Memory
Lab

21–26 September 2026Pilecki Institute Berlin

About the Project

"Between Memory and Stone" is a one-week international laboratory bringing together researchers, curators, educators, and civil society practitioners from Poland, Ukraine, and Germany to explore how our societies confront, reinterpret, and transform the Soviet legacy that continues to shape public space and collective memory.

In times when historical narratives are weaponized through disinformation and nostalgia, the academy will provide a space to rethink how public history can strengthen democratic resilience and cultivate pluralistic, value-based remembrance cultures across borders.

Should we reclaim Soviet history and memory as 'ours' — and if so, how do we distinguish between our societies' complicity in colonial power structures and the cases where Soviet domination was imposed primarily through Moscow's totalitarian coercion? How might we distinguish and evaluate the national cultural motifs and narratives that persist within, or emerge against, the shared Soviet heritage of Poland, Ukraine, and Germany?

The initiative creates an intellectual and creative laboratory of public history, where participants co-develop new ways to engage with difficult heritage and translate academic reflection into participatory civic practices.

The project directly contributes to the program's core objectives by:

Promoting discussion of values and human rights through shared reflection on totalitarian pasts.
Strengthening pluralism and resilience in the face of disinformation and manipulation of history.
Supporting European integration through trilateral civil-society cooperation.

Program curators: Yeva Yakubovska, Kateryna Semenyuk, Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova and Prof. Dr. Andrii Portnov

Project head: Kateryna Tarabukina

Project manager: Vladyslava Vorobiova

MemoryLab is organized by Vitsche e.V. together with the Pilecki Institute Berlin and Past / Future / Art.

Project funded by Auswärtiges Amt.

Participants

Participants were selected through an open call, with 15 participants who represented cases and expertise on the Soviet legacy in Poland, Ukraine, and Germany:

Group Ukraine

Yuliia Fernos
Kateryna Hryshchenko
Mykola Shylin
Iryna Loskot
Iryna Kupchynska

Group Poland

Anastazja Palczukiewicz
Linka Nowell
Juliusz Mazur-Machowski
Sergei Belaoki
Zlata Veresniak

Group Germany

Dalila Daut
Eva Hasel
Iga Nowicz
Tetiana Kornieieva
Anna Ivchenko

Online Programme

05.09.

Online session 1: Get together. Impulse, curatorial inspiration, FAQ

Eva Yakubovska, Prof. Dr. Andrii Portnov, Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova, Kateryna Semenyuk and Oksana Holubenko

12.09.

Online session 2: Memory vocabulary seminars

Dr. Stefanie Eisenhuth and Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova

Part 1: Formulas of Remembrance. A German Vocabulary.

Dr. Stefanie Eisenhuth

German memory culture is often admired as a model for the world — but this talk approaches it instead as a construction site of unresolved arguments, read through five popular phrases. Each phrase is shown to be not a shared conclusion but a compromise that settles one question while producing a blind spot — whether the fork between war and peace, the East-West asymmetry, or the gap between official and family memory. The aim is to explain the central paradox: how a country can do an extraordinary amount for remembrance and still carry so many blind spots.

Part 2: Ukrainian Glossary of Memory Work.

Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova

Ukraine (like the other countries of the former Soviet Union) developed for decades within a memorial culture distinct from that of Western Europe. It was an illusion to think that we in Ukraine could simply take the theoretical instruments of European Memory Studies to analyze the Ukrainian Memorial Landscape. But it became obvious that the European Memory Studies have their own gaps and shadowed spaces. Something appears lost in translation. That’s why the Glossary of Past / Future / Art memory culture platform was launched in Ukrainian and English.

Main Programme in Berlin

At the Pilecki Institute and Vitsche headquarters.

Day 1. 21.09.

Get to know each other. Introduction of the topic

Introduction of the institution, host organization, and partners.

Participants get to know each other in a facilitated session moderated by Oksana Holubenko.

Decommunization and Soviet Memorial Heritage in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe: Controversies and Perspectives.

Prof. Dr. Andrii Portnov

The Soviet memorial presence in nowadays Europe is a transnational phenomenon which requires proper contextualization. What makes the Ukrainian case of decommunization and decolonization peculiar, and how does it correspond to the Polish and East German experiences? How could we productively use the comparative examples from Southern Europe to better understand the ongoing memory wars in our part of the continent?

Day 2. 22.09.

Day dedicated to Germany

Trash or Treasure? How to Deal with the Remnants of State Socialism in Germany

Dr. Stefanie Eisenhuth

How does Germany negotiate socialist legacies set in stone? This workshop moves from concept to practice. In the first part, we explore the central forms of memory — communicative and cultural, collective and multidirectional, material and spatial — through the German case, with its double dictatorship experience and unresolved East-West asymmetry. Rather than a success story, we approach remembrance as an open process of negotiation between monument toppling, musealization, and reinterpretation. In the second, creative part, we work with concrete examples — from the Soviet war memorials to socialist prefab housing blocks to contested monuments and street names — and develop our own memory-cultural interventions. Our guiding question: preserve, reinterpret, comment, or remove?

