Environmental Humanities Fellow 2026

ERSTE Foundation - Summer-Autumn 2026 1 July – 30 September 2026

During the residency, Zamuruieva will work with the City Media Archive and the archives of the Natural History Museum to create a video work about the resource extraction of Ukrainian lands by the Russian Empire. This work will expand on a video she already created in 2023 in collaboration with the City Media Archive. Now, Zamuruieva aims to reveal how Soviet visual and narrative structures continue to operate today, transforming into contemporary forms of extractivism and wartime violence. By researching Soviet archival television materials and films, she will continue her practice of archiving non-human experience and examining the impact of Soviet policies on the environment.

In this new work, Zamuruieva is particularly interested in addressing the consequences of an anthropocentric worldview, especially through the lens of peace, and what Ukrainians will ultimately be forced to accept or reconcile with in its aftermath. Through the montage of archival materials and her own video footage, she will create a work in which the human history of exploitation is read through a non-human perspective — as a process that leaves chemical and biological traces in the environment. A key aspect of this work is the shift in perspective: from humans as the central subject to the environment as an active witness and carrier of memory of historical events and traumas. By the end of the residency, Zamuruieva expects to produce a video work of approximately 30 minutes that offers a critical reflection on the interconnections between imperial politics, war, and ecology.

Iryna Zamuruieva

Iryna Zamuruieva is a researcher and artist working at the intersection of environmental humanities, political ecology, and ecofeminism. Her work combines archival research, ethnography, photography, and participatory practice to examine the historical and contemporary making of agro-ecological landscapes, with a regional focus on central Ukraine.

Zamuruieva is currently a DPhil Researcher at the University of Oxford, working on a dissertation titled “A Field from Afar: rapeseed, power and ecologies in Ukraine’s landscapes”. Her articles and chapters are published in Environmental Humanities Journal, Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, as well as in Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth (ed. Adrian Ivakhiv, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) among others. Zamuruieva has also been awarded a Clarendon Doctoral Fellowship at University of Oxford and Research Fellowship at Imperial War Museums. She frequently gives presentations and conducts workshop related to her work and area of expertise.