You can read the final scientific report TE 138/2018 (2018-2020), here.

30 Years after the End of Communist Regimes: New Perspectives on the Art and Politics of Memory

Date: 14 September 2020, 1.00 – 5.00 (CET)

Format: Virtual Event

Panel on Zoom: https://cuni-cz.zoom.us/j/97078866851?pwd=dVd5dXdUdmtvODNpbXZGRkdUR0xCdz09

The end of communist regimes triggered a series of convoluted memory wars on all sides of the political spectrum. To various degrees, the politics of memory impacted the memory cultures of populously diverse regions around the globe.  While state-sponsored museums and memorials received consistent attention in academic studies dedicated to these topics, the cultural (artistic) renderings are less addressed.   This workshop’s main aim is to disentangle the multifarious materializations of cultural (artistic) memory in the post-1990s time frame. As cultural production after the collapse of the communist regimes reveals, there are significant differences both in the form and content of recalling the recent past. Some art pieces and cultural productions follow the official politics of memory, while others contest, complement or rectify what the official institutions of remembrance enforce as the “memory of communism.” While there are certain similarities in how the artists and cultural producers from the region remember communism, there are likewise differences in the manner in which they address it. While the central topic of cultural memory has been the de-communization and fading away of the past in some countries, the contemporary culture of remembrance in others highlights the fact that the citizens have not moved forward since 1991. Thus, this workshop’s main aim is to unravel the similarities but also the differences – and even incompatibilities – of the cultural materializations of the memory of communism in the former Eastern bloc.  In addition, we aim to explore the phenomenon of nostalgia that was acquired in Eastern Europe after the 1990s with almost exclusively negative connotations. Over time, new theoretical and memory studies frameworks were advanced, particularly in that nostalgia was no longer utterly understood in inherently negative terms as restorative, unhealthy, a “defect of memory” or potentially dangerous for democracy and its well-being. We welcome contributions from scholars of memory studies, arts & politics, cultural studies, political science and contemporary history. The speakers are expected to deliver a 20 minutes presentation.

Program

Panel 1:  1.00 – 2.20 p.m.

Chair: Dan Drăghia (University of Bucharest)

Caterina Preda (University of Bucharest), The Role of Art and the Politics of Memory of Communism in Romania: from ‘Communism Never Happened’ to “the Nice Side of Communism”

The official policy of the Romanian state has emphasized forgetting rather than remembering the communist regime. In the absence of a coherent public policy of the memory of the communist past, cultural memory practices are relevant to understand the multiple communist pasts that aspire to become hegemonic in Romania. Using the approach of the art and politics of memory, this presentation investigates art’s role as a tool of understanding the recent past and the extent to which artistic interpretations such as visual art (paintings, performances, video works, etc.) films or theater plays reproduce the public discourse on the need to reckon with the communist past and provide a missing or alternative perspective on it.

Romanian artistic discourses about the communist regime have focused on several topics, among which five are recurrent: the obsessive portrait of Nicolae Ceausescu, the portraits of perpetrators/the Securitate, the memory of the victims of communism, the material symbols of communism and the nostalgia for the “good side of communism”, and the 1989 revolution and the end of the regime. This presentation explores three aesthetic strategies employed by artistic discourses of memorialization of the communist regime: the aestheticization of memory, the use of art as a form of “poetic justice” by providing another documentary source of understanding the past, and the activist memory discourse that consolidates the heroization of the victims of communism who are regarded as “prison saints”. This presentation concludes that an overview of the artistic discourses about the communist regime in Romania shows the plurality of experiences of the past, compared to the dichotomies/political cleavages: communist/anti-communist, collaborator/dissident, or anti-communist/nostalgic.

Maria Alina Asavei (Charles University), Memorial Tattoos and Mnemonic Bodies: Remembering the Socialist Leaders from the Former East

The presentation zooms-in on the privately created and maintained commemorative practices of the former socialist leaders. The tattoo bearers who consent to have the former dictators’ portrait inked on the skin contribute to a culture of vernacular memorials: that is, a spontaneous form of memorial created by individuals that conform neither to the official politics of remembrance and its aesthetics nor to its content. Intentionally inscribed in the skin, tattoos like crosses, fluffy toys, roadside markers and other vernacular memorials carry the memory of the lost one. Tattoos, unlike other vernacular memorials, cannot be visited and then left behind because they are “sublime scars” carried with the body (and, yet ephemeral since it holds only the time of a life).

