What happens when nothing happens?
Site-specific performative intervention
Author: Veronika Shuster
PostPlay Lab, 2020, Kyiv
Babyn Yar is a ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine, where over 33,000 Jews were massacred by the Nazis in just two days in 1941 — one of the largest mass shootings of the Holocaust. As of 2020, the site still lacked adequate official commemoration, making it a complex landscape of memory.
What is the responsibility of humans toward such a space? What changes when nature acquires subjectivity? And what happens in a space left almost untouched by official cultural policy?
Posing these questions, I have proposed to create on the site our group’s performative intervention. We explored a liminal state where the human dissolves into the landscape, and the landscape itself becomes the subject of the performance. In Babyn Yar, this is not just metaphorical: human bodies have transformed into soil, from which trees now grow. Without erecting any monuments, we recreated a process of commemoration that allows the landscape itself to manifest remembrance.