From Monument to Debate

Eva Yakubovska

Soviet war memorials in Berlin have never been neutral. But since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they have become something more than contested — they have become active sites in an ongoing struggle over whose memory counts, whose suffering is visible, and whose past is allowed to speak in the present.

This seminar takes Treptower Park, Tiergarten, and Schönholzer Heide as its starting point — not simply as monuments to the dead, but as infrastructures of memory where historical experience, political narrative, and collective emotion have been deliberately layered over decades. Drawing on community interviews conducted at Treptower Park during the 8th and 9th of May 2026 commemorations, the session asks: what happens when a memorial becomes a site of active propaganda on one side and affective civic intervention on the other?

The session also introduces the online intervention Berliner Sowjetdenkmäler nach dem Zeitenwende, as a digital participatory platform developed with Vitsche e.V. and the Pilecki-Institut Berlin. Functioning as a symbolic "referendum of memory," which invites the public to engage with multiperspectival voices and more over the Berliners themselves.

Facilitated session: exchange of experiences among participants.

Day 3. 23.09.

Day dedicated to Poland

From the "Polish-Soviet friendship" to "Anti-Russian hysteria". Soviet monuments in Poland before and after 1989.

Dr. Bartłomiej Kapica (Pilecki Institute Warsaw)

Monuments of "gratitude to the Soviet Union" spread on the Polish soil from the very beginning of the presence of the Red Army in 1944. Often disguised as local, grassroots initiatives, in fact, they served the political aims of the ruling communist party. After the collapse of communism in Poland in 1989, their role changed, and they became a symbolic legacy of the Soviet domination in Poland. Why were they built? How has their role evolved? What was their perception in Poland? What kind of narrative did the Soviet Union and Russia use to describe them? These questions will construct the framework of the seminar.

(In)glorious Bastards: On Love and Hate for Postwar Modern Architecture in Poland

Dr. Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk

Why do we love some modernist buildings and hate others? What makes a building an important heritage — and what makes us want to tear it down? Through a few examples from postwar Poland, we will look at changing attitudes towards modernism and explore how memory, emotions, media and grassroots activism shape the way we see and value architecture. We will also ask how the difficult and contested histories associated with the postwar period in CEE, particularly with communism, shape the reception of architecture today — and whether we can separate the architecture from the history it carries.

Pilecki Institute Berlin exhibition tour.

Hanna Radziejowska

Who was Witold Pilecki, and what does his story tell us about Poland in the 20th century? During this co-curator-led tour, we will explore not only Pilecki’s extraordinary life, but also the history of the Polish state – from the Second Polish Republic, through the Polish Underground State and the government-in-exile, to the experience of two totalitarian regimes.

Together, we will examine why the Polish experience of war and occupation remains insufficiently present in German memory, and where German and Polish cultures of remembrance meet – and where they diverge. The tour will also raise a broader question: what happens to Polish history when Soviets attempted to erase it, and what does restoring memory mean for democracy in Europe?

Day 4. 24.09.

Day dedicated to Ukraine

Is there a place for former ВДНГ in the cultural heritage of Ukraine?

Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova and Kateryna Semenyuk

Soviet Heritage has different faces. When we look at the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin, we can explain its ideological role and show that this object can’t be neutral. What about the spaces of joy and relaxation? The Exhibitions of Achievements of National Economy appeared as a room for meeting with the happy future, where people are healthy, educated, and armed with scientific data. For many people, such spaces are connected with the warmest memories from childhood. Our guiding question: what is the Soviet Legacy in Ukraine?

Ukrainian Soviet Heritage: What Does it Mean?

Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova and Kateryna Semenyuk

In 2025 the team of the Past / Future / Art memory culture platform took part in the research of the Kyiv Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy. The research was initiated by the Kyiv Expo Center, the institution-heir of the Soviet Exhibition. Our question was: how can we determine the notion of the Soviet Legacy in Ukraine? How can we describe the influence of the unwilling legacy for Ukrainian society and how can we speak about Ukrainian social identity in context of totalitarian pressure or events such as the Chornobyl Catastrophe.

Soviet architecture as a part of Ukrainian cultural heritage

Alex Bykov

Alex Bykov, as an Architect and a researcher of Soviet Ukrainian architecture, analyzes the presence of specific Ukrainian elements in the architecture of the Soviet Times. Can we see the Soviet Ukrainian Legacy as a part of Ukrainian Culture? How can we reveal the lines of permission/prohibition for the representation of Ukrainian Culture in Soviet times, when we analyze the Architecture?

