The Archive Before the Ruin: Backup Ukraine and Anticipatory Reconstruction

This thesis examines Backup Ukraine, a citizen-driven digital heritage initiative launched in April 2022 by UNESCO’s Danish National Commission, Blue Shield Denmark, Virtue Worldwide, and the 3D scanning startup Polycam, in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The initiative mobilized Ukrainian citizens to produce and upload three-dimensional scans of cultural heritage objects and sites via a smartphone application. The thesis argues that Backup Ukraine constitutes a form of anticipatory reconstruction: a techno-social practice that intervenes to capture, preserve, and accumulate cultural traces before material destruction occurs, transforming endangered material into archival data that enables future memory, preservation, and potential repair. Drawing on new materialist frameworks developed by Karen Barad and Bruno Latour, alongside critical archival theory, the analysis proceeds in two successive movements. The first examines the archive from structural distance, combining discourse analysis, platform and interface study, and a systematic content analysis of 192 sampled captures distributed across Ukraine’s administrative regions, to develop the concept of the topographical archive and account for how the archive’s spatial logic produces heritage value. The second moves to the granular level of individual artifacts and embedded archival practices, developing close readings through sustained encounter to demonstrate how crisis archiviality emerges as a condition in which endangerment displaces authorized cultural significance, and how Backup Ukraine functions as a memory frame that contextualizes dispersed digital traces through techno-social processes of conjecture and association. Together these two scales illuminate how Backup Ukraine’s techno-social apparatus actively reorganizes the epistemological and ontological conditions under which cultural loss is anticipated, rendered legible, and given meaning, while remaining structurally unable to deliver the human voice that would animate its contents most fully. The thesis concludes that digital archives produced under crisis conditions demand accompanying participatory processes rooted in community engagement, and proposes Jeannette Allis Bastian’s community of records approach as a methodological orientation for future research.