Unlike the memorial tattoos that mark the recognition of a group that suffered the same trauma (e.g. the victims of the Holocaust’s tattoos; the survivors  of the Bataclan attack) the commemorative tattoos analysed in this presentation reflect a centripetal set of identity concerns, ranging from Yugonostalgia to individualized spaces of self-healing. The argument put forth is that tattoos can act as vernacular commemorations collected into a body archive of nostalgia for the security of the past. The argument I put forth is that tattoos are vernacular memorials that guide the understanding of the distinctiveness of the socialist leader’ image and its propensity to re-orient the tattoo bearer to the present. At the same time, this paper focuses on the aesthetic, political and epistemic intricacies of remembering through the inked body. These mnemonic actors who indulge in such modes of remembrance are more often than not disenchanted with the present.

Alexandra Oprea, (University of Bucharest), Artivism: A new language to channel the anti-corruption project in post-communist Romania

In the context of the anti-corruption social movements in post-communist Romania, what role do local civil society associations and, more specifically, artivism play in the articulation of corruption as a public problem? This presentation argues that through a specific form of political art, Funky Citizens, a very active NGO on the anti-corruption stage, is an example of a modernizing agent in post-communist Romania. Moreover, this goes hand in hand with the desire to overcome the idea of corruption as a heavy Balkan heritage that explains the existence of a contestation movement only through external pressure. Therefore, analyzing visual means of expression of actors that promote this specific modernizing project, allow us to grasp the specificity of the Romanian case. Aiming for a socio-historical perspective, this research uses concepts and perspectives borrowed from the theoretical field of pragmatic sociology instrumentalized for the pursuit of apprehending a certain type of political art. Through the investigation of this case-study, a new attitude towards corruption is put forward, different from the one that marked the first 20 years after the Revolution, which implies the need to investigate its references to the recent past. Last but not least, this contribution reflects on the usefulness of artivism as a new language to channel ideas, in the pursuit of contributing to the articulation of a certain narrative of the communist past.

Panel 2: 2.20 – 3.40

Chair Jiri Kocian (Malach Center for Visual History and Charles University)

Mykola Homanyuk (Kherson State University),The Transformation of Peripheral Memory Spaces in Modern Ukraine

Since the 2010s an active transformation of memory spaces dedicated to the WWII (often including monuments dedicated to the Civil War, ‘soldiers-internationalists’ and Anti-Terrorist operation) has taken place in Ukraine, particularly in rural settlements. Based on the analysis of over 100 pictures of the monuments and 15 in-depth interviews, the main changes are defined to include: 1) polychromy: initially monochrome monuments are painted in different colors, which often has political connotations, 2) installation of sacred elements (crosses, candlesticks) together with conducting holy services and vernacular religious memorial practices 3) personification of collective memory stelas: setting of memorial plaques with personal data, photographs etc.). The transformation of memory spaces, thus, involves sacralization of previously secular memory spaces, their nationalization (Ukrainization), as well as integration of folk and mass culture elements. As a result, initially secular memory spaces turn into syncretic sacred-political complexes, with different components predominating in each particular case. The transformations are revealed to depend on the three main factors: type of settlement, distance to the administrative center and total number of inhabitants. The polychromy, sacralization, personification, and integration of the folk and mass culture elements are more typical for small and remote rural settlements, while the nationalization occurs in non-remote towns. The conclusion is that, in the context of the decentralization campaign in Ukraine accompanied by the weakening of institutions of ideological control, a memory paradigm in the peripheral Ukrainian regions is undergoing a cultural shift. Namely, it has been changing from the Soviet heroic tradition to a vernacular religious tradition of commemoration. Applying the ‘history of concepts’ methodology to this case, it can be argued that rethinking and sacralization of memory spaces in modern Ukraine advances from periphery to the center and from everyday consciousness to the creation of an intellectual product.

Rose Smith (Charles University), Identifying the Role of Museums in the Czech Republic in the Construction of the Global Memory of Communism 

This research explores the movement towards a global memory of Communism through experiential tourism. It frames the research within the concept of collective memory by recognizing the global collective’s perception of a shared global history as well as the concept of prosthetic memory by identifying the evolution of museums as experiential sites allowing non-local visitors to acquire their own memory of a past event. Due to the vast scope of post-Communist states, the research that will be presented in the workshop focuses on the memory of Communism presented in the museums in Prague, Czech Republic. The research analyses (1) how museums that present the Communist-era narrate history and how much of the exhibition corroborates and deviates from the globally promoted narration of the past, (2) how modern technologies of mass culture present the Communist-era and introduce the “experiential” as a mode of knowledge acquisition, and (3) how visitors receive the memory of Communism. It uncovers the implications of commodifying the memory of Communism and allowing one to forge their own memory of it based on an experiential site.

