Critical memoryscapes: Liquid narratives and volatile heritages in post-socialist cities

Abstract

A memoryscape can be defined as site of concentrated cultural practice focused around a narrative of the past and usually aimed to impose order and coherence on the meanings attributed to the past–present relationship. Memoryscapes as sites of cultural practice are frequently enlisted “in efforts not only to normalize or homogenize but also to hierarchize, encapsulate, exclude, criminalize, hegemonize, or marginalize practices and populations that diverge from the sanctioned ideal” (Sewell, 2005: 56). Thus memoryscapes do not simply express and convey memories; just as often they erase the memories of those lacking sufficient resources to support a public presence, or silence uncomfortable memories that may haunt those who control the landscape. A memoryscape is simultaneously a product of power relations and a powerful producer of both consciousness and amnesia about the past (Yoneyama, 1994: 103). Each landscape, and particularly post-socialist memoryscape is political, inseparable from the conflictual and uneven social relations that structure specific societies at specific historical moments. All landscapes are produced and structured by conflicts. The dialectical, disrupted or pulverized landscape, which are best seen throughout the critical lenses, which allows us to transcend the dominant narratives and inequalities. The critical landscape is a dynamic system of interactions between objects, people, institutions, and processes, constituted by the distance, context, relation and direction between them. It is always a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations and the same time remains an area, as perceived by people.

Post-socialist landscapes have ben reflecting the dynamic social, cultural and economic transitions of the local societies. The erratic and hardly predictable landscape changes following liquid historical narratives. Contemporary processes and events, like the Russian aggression against Ukraine, rise of nationalistic chauvinism and right-populism, and paedophile affairs within the Polish catholic church change the interaction between places, memories and societies.