Propaganda

Propaganda is used by power to control memory — to determine whose memory has the right to exist. State memory policy does not so much represent the past as regulate the relationship of the present to time itself. The memory of war is used not as history available for detached study, but as a permanent present into which the citizen is immersed through immersive decorative spaces. Victory becomes a sign that circulates without needing historical verification.

I am interested in the phenomenon of the collapse of critical distance. Where historical narrative presupposes an observer separated from the event and capable of doubt, immersive memorial spaces remove this distance physically and psychically: war is not shown — one is placed inside it, and it is experienced as a game. All of this unfolds against the backdrop of an actual war in Ukraine, whose consequences are being concealed from citizens by every possible means. Power constructs the environment so that submission feels like complicity, even pleasure, rather than coercion. The project registers precisely this temporal effect: an eternal, victorious present, endlessly renewed, that does not allow the war to become the past.