Melinda Harlov-Csortán  (Institute of Advanced Studies, Kőszeg, Budapest), Why you didn’t tell? Not-talking as a significant memory element about the previous political system in Hungary

Communist regimes, as non-democratic systems are almost unquestionably characterized by silencing. You are not supposed to speak-out freely, you are not supposed to tell the truth to your neighbours, you do not talk about the fact that everyone is stealing this or that from the workplace or do things “illegally.” It seems such silencing almost became part of our DNA as people even after the political change have this inner confidence rather not-to talk about, name or speak-out. Many authors and director address this issue by focusing on the realization that defines the post-communist memory. Even the „-in-between” generation who was born and raised in the previous area but became (young) adult after the change got shocked of the level and realization of this silencing feature of the period that were present at every aspect of life.

The presentation focuses on two novels written by sons of their fathers or parents. Péter György and György Száraz Miklós and one of the latest movies by Márta Mészáros. The film structured around the same issue but puts a mother and her daughter in the center. The investigation looks at those artistic elements and methods with which this silencing got realized and identified with a time period. The other part of the research looks at the represented characters and identify those techniques with the personal memory is analyzed retrospectively based on the new or lack of information to create a meaning about the communist regime after the political change. Besides the three main subjects of research the presentation aims to introduce the same topic represented in other artistic genres such as public art.

Panel 3: 3.40 – 5.00

Chair: Rose Smith (Charles University)

Vedran Obućina (University of Regensburg) & Domagoj Krpan (University of Rijeka), Communism in distress! Images of Communist times through the movies of Vinko Brešan

During 1990-ies Croatia experienced a lot of changes: fall of communism, Croatian War of Independence, transfer from planned economy to free market, etc. All of this shaped Croatian artistic scene in new waves. The central idea of this new way has been the de-communization and building identity in which last 45 years were just a bad dream. In time when national pride flown through all parts of society still cinema somehow kept their freedom and non-nationalistic movies get through it. Furthermore, they were well received both by public and by critic. How the War Started on My Island (Croatian: Kako je počeo rat na mom otoku) is a 1996 Croatian black comedy film and Marshal Tito’s Spirit (Croatian: Maršal) is a 1999 Croatian comedy film. They are both directed by Vinko Brešan. First movie tells a story of a father Blaž Gajski who is trying to get his son Zoran out of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) where he is a conscript. In the same time commander of the local garrison, on the island, is refusing to surrender the garrison or to evacuate. The situation is seemed as the Mexican standoff since everyone on the island seems completely engrossed by their own role in the events. Second movie is about the ghost of Josip Broz Tito that is seen during a partisan funeral. Police officer Stipan arrives on the island and decides to investigate the whole situation. The mayor is trying to build the brand from this apparition while local former partisans are preparing to take arms and control over the town, turning it into the communist-era shape.This paper examines how two comedies are reflecting on communist legacy in post war Croatian society.

Daria Chuprasova (Charles University), Immortal Regiment of Great Patriotic War

Russians are very proud of the victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War. In Soviet and Russian historiography, it is customary to talk about the Great Patriotic War as part of the Second World War, which lasted from June 22, 1941, to May 9, 1945. Since 1995, the annual Victory Parade is held in the center of Moscow. In Russia, it is the main commemorative event devoted to WWII. Since 2013, the Immortal Regiment action has been held in Russia. This parade imitates the Victory Parade, but everyone may take part in it: the main condition is to bring a photo of your relative/ancestor who participated in the Great Patriotic War (it does not matter in what status: soldier, doctor, journalist, rear worker, etc.). Initially, the parade was held in the city of Tomsk, then spread to the cities of Russia. Gradually, other countries began to join the action, first the Post-Soviet country, then other countries (for 2020, the Immortal Regiment took place in more than 83 countries of the world). Mostly participating in the parades are the Russian-speaking population of these countries, most often – emigrants of different years. However, the project is open to citizens of any country and any nation. Participants in the parade, not only lifting photographs of their relatives above their heads, but also wearing a soldier’s uniform during the war, directly identify themselves with a generalized historical figure. We see a specific substitution: the carrying portrait becomes the “representative” of the deceased in the war, not only for other participants in the procession but also for those outside it. The self-identification that the members of the Immortal Regiment seek to demonstrate is confirmed by external observers. We can say that the participation of people in the action is due to the need to extend their memory, to make the personal part collective, to be sure that it will be preserved.