Group work (mixed) on Ukrainian cases of Soviet Heritage, proposed by curators.

Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova, Kateryna Semenyuk and Alex Bykov

Moderators propose the participants' group work (each group joins people from more than one country) with the examples of Soviet Legacy in Ukraine: to imagine a decision on how we can interpret the object of the memory site in the context of contemporary challenges. Moderators will propose the cases for discussion. After group work with moderator support, participants will present and discuss their ideas.

Day 5. 25.09.

Pitching day, Finalization work

Project pitches by participants, feedback from curators (moderated by Oksana Golubenko)
Individual work with curators: Yeva Yakubovska, Prof. Andrii Portnov, Witold Okun, Kateryna Semenyuk, Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova
Finalization, Reflection
Interview recording
Farewell evening in Kreuzberg

Program Curators

Yeva Yakubovska

Yeva Yakubovska is a Berlin-based researcher and curator working in the field of memory studies. She holds degrees in History and Media Communication from Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and an M.A. in Philosophy from the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, and she is currently finishing her second M.A. in Public History at Freie Universität Berlin. Yeva works as a researcher at the Pilecki Institute Berlin on remembrance of the 20th century. As a board member, she develops civic and artistic projects on memory politics in Germany. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Ukrainian Roma Advocacy Alliance (AURA). Previously, she directed the Kit Gavatovycha Theatre Festival and worked on memorial and community-based practices with youth in Avdiivka (Ukraine).

Kateryna Semenyuk

Kateryna Semenyuk has been a curator and manager in the art scene since 2010, focusing on an artistic approach to collective memory. In 2019, together with Oksana Dovgopolova, she founded the Past / Future / Art memory culture platform dedicated to commemorating the Russia-Ukraine war, creating art projects dedicated to working through the past, and advocating for changes in memory practices in Ukraine. Among their latest projects are the exhibitions From 1914 till Ukraine at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Germany) and Ground Shadows at Kazerne Dossin: Museum, Memorial and Research Centre on the Holocaust and Human Rights (Belgium). They were curators and producers of the National Pavilion of Ukraine, from South to North at Maltabiennale.art 2024 (Malta) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Crimea exhibition at Zamek Ujazdowski (Poland). Co-organized and curated the Memorialization Practices Lab — an educational and research project aiming to find a visual language for the Russia-Ukraine war and broaden the approaches to creating memorials.

Prof. Dr. Oksana Dovgopolova

The main areas of research interests: development of the new Ukrainian Language of commemoration in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, transformation of Odesa identity in the time of war, and Odesa image in "memory entrepreneurship". Teaches the courses on the contemporary practices of commemoration. As Past / Future / Art curates the projects of public history with a focus on artistic practices. Co-organizer of the Laboratory of Artistic Research of War Experiences "Land to Return, Land to Care" (2022) and the Laboratory of Memorial Practices in Ukraine (2024). Co-curator of the Art exhibitions "From 1914 till Ukraine" in Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2023), "Ground Shadows" in Kazerne Dossin Memorial Center (2023). In 2024, co-curates the Ukrainian pavilion "From South to North" at the first Malta Biennale of Contemporary Art. Working on the development of the exhibition project "What We Talk About When We Talk About Crimea", the first edition of which was presented in Warsaw in 2026.

Prof. Dr. Andrii Portnov

Professor at Pilecki Institute (Warsaw)

Historian, who graduated from Dnipro University (History) and Warsaw University (Cultural Studies) and defended his PhD thesis at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Lviv. Since 2012, he has lectured on various East-Central European topics in various universities in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Poland, etc. From 2018 to 2025, he was Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder). In 2015, he initiated and co-founded a Berlin-Brandenburg Ukraine Initiative (BBUI), which in 2016 became the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin. In 2022, Prof. Portnov was awarded the DIALOG Prize of the German-Polish Society. He is also a member of the Ukrainian PEN, the German Association for East European Studies (DGO), the German Society of Historians of Eastern Europe (VOH), and the German-Ukrainian Association (DUG). Prof. Portnov is the author of more than 10 books and over 250 academic publications on the intellectual history of East Central Europe, history of totalitarianisms, Ukrainian historiography of the 20th century, the history of Polish-Ukrainian and German-Ukrainian relations, historical urban research, genocide, and memory studies.

Speakers

Dr. Stefanie Eisenhuth

Stefanie Eisenhuth is a postdoc researcher at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2018 with a dissertation on the U.S. military presence in West Berlin and its shifting interpretations between 1945 and 1994. She was a Doctoral Fellow at UNC Chapel Hill and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and was awarded the International Research Award of the Caroline von Humboldt Program.

Since 2023, she has been pursuing her Habilitation, supported by fellowships from the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Studies. Her current book project examines ideas and practices of beautification in East Germany from 1949 to 1994. Furthermore, she is part of the collaborative research project "Nuclear Reaction on the Khreshchatyk: Ukrainian Society and its Path from Perebudova to Decoloniality, 1986–1994" at the ZZF in Potsdam.

