A Symposium of Ideas and Strategies
9,10,11 September 2022—(online)
Over 40 expert Ukrainian and international speakers–architects, artists, historians, economists, poets and others–will gather this September to discuss Ukraine’s past, present and future in light of Russia’s ongoing invasion. The overall theme of the conversation will be reconstruction: broadly-conceived to refer to the rebuilding of architecture and infrastructure, but also of institutions, social bonds, individual and collective bodies and minds. The symposium is organized by a network of institutions, including the Centre for Urban History in Lviv, Urban Forms Center in Kharkiv, Kyiv Biennial / Visual Culture Research Center, ReStart Ukraine, University College London, and Yale University. The symposium will take place virtually over the course of three days from September 9−11. The official website for the symposium, along with more information about the event, can be found here: https://reconstruct.in.ua/.
To register, please follow this link. Accompanying links to the symposium’s Instagram and Telegram channels can be found here.
The round table discussions held over each of the three days will range from housing, preservation, masterplanning, the political and economic challenges of reconstruction, the impact of gendered and sexual violence, remediation of the country’s psychological trauma, among many other subjects. While a majority of the participants will be Ukrainian, most panels will also feature non-Ukrainian experts, theorists, or practitioners who are able to situate the Ukrainian experience within diverse temporal and geographic contexts. For any questions about the symposium, please send inquiries to the email address above.
The symposium will be held in English, with simultaneous translation into Ukrainian. Proceedings will be recorded and streamed on YouTube (LINKED). Edited transcripts from the symposium will be turned into an open-access book publication, downloadable online.
The photographs illustrating the symposium website document ongoing work on grassroots reconstruction initiatives in Ukraine. The list of trusted grassroots reconstruction initiatives and how to support them could be found on reconstruct.in.ua