Elisabeth Kovtiak (independent cultural theorist, Belarus) The image of the USSR in Lithuanian and Belarusian contemporary art

This presentation deals with the image of the Soviet past in contemporary art in Lithuania and Belarus. In the presentation, I compare how the memories of the Soviet past are negotiated in these two countries, as Lithuania and Belarus are the two post-communist states that have very different official politics of memory regarding the Soviet times, although the vernacular memory does not seem to be very distinct. There are differences in the ways of addressing the Soviet times in contemporary artworks. In Lithuania the central topic is the de-communization and fading away of the past, contemporary art attempts to reconcile with the loss. In Belarus, on the contrary, contemporary art highlights the fact that the country has not moved forward since 1991. The Communist theme merges with Lukashenko’s regime and it is sometimes hard to tell apart the difference. Also, the ways of negotiating the Soviet past are more subtle, as there is censorship. In this presentation, I will explore the differences in representations using the works of Indre Šerpytytė, Deimantas Narkevicius, Arturas Raila, Darius Žiūra, Maknyte Aurelija, Lina Albrikiene, Andrei Liankevich, Ales Puskin, Velikzhankin, Tamara Sokolova, Moskaleva and Shakhlevich, Sergey Kozhemiakin and Igor Savchenko. Apart from discussing the differences themselves, I am going to address the potential of the artworks for forming the collective memory and bringing reconciliation with the past on cultural and individual levels.

This workshop is organized by the Institute of International Studies (Charles University, Prague), PRIMUS/HUM/12 research project Beyond the Hegemonic Narratives and Myths, (2017-2021) and the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Politics, Arts, Memory and Society (PolArt) of the Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest as a part of the project TE “Transregional remembrance of dictatorships: restoring human dignity through artistic practices in South America and Eastern Europe” (PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0346, UEFISCDI).

The scientific report for 2019 can be read here.

21 November 2019, 09.00-17.00

Location: CEREFREA, Villa Noel, 6, Street Emile Zola, Bucharest

This workshop analyzes transregional artistic memory practices in the case of societies that have experienced dictatorial regimes. Its particular focus lies within comparisons between South America (especially the Southern Cone – Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil) and Eastern Europe (including ex-Yugoslavia). Some of the questions we will address include: Which pathos formulae (Aby Warburg)/ cultural schemas/narrative templates do we see circulating between different regions? How are similar artistic genres and aesthetic approaches mobilized and locally inflected in different regions? How is their circulation shaped by national and transnational infrastructures and how do they compare in terms of production and reception? Finally, we are particularly interested in methodological opportunities, limitations, and critiques of the transregional approach.

This workshop is organized by the Interdisciplinary research center on Politics, Arts, Memory and Society (PolArt) of the Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest and is a part of the project TE “Transregional remembrance of dictatorships: restoring human dignity through artistic practices in South America and Eastern Europe” (PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0346, UEFISCDI).

Program
09.00 opening of the workshop

09.30 – 11.30 Panel 1 Eastern European memory regimes

Chair: Dan Drăghia (University of Bucharest)

Maria Alina Asavei, (Charles University, Prague), Presentist Cultural Materializations of Roma Persecution: A Committal Memory for Restoring Dignity

Although the recognition of violence against Roma is enforced through European policies directed to eliminate Romaphobia, racism, and discrimination, in practice, individual states offered little (or no) support to aid the materialization of the cultural and social memory of Roma exclusion from the “common European memory.” This presentation addresses the cultural memory work undertaken by cultural workers and artists of Roma ancestry across Europe that aim to both commemorate the victims of abuse and violence and to signal present infringements of human rights and injustices perpetrated against Romani communities. The “bearing witness” aspect of an unfinished transitional justice process is still an issue of intense academic and political debate. The debate is ongoing and it is not yet clear how to remember and commemorate for instance the Roma and Sinti who perished under the Nazi regime. This difficulty is typically explained by invoking the view that it is not yet settled as to how to refer to the wide variety of Roma persecutions. At the same time, there is a widely accepted view that Roma lack a commemorative culture (Lemon, Stewart) Against these claims, my argument is that there is no such a thing as Roma cultural indifference to commemorating the dead but rather a certain politics of forgetting and the non-committal memory work (Benedik) are responsible for the form and content of the official commemorations of Romani victims. The instances of presentist memory analyzed in this presentation reveal a different picture than the official commemorations of Romani victims accross Central and South-East Europe, where memory is merely employed in abstract debates and conversations while all “immediate connections between contemporary discrimination and historical suffering are neglected” (Benedik). The cultural materializations of Roma suffering turns the producers of them into memory entrepreneurs and cultural activists.

