Journal of the Military Builder: the violence of the visual archive

Kateryna Volochniuk and Vlada Vazheyevskyy utilise the history of the 'Journal of the Military Builder', produced by the Russian Ministry of Defence, to investigate the process of Russia’s settler colonial erasure on the occupied territories of Ukraine and expand on the power dynamics of archiving practices. Since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the violence of the oppressor has exercised its power through images. This brings the authors to question the legitimacy of visual documentation and the extent to which it should be perceived as a credible source. In order to include the multitude of experiences of Ukrainians, they propose to refer to multi-modal anarchives and alter-archives, which will help us to embrace gaps in memory, individual stories and affects.