‘Every entry should be the last’: archiving the war and producing implicated publics in Yevgenia Belorusets’ A Wartime Diary (2022)

Continuum, vol. 38, pp. 418–435

Abstract

The media discourse on Russia’s war in Ukraine heavily focuses on geopolitical and military explanations of this conflict, with Ukraine often serving as a metaphor for preserving European values. However, a discussion of what these values mean and how ‘Europeanness’ is experienced from the perspectives of everyday life on the war-torn territories is rare. This article addresses these questions through a reading of the Wartime Diary which Yevgenia Belorusets, a Ukrainian photographer and writer, started keeping on 24 February 2022. We focus on the private/public form of this diary which, while staging the author’s intimate dialogue with herself, was published in ‘foreign’ languages (German and English), and incorporates both personal and other people’s testimonies. Drawing on the diary and its remediations as installations, we suggest that these works create a ‘chronotope of immediacy’ by mediating the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people. As such, they do not only enable readers/viewers from outside of Ukraine to follow the daily rhythms of life during war but also implicate each individual (and particularly each European, given the place of the publications and exhibitions) into the events. Thus producing ‘implicated publics’, these works can help to rethink ‘Europeanness’ in the context of the war.

Authors 2

1. Ksenia Robbe corresponding

   University of Groningen

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Groningen

   European Culture and Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

2. Dorine Schellens Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University

   Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands