Park of Memory, 1968–81

While the Babyn Yar project was never realized, ARWM (Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko) further developed and expanded their ideas through other projects, such as the Park of Memory, a major work they began designing in 1968 together with the architect Avraam Miletskyi (1918–91). The project involved the building of a new crematorium at the Baikove Cemetery, and was Soviet Ukraine’s largest site-specific artistic intervention. To ensure the thoughtful integration of modern funereal technologies, the duo surveyed the folk customs found in archeological and historical studies, and regularly went on research trips to Ukrainian villages in the Volyn, Podillia, and Bukovyna regions, recording their findings in a series of artistic impressions. In the Park of Memory, they underlined the need to separate the spiritual and technological aspects, wanting to create a unique space for reflection that ‘ordinary’ architecture could not provide. They eventually designed the Halls of Farewell, atop a podium within a low spiraled ring that the artists construed as an expression of continuous movement (the cremating facility is located underground). Throughout the project, ARWM strove to avoid a static definitiveness, shaping the forms to accommodate the daylight, especially in the curves of the Halls: the complex is envisioned as a kind of sky temple, with fifteen of the seventeen foundational curves ballooning up to the heavens. The negative space between the Halls of Farewell was consciously designed to resemble the Nenets chum.
During the modeling of the Halls of Farewell, it was found that a retaining wall would also be needed, which became the Wall of Memory. The artists decided to use this as an enormous commemorative artwork outlining the path to the Halls. The Wall of Memory was a unified expression of ARWM’s visual vocabulary, with a metal frame clad in concrete reliefs to be painted afterward; the height of the reliefs varied from 4 to 14 metres, with an overall length of 213 metres and an area of more than 2000 square metres. For over a decade, the artists spent every day on the construction site at Baikova Hill, translating their drawings into intricate sculptures. In early 1982, as the reliefs were being prepared for painting, the order came to liquidate the Wall. This meant covering the reliefs in cement, an operation done from March through May of that year. At the time, the artists were vigorously attacked and accused of various transgressions, most notably of invoking Babyn Yar in the the Wall’s imagery.