The destruction and subsequent occupation of Mariupol by the Russian Armed Forces have fragmented its communities, leaving most survivors dispersed across different regions of Ukraine, other parts of Europe, and beyond reconstruction. This project looks at the bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theater as an emblem of Russia's strategies of terror. Our aim is to assemble the voices of members of the Mariupol Theater diaspora within a digital project of reconstruction.

The CST team has collected and analyzed thousands of social media posts, photographs, and videos in addition to recording over one hundred hours of interviews with witnesses. With no access to the site and with the systematic destruction of both physical and digital evidence, these recollections constitute an essential historical document. We used the model as a backdrop for situated testimonies and later to locate visual materials documenting the theater during the siege and after its occupation.

Our team identified sixty eyewitnesses of the events, out of which twenty-seven agreed to talk to us on record. We invited ten witnesses to participate in further interview sessions using the “situated testimony” technique developed by our partnering organization, Forensic Architecture. This collaborative reconstruction process allowed survivors to ‘walk’ through the virtual space and model different aspects of the building as they remembered it. This process facilitated recollection and helped our team to fill in missing details in the digital models. As each witness recalled their part in this complex event, the model became an increasingly rich assemblage of collective memory.