In this talk I focus on different memories contained in coal, a fossil fuel at the heart of constructing an industrial region in the east of Ukraine framed as “Donbas”, and trace (hi)stories of extraction through which the project of “Donbas” has been shaped. Since 2014, parts of the east of Ukraine have been occupied by Russia, where the industrial extraction of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union has been superseded by the military extraction of Russian imperialism. Focusing on these different modes of extraction and exploitation, I also stay attuned to ways of resisting being turned into a fossil fuel, or what I call resisting fossilfuelisation, a concept that closely aligns with Asia Bazdyrieva’s theory of “resourcification” (“No Milk, no Love” 2022). Examining coal as an archive of vegetal memory, I therefore discuss alternative narrativisations of the east of Ukraine, such as Lyuba Yakimchuk’s now canonical cycle of poems “Apricots of the Donbas”.

DARYA TSYMBALYUK writes, researches, and draws. Her work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research, and is based on feminist and decolonial methodologies. Darya is a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2022-2023). She has received her PhD in 2021 from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and her dissertation was dedicated to human-plant relations in stories of displacement and war. Her articles and essays appeared in Nature, IWMpost, Open Democracy, Antennae: Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, Arcadia: Environment & Society Portal, Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, to name a few. She is also a co-author of an open-access book Limits of Collaboration: Arts, Ethics, and Donbas (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung 2022). Together with Kateryna Voznytsia, Yulia Serdyukova, and Viktor “Corwic” Zasypkin, Darya is a co-author of a docufiction animation Displaced Garden. Based on Darya's PhD research, the film tells stories of humans and plants displaced from the east of Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion of the region in 2014.

Website: https://daryatsymbalyuk.com/

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