Prisma Ukraïna
2018/ 2019

Kateryna Mishchenko

Island as a Topos of Political Imaginary in Contemporary Ukraine and Beyond

is a writer, curator and publisher. She was the editor of Prostory, a magazine on art, literature and social critique. She is co-founder and editor of the Ukrainian publishing house Medusa. Kateryna Mishchenko curated exhibitions in the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (GfZK) and the Visual Culture Research Center Kyiv (VCRC). She is co-author of the book Ukrainian Night (with Miron Zownir). Her essays appeared in international journals as well as in an anthology on the Euromaidan at Suhrkamp-Verlag (»Euromaidan: Was in der Ukraine auf dem Spiel steht«, 2014).

Island as a Topos of Political Imaginary in Contemporary Ukraine and Beyond

New special formations are being intensively produced in Europe due to redrawing of maps, emergence of pseudo-state entities, and refugee flows that change sociolopolitical landscapes. A geographic perspective on these processes, in particular the question of the threatened commonwealth of the European Union states, brings to the forefront a figure of island. The ideas of isolationism, new nationalisms, Brexit, the annexation of Crimea narrow the territory of the imagined future, forming a new political order. This research is focused on how the island matrix works in Ukrainian context. In recent years, Ukraine experienced a double spatial move: firstly, the uprising on the Maidan, resulting in the stratification of urban texture and the emergence of an autonomous space in the cityscape, and secondly, the seizure of the Crimean peninsula, the military occupation in the east of the country and the creation of the so-called “people’s republics” whose territories drift more and more towards full isolation. Together with the islands, new borders are being formed, the periphery is defined anew, and people are becoming displaced, with social and cultural “waters” washing those new fragments of land. Inevitably, the narratives are changing, as well as the language and the type of (political) subjectivity — the word is taken by new islanders. All these figures, experiences and constellations need to be analyzed.