Dr. Bartłomiej Kapica

Bartłomiej Kapica earned his PhD at the Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland) in 2015. His main interests lie in the history of the communist and socialist movement in Poland, the communist party apparatus, biographical studies, and the XXth century intellectual history. He has completed an internship at "La Sapienza" in Rome, Italy, and at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. At present, he is working as an assistant professor and the head of the Center for Totalitarian Studies of the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw. He also holds the position of assistant professor at the Institute of History at Jan Kochanowski University of Kielce. He is the author of numerous articles and publications, among them: Witold Pilecki (1901-1948) (2026) and Władysław Bieńkowski – A Biography (2022, in Polish. English translation: The Development Trajectory of Communism in Poland. The Life of Władysław Bienkowski, Communist Leader and Socialist Thinker, Routledge 2025), presenting the life and ideas of the Polish communist and later dissident Władysław Bieńkowski.

Dr. Małgorzata Anna Jędrzejczyk

Małgorzata Anna Jędrzejczyk is an Art historian, curator, head of the interdisciplinary program "Exercising Modernity" carried out by the Pilecki Institute Berlin, and Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Author and editor of publications on 20th- and 21st-century art and architecture, including Moderne in Krakau (Wien 2025); Migrating ideas / migrating images. Networks of the avant-garde(s) (Vilnius 2023); Katarzyna Kobro. Movement of Space-Time (Lodz 2021); Composing Space. Sculptures of the Avant-Garde (Lodz 2019, with K. Słoboda).

Curator of exhibitions such as Interwoven. Barbara Brukalska, Helena Syrkus, and the Networks of Modernism (2026, Museum of Architecture, Wroclaw); Elementary Particles (2025, Bunkier Sztuki); Sections. Gallery of Polish Architecture of the 20th and 21st Centuries (National Museum in Krakow); Composing Space. Avant-Garde Sculpture (Museum of Art in Łódź; with K. Słoboda).

Mag. Arch. Alex Bykov

Alex Bykov is a Ukrainian architect and researcher. His work explores the history and legacy of Ukrainian architecture of the twentieth century. He is the co-author of the books Soviet Modernism, Brutalism, Postmodernism. Buildings and Structures in Ukraine 1955–1991 (2019) and Orthodox Chic (2020). He is also chief editor of the magazine 5.6 issue "Architecture. Community. Time" (2018).

Since 2015 he has preserved archives, curated exhibitions and filmed documentaries on Soviet modernism in Ukraine. His recent projects include co-curating Retrotopia in Berlin (2022–2023) and contributing to the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2023. Alex Bykov teaches at the Faculty of Architecture, Brno University of Technology. He leads his studio Alex Bykov Dream Team and runs courses on architectural photography.

Hanna Radziejowska

Hanna Radziejowska – (co-)founder and head of the Pilecki Institute Berlin; curator of several exhibitions, including on Witold Pilecki, the Wola Massacre, the history of women's suffrage in Poland, and modern architecture in Warsaw; recipient of multiple awards, including from the Museum of Polish History and the Mayor of Warsaw in 2020. (Co-)curator, screenwriter and producer of various cultural, historical, participatory and museum projects in Warsaw and Berlin, e.g. Museum Laboratory, Exercising Modernity, as well as numerous historical and cultural programmes on Belarus and Ukraine.

Witold Okun

Short bio to follow.

Project Team

Kateryna Tarabukina

Project Head

Kateryna Tarabukina is a Berlin-based project manager and curator of public programs originally from Kyiv, Ukraine. She specializes in public programming and international collaborative projects with interdisciplinary methodologies.

She holds an MA degree in International Economy and Business and an MA in Cultural Studies.

As a member of Vitsche e.V. (Berlin), she engages in curatorial practice that engages with memory studies, political science, international relations, and contemporary artistic practices.

Her work centers on fostering interdisciplinary dialogue to support peaceful, secure coexistence and equal rights for diverse communities. She approaches curiosity, critical re-learning, and a commitment to justice as essential instruments in challenging false narratives, imperialism, and colonial legacies within the European cultural and intellectual landscape.

Vladyslava Vorobiova

Project Manager

Vladyslava Vorobiova is a co-founder of Vitsche and currently serves as the organization's PR Manager. She has over four years of experience in civil society mobilization and management in Berlin, as well as in moderation, political advocacy, and organizing public and political actions.

She is currently pursuing her bachelor's degree at Freie Universität Berlin, studying Media and Communication Studies (Publizistik) and Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Oksana Holubenko

Facilitator, trainer, mentor

Oksana Holubenko is a facilitator, trainer, mentor, and project manager. She has been working with international educational, social, and cultural projects in Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and Germany for over 9 years.