Babyn Yar Park, Kiev, Ukraine is a repository of many histories. Tales of murdered litter the grounds of this present day city park. The sheer violence and density of its tortured past transcends any attempts at explication or narration to present-day visitors. For this reason, we propose that Babyn Yar be preserved as a living, evolving ground for the perpetual and unresolved process of memorialization that is at once individual and collective, sympathetic and empathetic, continual and fleeting. This intervention exposes the reality of its irredeemable past not to facilitate casual empathy but to acknowledge the perpetual weight of its history and to resist embalming it with neat platitudes.

This project brings forward the possibility that the future of memorials, lies not in the superimposition of grand meta-narratives of hard, dominant architecture, but perhaps in the revelation of its soft, shifting ground.