Emptiness

Living portals: reflections on territorialization in contemporary Armenian art

Authors: Maria Gunko

Taking inspiration from Nairi Khatchadourian's curatorial essay “Carpet as Territory” on the “Living Portals: Settlement Fabrics of Khndzoresk, Tegh and Verishen” exhibition at the Verishen village of Syunik marz, Maria Gunko reflects on social space and the process of territorialization in Armenia. She focuses on artistic practice and care work bringing forth the carpet as an object and as a symbol. (Image courtesy of the AHA Collective.)

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The intimate and everyday geopolitics of the Russian war against Ukraine

Authors: Maria Gunko, Sven Daniel Wolfe, Olena Denysenko, Dina Krichker, OLga Rebro

Location: Armenia, Norway, Spain, Ukraine

Themes: Affect, Bordering, Geopolitics, Mobility, Violence, War

This Forum publication analyses the Russo-Ukraine war from the micro-perspective of everyday life by scholars who have been personally impacted by the war. Maria Gunko’s contribution focuses on a town in rural Armenia where an abandoned Soviet-era factory is being inhabited and restored by a small alternative community of people fleeing the violence of the war in Ukraine and the oppression of governments in Russia and Belarus. Contextualised within Armenia’s own turbulent post-Soviet history, Gunko examines the micro-politics of this multinational attempt to build a kind of improvised refuge out of the shell of the Soviet built environment.

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Not just rusty metal: What fences in Armenia reveal about the state

Authors: Maria Gunko

Location: Armenia

Themes: Demodernization, Infrastructure

Have you ever taken notice of fences while passing through rural or small-town Armenia? What, if anything, do you recall?

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Violent faces of the Russian state

Authors: Maria Gunko

Location: Russia

Themes: Infrastructure, Postsocialism, Statecraft, Statehood, Violence

While the war in Ukraine is making the 'fast' spectacular violence of the Russian state increasingly evident, the latter's 'slow' violence has largely remained out of the spotlight. Drawing on various data sources, this essay discusses the different yet co-existing sets of state practices – statecraft and statehood. It portrays a more nuanced picture of state violence expressed by the Russian state both against Ukraine and against its own citizens within Russia.

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Lost in transformation: comparative analysis of healthcare provision dynamics within urban systems of European Russia and France

Authors: Maria Gunko, Benoit Conti, Aleksander Sheludkov, Sophie Baudet-Michel, Anastasia Novkunskaya

Location: France, Russia

Themes: Healthcare

This comparative study of healthcare in France and European Russia traces variations in provision between cities of different sizes and administrative statuses during a 20-year period. Since the early 1990s, both countries have been putting New Public Management principles into practice on an ad hoc and planned basis. As a result, healthcare reforms have led to fewer hospital beds and redistribution of healthcare provision in favour of larger cities.

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Making sense of the war in Ukraine

Authors: Volodymyr Artiukh, Emma Rimpiläinen, Dace Dzenovska, Madeleine Reeves, Anna Balazs, Roosa Rytkönen, Jonathon Turnbull, Maria Gunko, Claudia Eggart, Ina Zharkevich

Location: Eastern Europe, Germany, Latvia, Russia, Ukraine

Themes: War

This forum is one attempt to make sense of the war and related events in a constantly shifting landscape. Each of us finds ourselves trying to track an avalanche-in-motion, figuring out what the war means for our interlocutors and their families, for their livelihoods and futures, for their practices of social navigation when homes and/or hopes have been upturned.

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Post-Soviet coal mining cities as platforms for the reordering of power relations

Authors: Maria Gunko

Location: Russia

Themes: Capitalism, Infrastructure, Sociality

The decaying post-Soviet mining cities are vivid illustrations of the on-going realignment of power relations after the end of the Cold War. As such they are both manifestations of new capitalism forms and platforms for the emergence of collective survival strategies, as urban anthropologist Maria Gunko argues in her contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.

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