Katya Buchatska
‘This World is Recording’, 2023, video with sound, 7′
Katya works with sculpture, installation, photography, painting and film. She focuses on themes of timelessness, transformation and the metamorphosis of objects; she examines human and extrahuman relations, the body’s susceptibility to violence and the possibilities that come with a shift in perspective.
The work ‘The World is Recording’ was created in 2023. Its first version—a film lasting around 30 minutes—was more of a research project aimed at communities living in the forest-steppe zone in frontline areas. The film was centred on a practical goal—rethinking our relationship with the land by combining practical, ‘therapeutic’ and commemorative functions. The idea was supported by environmental protection experts; a memory garden grown from trees planted in missile craters could increase yields through biodiversity, retain moisture, absorb pollutants and at the same time, preserve the memory of the russian–Ukrainian war.
At the time, Ukraine’s approach to memory and commemoration, which remained rooted in the Soviet tradition, was a particularly sensitive issue for Katya. Adapted to the exhibition space, the film was transformed into a video essay that still focuses on remembrance but shifts the emphasis to the reason why we should remember. ‘We plant our garden to have something to lose’, Katya explains. Since 2025, active warfare has continued in Kharkiv Oblast, and now it is impossible to put the idea of creating commemorative tools through landscapes and plants into practice.
