EMBODIED URBAN MEMORY: WALKING, RUINS, AND THE AESTHETICS OF CARE IN CONTEMPORARY UKRAINE (TIACHIV CASE STUDY)

Abstract

B a c k g r o u n d . This article explores contemporary Ukrainian urban experience through the frameworks of embodied aesthetics, phenomenology, and memory studies, conceptualizing walking as both a diagnostic and an aesthetic practice. In the context of post-Soviet legacies and wartime transformations, Ukrainian cities are approached not as rationally designed totalities but as heterogeneous assemblages shaped by temporal ruptures, affective tensions, and layered absences. Drawing on phenomenological and environmental aesthetics (Berleant, Paetzold, Lehtinen), the study situates walking within debates on presence, negative aesthetics, and urban perception, emphasizing the role of the sensing body in mediating between personal memory and collective amnesia. 

M e t h o d s . The study combines phenomenological description with historiographical and artistic analysis. Walking is employed as an embodied research method that foregrounds sensory attention, spatial orientation, and affective response. The analysis integrates close readings of contemporary Ukrainian artistic projects that engage walking, documentation, and care as strategies of reflection and civic engagement. In addition, the article includes an auto-ethnographic case study based on repeated walking practices in the town of Tiachiv (Zakarpattia region), allowing for a situated examination of hybrid urban space shaped by Jewish, Soviet, and post-Soviet layers. Results. 

R e s u l t s . The analysis reveals that Ukrainian artists – including Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Yevgenia Belorusets, Ivan Melnychuk, Daniil Revkovskiy, Vova Vorotniov, and the DE NE DE collective – use walking to activate ruins, monuments, and vernacular objects as mnemonic surfaces. These practices expose the intersections of individual memory and collective forgetting within the politics of decommunization. Artistic research platforms such as Creating Ruin, alongside projects like Melnychuk's Forms and Contents and Futymskyi's Continuance of Ruin, articulate an aesthetics of care that privileges attention to decay, material detail, and presence over spectacle or monumental narratives. 

C o n c l u s i o n s . The article argues that walking operates as an ethical and aesthetic practice of care in contemporary Ukrainian urban contexts. Through embodied engagement with fragmented and vulnerable urban environments, walking becomes a mode of witnessing, resistance, and cultural continuity amid war and transformation.