Cultural Practices of Space and Memory: Experience of Topography and Cultural Landscape (On the Materials of Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center)

Abstract

The Babyn Yar memorial complex is one of the few Holocaust memorial spaces in Eastern Europe, located on the site of the mass murder of people during the occupation of Kyiv by German troops in 1941-1943, especially the Jewish population. The article presents the study of logic and aesthetics of memorial space with the help of concepts optics of "Symbolic Architecture" (Georg Hegel), "Sublime" (Immanuel Kant), as well as "Greate Tradition" (Robert Redfield, Milton Singer) and "Walking" (Olga Freidenberg). This optic helps to understand the specificity of de-differentiation of the cultural landscape of historical place and symbolic architecture, as well as the augmented reality in the practice of memorial procession and community, which it constructs through the oppositions highlighting of subterranean and terrestrial, visual and audible, whole and fragmented, and symmetrical and shapeless. Spatial forms of cultural memory organization help avoid memorycide outside ideological disputes and Europeanization of Holocaust tragedy images. It can be noted that the tragic events of World War II, which revealed the "Dialectic of the Enlightenment" and the dark side of Modernity in general, led to the need to re-organize the space of cultural memory. There was a lack of only the internalized structures of the subject and only discursive forms of its objectification to preserve and transmit grief of this level of intensity. The Ukrainian experience of visualizing the tragedy of the Holocaust continues the traditional means of symbolic architecture length and monumentality, sublimity. At the same time, the scale of the complex allows to diversify the practices of the image and thus make new connotations in the practice of its memorialization. In particular, a variety of forms of symbolic architecture and augmented reality was a successful technique, which allows to emphasize the status of the procession as a form of cultural memory, as well as to successfully use the landscape of the historical city in the logic of de-differentiation of subterranean and terrestrial, where other forms of syncretism visual and audio integral and fragmented, symmetrical and shapeless – serve as artistic techniques that work to increase the involvement in the space of the memorial actor of cultural memory.