On the territory of one of the shopping and entertainment centres in the village of Hatne, Kyiv Oblast, in the summer of 2017 an unusual sculptural composition called “Generation” was installed – a family of mammoths, created by the Kyiv architect Vlad Holdakovsky. The choice of this image is no accident: it was here, in Hatne, that a mammoth skeleton was found back in 1947, which is now kept in the capital’s Museum of Paleontology. The architectural group that included Holdakovsky was tasked with emphasising the uniqueness of this location, and mammoths became a natural, almost documentary solution.
The author deliberately refused to literally recreate the animal that was found, choosing instead to tell the story through three figures that seem to capture frames of a single movement – because the main viewpoint of the composition opens precisely from the road, as cars drive past the shopping centre. The first figure resembles a rock painting and symbolises the integral, undivided perception of the world by primitive man, who did not yet separate himself from nature. The second figure gradually loses its organic form – it becomes more geometric and broken, reflecting how humanity began to dissect the world analytically into parts, developing technology, industry and, finally, digital technologies.
The third figure embodies the modern digital, discrete reality in which, in the architect’s conception, we live today – when communication in messengers often displaces live contact. Thus the three mammoths in Hatne are not just a tribute to a paleontological find, but an artistic metaphor for the transformation of human consciousness, culture and social ties throughout history, presented in a form familiar to many from decorative elephant figurines in home interiors.
