On 24 February 2022, academic, cultural, and activist communities began documenting new experiences of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Today, over a hundred initiatives across the country collect eyewitness accounts, take photographs, or keep diaries; document wartime dreams; archive social media, or record the destroyed heritage.
The first symposium, "The Most Documented War" in 2023, was dedicated to bridging these communities and introducing them to each other. Institutions in Ukraine and abroad responded by creating support programmes for documentation and archival initiatives. Therefore, the ethics and practice of international cooperation were the focus of the second symposium last year.
Documentarians choose various trajectories for the collected materials: they incorporate them into state, community, or personal archives, integrate them into educational modules and artistic works, use them as evidence in court, and ultimately transform them into fragments of memory about those killed and injured in the war. Some of these materials have already been described and catalogued in institutional collections, while others are stored in the cloud or on private computers.
What are the intermediate results of the intensive documentation? What goals do people and organisations involved in documentation and archiving pursue, and what impact do they strive to achieve? How can we make existing archives visible and bring them into action? What is the archive of an ongoing war? How do archives reinforce or undermine knowledge production practices? What is the desired future of the community materials of the "most documented war?" How can we overcome our fatigue and remain motivated to document and archive on the way to such a future? How can archives of extraordinary events and borderline experiences from different geographies and time periods help us?
We invite you to join the discussion of these and related topics during the third annual symposium "The Most Documented War: Enacting Archives" to be held on 22-24 May in Lviv.
• Multiple Practices of Describing, Preserving, and Actualising Materials: How do collected materials become archives? How do we take into account the durability and fragility of physical and digital documents?
• State, Institution, Community, and Individuals: Who is responsible for the creation and further existence of an archive? How does this responsibility unfold temporally and geographically?
• From Document to Argument: How can we achieve legal, epistemic, and social justice by using community materials that document war experiences?
• Practices of Access and Engagement: What goals do institutions and initiatives pursue when providing access to materials? What are the risks? How can we navigate between short-term and long-term objectives?
• The Vulnerability of Archives: How can we document lost archives, particularly in occupied and destroyed territories? How can we ensure the viability of archives in the face of various threats such as physical destruction, cyberattacks, unauthorised access, and outdated software?
• The Frustrations of Documenting and Archiving: How do documentarians deal with the expectations of the immediate results of their work and the absence of such results?
This year's Symposium programme will include a variety of formats: panel discussions, Q&A sessions, networking, walks, films, trainings, and informal exchange of experiences.
Working languages: Ukrainian and English.
Registration is available through the link until 25 February 2025. We will confirm participation by 10 March 2025.
The number of places is limited. Some participants from outside Lviv will be able to receive grants to cover travel and accommodation costs.
Center for Urban History, Lviv
INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, Lviv
Documenting Ukraine / IWM, Vienna
Max Weber Foundation, Bonn/Lviv
• LivArch / Herder Institute, Marburg
• CERCEC / EHESS, Paris
• Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS), Berlin
• Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), Warsaw
• Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), Luxemburg
