“The War Conquers You Not Only Physically”: Darya Tsymbalyuk on Plants and Humans in Ukraine - Public Books

“I’m very interested in things you can only know if you are in a place itself.”

For several years, Darya Tsymbalyuk has been drafting a new history of Ukraine’s Donbas that overturns our assumptions. Rather than focus on the industrialization and war that have dominated the region, she interviews locals and asks them to draw maps of their hometowns, based on their memories and emotional connections. The resulting maps—which emerge in dialogue with Tsymbalyuk, who gathers oral histories in the process—are eventually displayed publicly. When, together with Yulia Filipieva and Viktor “Corwic” Zasypkin, she first started work on this project, called Donbas Odyssey, in 2015,…

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