Codruța Pohrib (University of Bucharest), Queer aesthetics: reframing post-communist memory politics

Marked by an ineffective trauma-nostalgia dichotomy, Eastern European post-communist cultural memory practices have been organized around the affective protocols of trauma (by state-sponsored institutions), pop-nostalgia (especially by private/commercial cultural actors) and, in some instances, have used the post-colonial critical idiom. More recently, queer artistic practices developing parafictional, translocal tools for exploring micro-histories of queer lives from communism, are questioning these established frames of remembrance, challenging previous memory work, as well intervening in presently rekindled Cold War rhetoric. This paper investigates some of these artistic/research practices, paying close attention to their affective-aesthetic protocols, the way they creatively assemble new “archives of feeling”(Cvetkovich 2002) and how the participate in contemporary memory debates.

Alexandra Oprea (University of Bucharest), Cinema, memory and critique of corruption after the fall of communism
This presentation questions the anti-corruption movements that emerged in post-communist Bulgarian and Romanian societies after the 2000s in order to understand the emergence of a public problem, in this case, corruption. We thus try to understand the local specificities of this denunciation of corruption but also the circulation between the two countries, through the analysis of the cinematographic discourse as it is presented in the 4 films chosen by this research. Among the existing cinematographic productions we have selected two documentaries, a Romanian one -Kapitalism our improved formula (Alexandru Solomon, 2010) and a Bulgarian one -The Beast Is Still Alive (Vesela Kazakova, Mina Mileva, 2016) and two fictions, one Romanian short film – Cigarettes and coffee (Cristi Puiu, 2004) and a Bulgarian feature film – Gloria (Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov, 2016). All four are Eastern Europe productions, released at different times of the post-communist era, so local films, loosely similar by type. It is precisely for this reason that we analyse documentaries, short and long films together, to cover several ways of cinematic expression and to highlight the circulation of certain types of artistic discourse. In order to do so, this contribution mobilizes concepts specific to pragmatic sociology (such as the notion of test and that of grammar) and memory studies. This translates into the analysis of a transnational public memory of communism mobilized in the denunciation of corruption. We therefore try, through this presentation, to propose a model of analysis that allows the researcher to use film productions to capture a form of endogenous critical articulation of a public problem.
11.30-12.00 Coffee break
12.00-14.00 Panel 2 The memories of communism in Romania and Eastern Europe

Chair: Caterina Preda (Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest)

Andreea Lazea (West University of Timisoara), Irony and memory in visual arts in post-communism
Following totalitarian regimes, changes in arts are expected to be radical, as the new-found freedom of creation should liberate long repressed imagination and make finally place to subjects, techniques and aesthetics artists are genuinely interested in. The idea simplifies the complex situation of the arts in post-communist societies, as sometimes themes and styles that emerged during the totalitarian regime are recuperated and developed afterwards. An example is the neo-byzantine movement, that during the 1980s was marginal in relation to the official culture and involved few artists gathered in the Prolog group, whilst after 1989 it became one of the main artistic phenomena, well represented nationwide. But there are also important ruptures. Whereas many topics and paths are explored by artists in the new democratic Romania, the memory of the communist past is hardly one of them. Along with a semi-absence of the subject in the official discourse, few artists approached the recent and traumatic past. The proposed intervention will discuss such artistic endeavours, for example the installations and performances of subREAL group (East-West Avenue, Alimentara), Ioana Ciocan’s Project 1990 for Lenin’s pedestal involving 12 artists, Tara von Neudorf drawings related to the totalitarian past and its nowadays life. The presentation of some important artworks tackling the memory of the communism will highlight the presence of a common ingredient – irony. Can irony in visual arts succeed in preserving memories and how does it do that? What kind of memory is the one irony passes on? Are there analogous forms of art in other post-communist societies? These are the questions my intervention will deal with, drawing on the results of similar research on other cultural fields and geographical areas and largely employing formal and contextual analysis of art objects.
Ludmila Homutová (Charles University, Prague), Pink Symbols. Transforming Postcommunist Public Spaces in Eastern Europe
Political changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s left significant marks in the ex-communist public space. Some statues and symbols of former regimes were torn down without much fuss. But some symbols were transformed, raising questions, backlash and praise at the same time. Pink Tank by David Černý that used to be in Prague is one famous example. His action transformed the memorial to the Red Army into a symbol of resistance, the Velvet Revolution, and freedom. The rich second life of Pink Tank shows the vitality of this new symbol. The use of the colour pink bears clear allusions to this very tank that was used also in other East European countries. This paper will examine the forming of new postcommunist symbolism and how it reflects political and social changes in the former Eastern Bloc taking the use of pink colour as an example. It will briefly describe the story of the original Pink Tank and other examples of „pinked“ statues, especially The Red Army Monument in Sofia and the statue of Lenin from the Project 1990 in Bucharest. Finally it will analyze reactions to these transformations in media.
Manuela Marin (The National History Museum of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca), Remembering the Communist Past in Romania from a regional perspective

