Editorial — Against Catastrophe

From the Editors…

As we were conceptualizing the ‘Against Catastrophe’ project, Russia invaded Ukraine. Faced with the invasion, the resulting humanitarian and geopolitical crisis, and a 24-hour news cycle churning out coverage of violence and devastation, we sought to respond to the unfolding tragedy without contributing to its sensationalization or seeming to capitalize on it. An idea emerged to produce ‘Dispatches’ that move past the news cycle-based temporality of contemporary catastrophism, but also faster than traditional academic publishing, to shed light on longer-term structural causes and implications of catastrophes. These dispatches would be particularly attuned to technology and the temporalities of the Anthropocene as they relate to geopolitical crises.

With our first set of dispatches, emerging from the war in Ukraine, our intention is not so much to offer a single response to the immediate human tragedy, but to explore the war in and beyond the multiple catastrophes it has wrought. The six collected dispatches in this drop are products of war, but focus on its causes and effects in infrastructure and non-human nature, to examine how sites not directly embroiled in war are nonetheless reshaped by it. These dispatches invite reflection on war as a catastrophe, but also, among other things, as a form of infrastructural and technological politics embedded in environmental and spatial histories as much as geopolitics.

Oleksiy Radynski contextualizes the war in terms of Western Europe's – particularly Germany's – energy dependency on the Russian Federation, which goes back to the late Soviet era. He analyzes the shift in geopolitical relations caused by Russia switching its supply lines of gas to Western Europe to the undersea Nord Stream pipeline, and its consequent consolidation of power over former colonies like Ukraine and Belarus.

Anna Engelhardt analyzes Russia’s canny military deployment of infrastructures as cryptic, adversarial and self-reinforcing technologies for restricting mobility and the flow of peoples, goods and information for colonized subjects in Ukraine. Russia’s political repression of Ukraine and its expansionist annexation of territory become coded as simply effects of “a technical or economic limitation.”

Katarzyna Nowak walks us through a historic forest road on the Poland-Belarus border that interfaces between rich non-human and human histories. Mobilized now as a border for policing migrants after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Nowak pays close attention to the many wounds inflicted by the war on the non-human inhabitants and the forested environment itself – which are suddenly threatened with disruption and destruction.

This attention to non-human life and persistence also suffuses ‘The Dogs That Survived,’ in which Jonathon Turnbull and his collaborators document the fragile interspecies relations that sustain some 550 dogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Fed and cared for by checkpoint guards, workers and a few remaining civilians, these dogs face an uncertain future due to Russia’s occupation of Chernobyl.

Sharing Nowak’s attunement to the surrounding environment, Asia Bazdyrieva collects anecdotes from fleeting traces of past technological disasters in Ukraine. The micro-temporalities of these anecdotes, she argues, escape the teleological matrix of industrial modernity with its narratives of progress and the negation of that progress by catastrophes. Instead of validating deferred, speculative futures, Bazdyrieva posits that we must carefully witness the multiple micro-temporalities that permeate our broken world, and learn to live within the ruins.

Lastly, the artist duo Krolikowski Art employ double exposures and chemical treatments in photography to comment on and then erase the nationalist myth-making surrounding war memorials and soldiers' graves in Crimea. Through a ritual performance where photographs of these memorials are chemically destroyed, they undercut the cult of death around them and enact a gesture to ‘Start Over’ or begin anew after the catastrophe.