Occupational Formations

Occupational Formations: Infrastructures of the Seen and Unseen is a group research project focused on the occupational infrastructures Russia is currently deploying in the temporarily occupied territories (ToT) of Ukraine. We are interested in the full cycle of Russia's ongoing colonial transformation of Ukraine: from tactics and procedures of erasure to the militarization of existing infrastructures and the development of new ones, both seen and unseen.

Russian policies in the occupied regions of Ukraine actively generate extended and extensive knowledge designed to reorder/redraw space (& memory) through the infrastructures of colonial violence. Documenting these processes is essential for resisting epistemic injustice and engaging critically with the myths that circulate both inside and outside of Ukraine.

Our diverse research practices engage with infrastructures on two levels. On one level, we research and document the material infrastructures that enable occupation: legal codes, executive chains, educational reforms, resource extractive networks, media/propaganda machinery, and the logistics of military operations. On another, we trace the concealed, the invisible and unseen, and those that exist in the realm of cultural imaginaries, social relations, memory, and affect.

We approach occupation as a knot/system of these visible and invisible threads (akin to an iceberg): the surface reveals only a tiny fraction (=tip) of the structures that consolidate occupational control. Beneath it - a dense interlocking formation of various processes carried out by the russian state, be it through the respective ministries, agencies, or puppets such as private companies and media, complicit in reinforcement and stabilisation of occupational power.

By working across these layered registers, our project seeks to illuminate the ways in which the russian occupation operates, and most importantly, to invite others to share our commitment to preserving the knowledge that the terrorist state aims to destroy. This project honours the people who continue to live amid the precarity forged by occupation and war, and those whose lives were taken by it. The evidence, objects, and spatial traces gathered here emerge from landscapes shaped by displacement, dispossession, grief, eroded infrastructures, and the courageous persistence of hope.

The project was supported by Documenting Ukraine, a program of the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna.

Our interdisciplinary team brings together researchers, writers/artists, educators, filmmakers, and analysts whose work examines occupation in its various dimensions, with a particular interest in what escapes the gaze and mainstream media narratives, as well as what the occupying forces relentlessly hide, and what systems/infrastructures allow them to do so.

Though our methods differ, our works converge around shared themes:

▶ epistemic injustice and erasure
▶ systems of reproduction and representation
▶ extractivist and economic infrastructures
▶ affective and ecological kinships
▶ image/cartographic (production/circulation) and its afterlife
▶ digital and bureaucratic infrastructures of harm
▶ temporal coordinates of educational and mobilisational systems
▶ (and lastly,) practices through which people resist and counter imposed narratives surrounding land, home, and identity

Together, over the last year and a half, we utilized these methods in an attempt to trace and unsettle the layered systems of the material, symbolic, psychological, and infrastructural, through which the russian occupation of Ukraine is exercised and sustained.

Di Yehorova is a researcher, documentary producer, and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of temporality, rupture, and the politics of space. Their work for the Occupational Infrastructures invites counter-cartographic practice to examine ecological kinships and the affective architecture formed in conditions of unhomeliness, in-betweenness, and ongoing occupation. Drawing on field notes, maps, traces, and speculative geographies, Di explores how lived space is remade through memory, and how alternative modes of knowing emerge when conventional epistemologies fail.

Their contribution to the project includes an artistic-research piece that pays tribute to Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's Intermezzo, which holds personal significance: the town where the novella was written is the same place their family fled to from Donetsk in 2014. Starting from a place of curiosity, Di sets out to locate points of overlap, if any, between the text written over a century ago (1908) and the spatio-temporal reality of contemporary occupation. If the iron hand's grip remains firm, what exactly does it hold onto? The resulting work, titled Interimezzo, focuses on human and more-than-human kinships and unfolds through micro-worlds, in which unresolvedness has gotten so embedded that its inhabitants refuse anaesthesia.

Kateryna Volochniuk is a Ukraine-born, Scotland-based historian of photography and researcher; she is a SGSAH-funded PhD Candidate at the University of St Andrews. Volochniuk's scholarly pursuits focus on the intersection of the history of photography, memory studies and visual culture.

In her contribution to Occupational Infrastructures, she traces the role visuality played during the Crimean War and its potential continuity and connection with the occupational politics of the current Russian annexation of the peninsula. To do so, she examines the main tropes in the documentation practices of the indigenous population of Crimea produced by various Western artists and through multiple media, including photography, lithographs, and sketches, as well as the ways Orientalist tendencies shaped the imagination of Crimea and influenced subsequent photographic practices.