This paper analyzes how the Romanian popular press and advertising industry marked the passing of 20 and respectively 30 years since the fall of the communist regime in Romania. While focusing on the Romanian case, my paper will place it within the larger context of similar initiatives from other communist countries. In the first part of the paper, I will focus on how Romanians’ thinking about the communist period changed from outright rejection to nostalgia over the last 30 years and what arguments they invoked to support their option. To this end, I will analyze both the results of the opinion polls and the readers’ comments on the articles published about communism in the Romanian press. The second part of my presentation will examine what types of images about the communist past were conveyed by the Romanian press and advertising industry and thus, what role the consumption had in creating the nostalgic image or images about the communist past.

14.00 – 15.00 Lunch for the participants to the workshop

15.00-17.00 Panel 3 A transregional outlook between South America and Eastern Europe

Chair: Maria Alina Asavei, (Charles University, Prague)

Katarzyna Cytlak (CEMECH-UNSAM, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires), Giving the ‘Big Picture’. Art Dealing with the Post-Authoritarian Contexts.

In 1996, an American critic and historian Hal Foster used the term “artist as an ethnographer”, marking a paradigm shift in the art of the seventies regarding cultural politics, and above all, the politics of alterity. The ethnographer becomes a model of the producer (of culture) who investigates the cultural “Other” – a subaltern and postcolonial subject. Considering the theoretical debate aiming to redefine modern art, to reevaluate local translations of the modernist project and re-inscribe it within the global frame, Foster’s concept should be modified in order to correspond better to the post-authoritarian contexts. From this perspective, artistic strategy developed by Latin American and East European artists can be defined as self-ethnography or even as self-history, the science that uses self-reflection to explore anecdotal and personal experiences, and then, relate them to broader historical, cultural, political and social meanings and knowledge. The paper aims to discuss the archival and historiographic turn in contemporary art developed in the contexts defined as “peripheral” in respect of the Western (European) cultural centers. It will focus on artworks context that aimed to give a big picture of historical traumatizing events, or to depict the history of the country, the continent, or even the whole Planet Earth. The paper will analyze two artist’s books made by the Uruguayan artists during the post-dictatorship period: Brief History of Art in Latin America (1986) by Jorge Caraballo, which is a commentary on the Uruguayan civic-military dictatorship (1973-1985) and Visual Encyclopedia of the History of Latin America (1983-1988) by Clemente Padín that refers to the history of colonialism, dictatorships and dominations of the whole continent. In order to discuss the use of individual memories to construct metahistorical narratives about domination and resistance, the paper will compare Padín’s and Caraballo’s artworks to Pangaea – Visual Aid for Historical Consciousness (2011) by Ex-Artists’ Collective, which maps political and social struggles as well as their symbols and ideologies from the prehistory of the World up to today’s globalization.

Graziele Frederico (University of Milan), Become testimony: women voices about the Brazilian and Argentinean Military Dictatorships

Based on the concept of testimony defined by Giorgio Agamben in Quel che resta di Auschwitz: l’archivio e il testimone (2008), this paper proposes the analysis of three narratives which seek to reconstruct the memory and the past from a temporal distance that allows to reelaborate and expose the scars of what happened, besides showing and representing various aspects of the politics of transitional justice, memory and truth (or the absence of all this) in the Brazilian context with references to the Argentinian context as well. This paper proposes to analyze the novel Nem tudo é silêncio (2010), by Sonia Regina Bischain, a São Paulos’s periphery writer; Mar azul (2012), by Paloma Vidal, that tells a story about two exiles, father and daughter in different times, escaping from the Argentine and the Brazilian dictatorships. And finally, Volto semana que vem (2015), by Maria Pilla, a survivor from the two dictatorships (Argentine and Brazilian) that elaborates in fiction 20 years later her experience. Based on these narratives, this work aim to approach Agamben’s wish that after the extermination camps, ethics and testimony should make some words forgotten and others understood/read differently. The process of memory elaboration differs in many ways in the two countries. First of all, Argentina has prosecuted its criminals for state terrorism, while Brazil continues to maintain an unrestricted “amnesty” for tortures and murderers. In the Hispanic-American country, public testimonies and proceedings were held and a collective sharing of the crimes of the dictatorial regime was possible. In Brazil, official memory policies in the post-dictatorship period cloistered scars at private levels and at most turned state crimes and horror into a family problem. The discussion has not been and is not yet public and collective. In literature, these questions are also exposed in different ways. While Argentines consider testimonial literature as an established and prolific literature genre, even tracing different phases with the current production of “Hijos”, for example, bringing irony and humor as new aesthetic elements for the memorial debate. In Brazil, although the current phase also differs from the first stage of denunciation, there is a division in production: narratives that still seek to demonstrate the still open wounds (especially due to the lack of Justice) and on the other hand, an attempt to pacify this past or a melancholy framing of the military dictatorship in an outdated chapter of the country’s history.

