Olga Boichak and Michael Richardson / Visualities of Destruction

Part of “VISION CULTURES”, a lecture series about new ideas and research on seeing across the sciences and humanities, presented by the Power Institute as part of the Visual Understanding Initiative.

Wartime destruction has traditionally been framed in anthropocentric terms and quantified in terms of its damage on human life and property (Knittel, 2023). Yet, the last decade has witnessed the ‘ecological turn’ in the cultural imaginaries of wartime violence, drawing the links between crimes against humanity and crimes against the environment (Crook & Short, 2014). Large-scale infrastructural projects, such as dams, often become prominent sites for such violence - built in the service of colonialism, they evoke and represent complex histories of erasure and dispossession in the course of their destruction. In this presentation, we focus on one such prominent episode: the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine’s South by the invading Russian army. Unlike its historical precursors, the destruction of this dam has been amply documented online, turning social media into a rich visual site to witness these events in real time at scale. Investigating the convergence of the “fast”, kinetic violence with the “slow” environmental devastation, we map the emerging regimes of visualities of destruction in contemporary wars.

Image: Kakhovka Dam, Ukraine, before and after its June 6th 2023 destruction. Left top: Sentinel-1, 1 June 2023. Left bottom: Sentinel-1, 9 June 2023. Right top: Sentinel-2, 5 June 2023. Right bottom: Sentinel-2, 8 June 2023. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), processed by Pierre Markuse.