5D optical data storage,

hand-carved willow wood objects,

inSAR satelite image,

concrete

2025

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This memorial belongs to a speculative future, exploring how memory and mourning are stored across technological, cultural, and ecological dimensions. At its centre stands a weeping willow—rooted in Ukrainian folklore as a symbol of the cyclical nature of time, memory, and renewal. The work combines inSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) data, folklore, and ghost stories to trace willow forests now growing where water once flowed—trees as hauntological witnesses, living archives of violence, resilience, and memory embedded in wounded earth.

Embedded within the sculpture is an inSAR satellite image of the Kakhovka Reservoir, captured after the catastrophic destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam on 6 June 2023, together with an optical 5D data storage device—the Eternal Memory Crystal—specially produced for this exhibition by the Institute for Photonics and Nanoelectronics at the University of Southampton. Designed to preserve data for billions of years, the crystal encodes information in light, surpassing the lifespan of paper, film, or hard drives. It stands as both a metaphor and an epitaph of deep time: fossilised light carrying memory into a future yet to come.