Caterina Preda (Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest), The artistic memorialization of dictatorships: a transregional approach

Thirty years after the fall of communism and after the end of the military regimes in South America (in the 1980s), contemporary artists, theater and film directors are still interested in the ways in which the dictatorships in their countries shaped their societies. Artists investigate the past through the use of the archives of the secret police forces in their countries, or they employ regional archives (Voluspa Jarpa) that help shape a transregional approach to the study of the memory of the dictatorships. They moreover use their bodies to recall those, which are still considered disappeared by the dictatorships such as in Uruguay (Clemente Padin), or Chile (#quererNOver). Artists enter a conversation with the relicts of the past, engaging with the material memory of the dictatorships as in the case of the socialist monuments which are still in place (Alexandra Pirici) or which have been relocated. In this presentation I want to discuss the different ways in which contemporary artists bring to the fore the memory of dictatorship and the ways in which they help document, interrogate and draw a new possible future from the relicts of the unresolved past. From a theoretical point of view this investigation is situated at the meeting of Art in Transitional Justice studies and Cultural memory studies that take into account artistic forms of memorialization after traumatic experiences introducing thus in the theoretical discussion the case of contemporary visual arts which is not a privileged topic of research for neither.

17.00 closing of the workshop

Scientific researcher grade 3 (CS3) “Transregional remembrance of dictatorships: restoring human dignity through artistic practices in South America and Eastern Europe” (Contract TE, 138/2018 (2018-2020), PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0346

Scientific researcher grade 3 (CS3) for the Project TE, 138/2018 (2018-2020), PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0346, director of the contract Lector Dr Caterina Preda.

Job offering: Scientific researcher grade 3 (Cercetător științific 3) fixed term PolArt.

Period of employment: 01.10. 2019 – 09.10.2020, Contract 138/2018.

Scientific researcher grade 3 (CS3) for the Project TE, 138/2018 (2018-2020), PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0346, director of the contract Lector Dr Caterina Preda.

Job offering: Scientific researcher grade 3 (Cercetător științific 3) fixed term PolArt.

Period of employment: 01.10. 2019 – 09.10.2020, Contract 138/2018.

1. Conditions for the job offer

• Doctor in social sciences or humanities.
• Experience in research as part of other research projects
• Scientific publications in journals or volumes
• Aged less or equal to 40 years old.
• Knowledge of foreign languages: English/French/Spanish

Topic of research: the study of the memory of communism in South-Eastern Europe

• Job description

1. Coordinates the research and administrative activities in the research project.
2. Develops research activities in the research projects to which (s)he participates to
3. Applies specific methods of research in archives and bibliographic research.
4. Participates to the activities of research of the Interdisciplinary Center of Research Politics, Arts, Memory, Society (PolArt)
5. Participates to the elaboration of the scientific articles and the research reports.
6. Disseminates the research activities’ results.
7. Applies and respects the norms, procedures and internal regulations, as well as the law dispositions concerning accidents.

• Topic of the contest

The Project “Transregional remembrance of dictatorships: restoring human dignity through artistic practices in South America and Eastern Europe” (Contract TE, 138/2018 (2018-2020), PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0346) proposes to create a framework of comparative analysis of the phenomena that follow dictatorships through artistic examples that help document the transregional similarities and differences in what regards dealing with the past that artists are sensible to. The results of the project will be disseminated through the participation of the members of the research team to international conferences such as ECPR, LASA, SCOPE and through the organization of two workshops in 2019 (University of Bucharest) and 2020 (University of Prague). Furthermore, the members of the research team will publish scientific articles in journals which are indexed by ERIH+/Thomson Reuters Arts and Humanities/ Thomson Reuters Social Sciences.

PolArt launches a call for applications for a doctor in social sciences or the humanities to integrate the research team of the project “Transregional remembrance of dictatorships: restoring human dignity through artistic practices in South America and Eastern Europe”. The candidates must comply with the requirements of point A. The main results expected from the scientific researcher grade 3 (CS3) are: bibliographic research and the participation to the workshops organized in the framework of the project, as well as to the accomplishment of all the duties found in the description of the position specified at point B.

