Paper short abstract:

The exhibition in Kozlowka includes both art pieces in "social-realistic" style of 1950s and everyday items. Familiar objects of material culture reconcile visitors with their socialist past, while the monumental propaganda art gives them feeling of being "victims of the system."

Paper long abstract:

Kozlowka is the only existing museum of socialist art in Poland, and one of the favourite one-day trip destinations in the Lublin region. However, apart from art pieces in "socialist realistic" style of 1950s, the exhibition includes several arrangments of everyday life sceneries, with original items of material culture form the period, staging grey and homespun "lifestyle" of the time. In the paper (based on observations and interviews with visitors) I will argue that the elements of everyday material culture reconcile visitors with their "socialist" memories suggesting them the "average" part they played in it, while the monumental propaganda art gives them feeling of being "victims of the system." All together it creates a museum experience that alleviates memories of socialist past in Poland.

Paper short abstract:

In Bratislava a stratum of new plutocrats demonstrates pecuniary wealth with hyperbolic evidence. Despite of the stigmatization of these nouveaux riches as boisterous, tasteless and anomic this paper tries to shed light on the relation of the suddenly wealthy owners with their material belongings and investigates the function of the objects as projection screens for complex ideas and emotions.

Paper long abstract:

The fall of the Iron Curtain has resulted in political and economic changes in all ex-socialist countries. These changes have given rise to a new stratum of nouveaux riches, who managed to acquire wealth due to restitution and privatization of former state properties. That pecuniary elite is despised by the "old aristocracy", the cultural elite, as well as by the newly poor. The plutocrats' provocative demonstration of their wealth may be stigmatized as "uncultivated", but it is their cultural idiosyncrasy that my research is focused on. The newly rich demonstrate to the world how rich they have become, but there is more to their message that uses 'things' as a vehicle. Can this demonstration of 'tasteless and obscene' overabundance be understood as a break with the socialist past, the ideology of equality? Can it be read as a sign for a new social order with an orientation towards the consumption absorbed West?

In my paper I shall concentrate on subject - object relationships of my informants with their possessions, which are so evidently displayed by the newly rich of post-socialist countries. Looking at their dress-codes and jewelry, registering their objects of daily use and furnishing, potential (art)collections, architecture (including interior and garden architecture) as well as means of transport I intend to map the plutocrats' subjectivities. Presenting a case of a material environment created by a plutocrat in Senec (near Bratislava, Slovakia) I shall attempt to approach an understanding of the motivations, intentions, fears and desires of this recently born elite.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork conducted in exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), this paper explores recent debates on memory and oblivion, focusing on the objects found with the corpses as well as on different artefacts (photographs, documents, flags…) brought to the exhumation sites.

Paper long abstract:

In 2000, the exhumation of mass graves of people executed during the Spanish civil war (1936-39) opened up an intense debate in Spain on the memory of the civil war and Franco's dictatorship, bringing to the public arena questions that had been silenced for over seventy years. Since then, the Spanish civil war has been at the centre of public debates in the political arena. For the first time, the pact of silence on the war and its aftermath was broken. Sealed at the end of the dictatorship that gave way to the democratic transition and considered to be one of its main pillars, the pact of silence was instituted as an officialized amnesia, preventing any debate, review or legal claim over past events. Indeed, the Spanish case served as a precedent and an example for the so called "full stop laws" (ley de punto final) enforced in Latin American dictatorships.

Leaded by families later constituted in associations, the efforts to localize and give the corpses of their kin a 'decent burial' opened up unprecedented discussions on remembrance, oblivion and political responsibility regarding past events.

Digging up common graves has a healing effect on those looking for their beloved ones. Many did not dare to undertake such an action for decades. Many of them have died without being able to trace and recover the corpses of their beloved ones. The issue is far from being simple, though. The debate over the convenience of opening up the graves or leaving them as they are for future generations to remember what happened is still open, underlining the existence of different points of view over the role of such locations as sites of memory and places for remembrance. All of these underline the need to give a material shape to memory in the form of memorials, communal or individual tombs.

