CNXIB | СИХІВ

I spent my youth subconsciously searching for a subject I could mourn about. Mourning burns emotions into flesh, twists the memories. It gives a reason and creates a frame. I felt the duty to mourn the decay of industrial culture and ethic, the erasure of vast spaces, once functional, now a nature-technology limbo. A culture I have no relation to and no memories of.
Mourning is a powerful force and yet it is extremely fragile. Some people used the industrial mourning (=the soviet mourning) as an argument against the current city politics. And yet their field of attack was constantly shrinking – even the Holocaust memory, once a joker in each discussion, became a subject of interest and extensive development of the city council.
The critique of this city has dried out.
To mobilize people you have to explain them things. Have clear enemies, reachable goals. But how can one describe the state we are in now? How can one fight a dictatorship of positivity, of professional skills, of enthusiasm? How can one oppose the youth, the “young girl”, the main force behind the changes? How can one abandon “the future”?
The soldiers were scattered and often reluctant. Quick comments under badly written articles on public media, powerful strokes of insight, poetry of years of the everyday life condensed into small accounts of injustice and erasure. No contacts, no details. Sharp mind, things one can’t see without participating in them for years. How come these people even have Internet? Not everything is extinct. But I wonder how much time we have left. On a walk through familiar neighborhoods I discovered the scale of the redevelopment. Small moves – buying, removing, renewing, inserting, covering. Almost invisible and yet present. I see other faces moving down the street. I enter a rotten patio of a nearly dilapidated house, I see brand new doors installed, behind the doors – renovation and calmness, comfortable living.
The visible is not what counts in this city. Only the invisible tells a story.
I was cultivating my ressentiment. Only through disdain could I describe my relation to the social reality around me. I grew to despise many things. I witnessed the blurring of distinctions – the poor became wealthy in an inexplicable and mysterious turn: one third of the population joined the sub-proletariat of Europe in order to finance the living of the other half. This is the center, from which all other discourses grow – political, social, economical. The wealth of Lviv, the affluence and consumerism of it’s citizens are based on the simple phenomenon of work-migration. The city was no longer obliged to care for it’s citizens, because they had found a way to feed themselves – it could carry on creating plans for the future. The migration provided the money, created a solid ground for every initiative. At the same time it became the black hole, a skeleton in the closet. Will it still be remembered in 20 years time? Or will this fact remain hidden, until some Tarik arrives from the West to research?
20 years into independence Galicia had witnessed only 2 important events, both linked with mass movements of people in space: the deindustrialization and the following exodus of the soviet technical intelligentsia + work-migration into Europe and Russia. Both movements created a strong force of disenchantment with everything – the dissolution of all existing and possible solidarities was the main and the most painful result. Both events remain badly researched and are erased from the public discourses. Ones duty would be to start a wave of research, create projects, platforms for exchange. Let the people speak while they are reachable, with fresh wounds and while we still can learn something from their experiences. It is the task of true sociology and risky anthropology to unearth this hidden phenomenons and draw the lines that connect all events.
It should be my task and yet it is too late for me. I can not gather proper facts, the only thing I have is this feeling, the vague understanding of the mechanics of the contemporary Lviv life, a catalogue of themes and images, like the Arcades-convolutes of Walter Benjamin, damned to remain incomplete, but thus open and vibrating. I can and will not act in an academic frame. I’m sure there will be enough attempts to create symbolic capital for this city by researching the themes.
There will be no direct confrontation in this city. No spectacular fights, land takeovers, evictions. Everything is done slowly and the people are being prepared to what’s coming. For years we had this special mode of text production. Texts were created by dozens of people, not really connected between themselves. They were promoting a liberal newspeak, a fascinating language they had learned while staying in the West. Time passed and the language became internal part of the whole mechanism. In fact it became the main, visible part of the promotion of the new vision of the city. That’s why I saw my first task in the dissection of this new form of propaganda – a subtle and elusive charm of the westernized middle class.
Lviv is on the way to become “the only city in Ukraine”, a territory of exception, where certain things are possible. It’s only because of the general degradation of spaces and freedoms around Ukraine such exceptional territory could be created. A museum and a playground of possibilities for the new generations in Ukraine, a looking glass for the Europe. A mummified photoshopped reality, perfectly renovated and regenerated to extract added value and create cultural symbolic capital. The rapid virtualization of the inner urban space in a city where the IT crowd is going to become the only privileged class and all the rest is going to be marginalised, is on it’s way.
My understanding of the situation grew from x years of walks and observations, experiences and thoughts. A metaphysical, mystical flaneurie provoked by a profound sense of alienation and disenchantment was the start of the project and it will be it’s end, stretching long after all theoretical impulses are shut down. The real experience of walking and discovering was the most important part of this life project – a part that is most difficult to mediate with other people. It was more honest than my partly anthropological approach, the speaking in the name of “simple people” and my admiring of abandoned territories. After all it’s them, not me, living in this mess.
And yet I strongly encourage everyone to return to the practice of walks, to the real experience, that leads to the abandonment of the dead time.
Concerning the future of this city: I may not be right, but the others will soon be wrong.
Not reconciled. I have a sense of betrayal, exhaustion and despair. I should have finished it. But at the same time the theme tends to become an obsession, it sucks all power out of me, all hope. For months this city was the only thought occupying me. I have to awake from this nightmare.
Thank you.
The memory stays with me.