• Competition: required documents and interview. The required documents are: updated Curriculum Vitae, Letter of motivation explaining why the candidate wants to hold this position, the abstract of one scientific article to be published.

• Place of the competition:

PolArt, UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCUREŞTI Facultatea de Ştiinţe Politice Str. Spiru Haret, nr. 8, 010175 Bucureşti România

• Bibliography

1. Atencio, Rebecca J. and Nancy Gates-Madsen, “Art and Transitional Justice,” in Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, eds. Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1:117-123.
2. Bahun, Sanja, ‘Transitional Justice and the Arts: Reflections on the Field’ in Claudio Corradetti, Nir Eisikovits and Jack Volpe Rotondi (eds), Theorizing Transitional Justice (Ashgate, 2015).
3. Barahona de Brito, Alexandra, “Transitional Justice and Memory: Exploring Perspectives”, South European Society and Politics 15:3 (2010): 359-376.
4. Bilbija, Ksenija, Jo Ellen Fair, Cynthia Milton, and Leigh Payne (eds.), The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
5. Erll, Astrid, “Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory,” in Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 389-398.
6. Golebiewski, Daniel, “The Arts as Healing Power in Transitional Justice,” E-International Relations, 19 February 2014, available at: http://www.e-ir.info/2014/02/19/the-arts-as-healing-power-in-transitional-justice/, accessed on 1 May 2016;
7. Huyssen, Andreas, Present Pasts, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Milton Cynthia (ed.), Art from a fractured past: Memory and truth-telling in post-Shining Path Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
8. Ricoeur, Paul, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000).
9. Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

• Commission of the competition:

President: Lector Dr. Caterina Preda

Member: Conf. Dr. Raluca Alexandrescu

Member: Dr. Alina Popescu

Member: Codruta Pohrib

Secretary: Dr. Irina Matei

CALL FOR PAPERS for the WORKSHOP TRANSREGIONAL REMEMBRANCES: ARTISTIC MEMORY WORK AFTER DICTATORSHIPS

DATE: 21 November 2019

VENUE: Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest

This workshop aims to analyze transregional artistic memory practices in the case of societies that have experienced dictatorial regimes. Its particular focus lies within comparisons between South America (especially the Southern Cone – Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil) and Eastern Europe (including ex-Yugoslavia). We are looking for research that operates at the intersection between the fields of Transitional Justice, Art Theory and Cultural Memory and that takes a comparative approach to the circulation of artistic templates, intervention tools and practices.

Which pathos formulae (Aby Warburg)/ cultural schemas/narrative templates do we see circulating between different regions? How are similar artistic genres and aesthetic approaches mobilized and locally inflected in differente regions? How is their circulation shaped by national and transnational infrastructures and how do they compare in terms of production and reception? Finally, we are particularly interested in methodological opportunities, limitations, and critiques of the transregional approach.

We welcome papers that focus on but need not be limited to one or several of the following:

• the role of artistic practices in processes of transitional justice (especially in South America and Eastern Europe)

• artistic practices that act as stand-ins or alternatives of transitional justice; that critique the limits of transitional justice or are, on the contrary, supported by institutions and bodies in the field of transitional justice

• cinematographic, performative, museal, visual memory practices

• modes, media, genres of remembrance

• representations of memory and art interventions • artistic developments during and after dictatorship: continuations, ruptures, legacies of protest art

• art and social movements during and after dictatorship • networks and exchanges in transregional socio-cultural fields • systems of artistic production and reception across regions

• methodological challenges and opportunities

• methodological reflections on area studies versus transregional studies

This workshop is organized by the Interdisciplinary research center on Politics, Arts, Memory and Society PolArt) and is a part of the project TRANSREGIONAL ARTISTIC MEMORY

Those interested should send us a short abstract (300 words) of their intended presentation, together with a short CV.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMITTING ABSTRACTS: 1 September 2019.

CONTACT: Caterina Preda (Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest), caterinapreda@gmail.com

The scientific report for 2018 can be consulted here: Report ENG TE 2018

CPES launches a call for candidacies for 2 doctoral candidates that will integrate the team of the project “Transregional remembrance of dictatorships: restoring human dignity through artistic practices in South America and Eastern Europe ” Contract TE 138 of 10/10/2018 (PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0346). The candidates must comply with the requirements specified and the main results expected are: to engage in theoretical research and to publish two scientific articles, as well as accomplishing all duties specified in the job description.

https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/349861

http://jobs.ancs.ro/anunt.php?id=2940