However, the exhumations constitute a unique moment to observe these debates in action. The materiality of corpses, together with personal items found in these graves have a strong impact on all those attending the exhumation, from archaeologists to families and members of the associations working for what has been called the "recovery of historic memory". Ordinary objects, such as buttons, shoes, pencils or glasses found in mass graves acquire thus a huge importance: they may be central for the identification of the bodies and/or they may become the very materialization of remembrance in the hands of the families. Drawing from a four year fieldwork conducted in different exhumations all through Spain, this paper intends to explore the links between memory and material culture, focusing on the objects found in mass graves of the civil war as well as on different artefacts (photographs, documents, flags, flowers) brought to the exhumations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is focused on the question how silenced memory of the Armenian expulsion in 1915 has been articulated in the Soviet past and received a new meaning and materiality after the postsocialist change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is focused on the question how silenced memory of the Armenian expulsion in 1915 has been articulated in the Soviet past and received a new meaning and materiality after the postsocialist change. In spite of erecting the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan in the mid of the 60s during Khrushchev's political thaw there was no crucial change in social and political order of remembering. A radical shift from forgotten to visible Armenian loss has occurred in postsocialist Armenia with creating a new moral universe and re-establishment of proper memorialization regarding the Armenian yeghern (grief and mourning) in terms of global morality. The Soviet memorial in its typical abstract monumental style has been successfully incorporated by the new ideology in the Armenian post-conflict society, whereby the cult of death is intensified through global aesthetics of loss and a new politics of unrecognized bad death in the language of Christian suffering. To illustrate this change, I concentrate on the area surrounding the Yerevan memorial and museum of the Armenian Genocide on the Tsitsernakaberd hill.

Paper short abstract:

The goal of my research is the analysis of how, in Lithuania, the nationalistic policy constructs the official representations about notions of "nation-state" or "national identity" according to the previous independence from soviet union and the recent adhesion to european union

Paper long abstract:

In this specific research, I'm interested in analysing the procedure by which, elaborating more or less coherent representation, the burocratic power structures construct a national identity.

I carry out this analysis using what M. Herzfeld called the "middle ground" approach, the way in which it is possible to analyse how the official representations are constructed and, contemporarily, how they work in social daily life.

My point of view try to put in evidence the role of "Agency", intended as the strategy applied by individual according it to the society.

In a nation-state there is always an intimate space for negotiation of those representation that, to outsider, are presented as natural and unchangeable. How does it work in the process of constructing european union?

The field of my work is the Republic of Lithuania, the state that, in a period of ten years, went through the independence from soviet union to the joining european union.

This example of nation- state is particularly interesting because there is a powerful nationalistic policy orientated to the consolidation and legitimisation of the new burocratic power growth after the independence. In particular, my research will concentrate the attention on the process and all the people involved in the re-structuring of urban space and the management of monuments and museum according to the specific national and nationalistic policy as well as European and international one.

Paper short abstract:

I will focus on the Gdansk landscape considered as an carrier of social values. Some parts of this city are a subject of vivid processes of symbolization, also on the ground of Gdansk literature which is abundant with descriptions of Gdansk seen through different persons’ eyes. Among those images some interesting regularities can be found.

Paper long abstract:

In my paper I will focus on Gdansk (Danzig) city considered as an carriers of non-material values. Gdansk being for a long time a subject of Polish-German conflicts has a very diverse landscape. Since 89' a part of it is a subject of vivid processes of symbolization. Among others, they occur on the discursive ground and entail phenomenon called the Gdansk literature which can be placed on the edge of recollections literature and fiction.

Stefan Chwin and Paweł Huelle are the authors known also out of Poland. An outstanding feature of their literature are abundant and reflective descriptions of Gdansk seen through different persons' eyes. Among those rediscovering images of the city some regularities can be found. Those new Gdansk portraits usually omit the old town (city center) rebuilt after World War II as well as all new districts and turn to post-German peripheral districts which over years have been marginalized. They also reveal paths of domestication and symbolic privatization of Gdansk which are different for the first and the second generations.

The main thesis of the paper is that the reason why the Gdansk landscape triggers such an exceptional interest and emotions results from tension arising from intersection of three pairs of categories mingled with different types of city landscapes. The Old Town is perceived as Polish but artificial and communist heritage, whereas districts like Oliwa and Wrzeszcz as German, authentic and liberal which makes both types of places not an obvious reference for contemporary local identity.