“These towns and cities look like places where I’ve been. And then you wake up one day, and they aren’t there anymore.”
That’s the reaction of LSUS freshman Jonah Cryer after experiencing the Virtual Reality Museum War in Ukraine, which visited the LSUS campus Monday.
The exhibit takes attendees on a tour of Ukrainian locales which have been devastated by the Russian invasion.
Images of entire city blocks reduced to rubble, apartment buildings flattened, and the twisting frames of structures exposed to the sky where walls and roofs used to be, greeted attendees through the VR Oculus headsets.
Photojournalist Mykola Omelchenko, a member of the War Up Close Exhibit Team, uses panoramic photos paired with a virtual reality experience that allows attendees to explore the damage as if they were walking down those Ukrainian streets.
“The idea came as a way to fight Russian propaganda,” Omelchenko said. “Children are dying, and hospitals and schools have been destroyed.
“Behind every destroyed building is a story of real people.”
Attendees had the option of putting on a virtual reality headset or using their smart phones and a QR code to tour Ukrainian cities like Kyiv, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Mykolaiv.
Photos and videos of these places before the full-scale invasion are juxtaposed with the destruction left in the wake of Russian missiles and bombs more than two years into the full-scale invasion.
Aerial drone footage shows the extent of widespread damage while photos/videos from the street level allows an up-close view of the destruction.
Each city also features interviews with residents of that place and their experience.
Mariupol, one of the cities to first experience the full-scale war near the Russian border in southern Ukraine, has roughly 98 percent of its buildings damaged and 87,000 people dead.
“The response we’ve seen from the exhibit is that many people weren’t aware of the level of destruction that is taking place,” Omelchenko said. “On television, you might see a two-or-three second clip.
“With this exhibit, you’re getting a full five minutes plus locations in specific cities. We hope that after seeing this exhibit, people will contact their representatives and tell them to keep supporting Ukraine. With your help, Ukrainians, who are a resilient people, can still fight. But without it, we’ll lose.”
The exhibit itself doesn’t show images of bodies or injuries, but the exhibitors want to make sure it’s audience is aware of the human toll of this war.
Dr. Alexander Mikaberidze, an LSUS history professor who is a native of Georgia (a former Soviet Union territory), said awareness of the war and its consequences was his top priority in bringing the exhibit to LSUS.
“The war in Ukraine is of great importance to the U.S., so the public must be better informed on what is happening overseas, and more crucially, of the human tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine,” said Mikaberidze, who is also the Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair for the Curatorship of the James Smith Noel Collection. “While the full-scale invasion didn’t start until 2022, this war has really been going on for 10 or 11 years now.
“Russia is trying to re-establish itself as an imperial power and challenge the international order. This is the greatest destabilization of that world order since World War II and constitutes a national security threat to the entire West.”
Cryer, the LSUS freshman, said the absence of life and hustle and bustle in these once-busy city centers is “overwhelming.”
“It’s overwhelming to think that people used to live here, and now they don’t,” Cryer said of bombed out apartment buildings and crumbling downtowns. “People’s entire lives are uprooted.
“It’s really eerie to see all the destroyed buildings and no people.”
The exhibit will be in Shreveport one more day as it will head to Centenary College on Tuesday.
For more information, visit the War Up Close website.