In analysing photographs made by British photographers such as Roger Fenton, Volochniuk accentuates the absence of indigenous populations and the flattening quality of the war's representation. She connects this to contemporary events surrounding the Russian occupation of Crimea, noting how the Crimean landscape is often depicted as idyllic and serene, stripped of its violent context. At the same time, Ukrainian artists develop their own approaches to referencing their homeland and capturing the subtle traces of everyday brutality.

Vlada Vazheyevskyy is an anthropologist and performance maker, currently doing their PhD at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Their work falls somewhere in-between research on transmissions, filtration, affective infrastructures, and political imaginaries.

In their offering to this project, they work through the limits of visual representation of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, as well as the politics of seeing territories and people under military occupation mediated by screens. Through a focus on an image which Kateryna Ustiuhova - a writer and a dear friend from Kreminna, Ukraine, has shared with them during their masters fieldwork, they attend to the unhoming potential of images of destroyed housing, and the ways in which such unhoming abets the goals of the Russian occupation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. They too, however, think of the ways in which the weaponisation of such imagery can be refused and negated.

Oleksii Minko is a Kyiv-based writer from the temporarily occupied city of Berdyansk. He is studying philosophy as an MA student at the Dragomanov Ukrainian State University (Kyiv). In his texts, he examines the impact of Russian colonial bureaucracy, movement restrictions, and propaganda on the fields of housing, pedagogy, and public memory in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

For the Occupational Formations, Oleksii maps Russian governmental initiatives which are under pedagogical, educational, entertaining and recreational agenda, conducts the indoctrination and militarization of Ukrainian children and youth. Observing forms of children's leisure, organized after 2022 in the temporarily occupied South of Ukraine by Russian-state actors, he noticed the propagandistic narratives embedded in the practices that occupiers impose on children. He shows how travel programs, leadership trainings, camps and engagement in urban security service activity are used as a way to confuse children's identity, instil loyalty to the Russian occupation among youth and induce children to serve in the Russian Army. Minko argues that Russian children's policy functions as an integral part of its military and security strategy, treating children as military resources for both ongoing and future aggressions.

Anna Sietak is a researcher and educator, currently studying Political Science and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Her research interests are rooted in the Ukrainian context and cover political participation, inclusive education, cultural heritage and the exploration of postcolonial and feminist methodologies.

For the research project Occupational Formations, she works with countercartography as a resistance practice against russian spatial planning strategies, imposed on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Her text presents the results of the research into occupier-produced maps and shares insights about organising a workshop on mental maps for internally displaced persons in Ukraine. Sietak also researches the mining industry in Ukraine's temporarily occupied territories, where an enforced industrial and economic identity has made the other, politically active identities of the Donetsk region less visible. Both texts deal with the ways in which russia tries to tie Ukrainian land closer to the russian centre and to grow its artificial roots deeper into the mental and material landscape.

Lera Malchenko is a journalist, analyst, and interdisciplinary artist specializing in media and investigative research. She works as a senior analyst and forward deployed engineer at Osavul, tracking FIMI campaigns. Her research interests center on digital and emotional infrastructures, as well as communicative militarism. As a co-founder of the 'fantastic little splash' group, she explores collective imagination and emotional appropriation within technosocial systems.

Within Occupational Formations, Lera examines how Russia's digital occupation infrastructure in Ukraine turns violence into a routinized technical workflow. Building on the case first introduced in the 'fantastic little splash' essay «Being on EI», she extends her inquiry into the actors and structures that sustain these occupational systems. Revisiting Bauman and Arendt, she reframes the bureaucracy of violence through the lens of contemporary IT development approaches, showing how mass violence can be organized as an ordinary labor process enabled by agile workflows, distributed responsibility, and technical abstraction.

Additionally, with support from Nazar Golianych, she collected and structured open-source data on the organizers and executors of construction projects in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. Based on this body of material, she proposed the Evidence-Based Notes (EBN) format as a way to register the unfolding machinery of occupation through a field-based research approach. The resulting table outlines the high-level architecture of the occupation building apparatus, showing how contractors continually recombine and reorganize through nominal legal entities, shifting directors, and rebranded branches of Russian firms seeking to conceal their involvement and evade sanctions. Rather than listing every participant, the project traces recurring organizational patterns that reveal the deep economic engagement of Russian companies and citizens in profiting from forcibly expanded real-estate markets — exposing how state and private capital share both risks and gains within Russia's evolving extrastatecraft.

The project was supported by Documenting Ukraine, a program of the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna.