What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people’s conventional values is losing its effective power, opening new opportunities for repair and revaluation of the past.

Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: the railway bazaar in Tallinn where concepts such as ‘market’ and ‘employment’ take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a grandiose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses diffi cult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial and temporal co-evolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO and the European Union, and represents a place of continual negotiation of belonging; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu, that has been turned into a memory field.

The anthropological study of all these places shows that national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and disrepair too, also demonstrating how we can understand generational change in a material sense.

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia: An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces

Abstract: The paper is focused on a particular group of visual artists from Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak republics dealing with the issue of memory, history and nostalgia in their work. A common feature of their art is the perception of local space in its historical connotations, the exploration of historical content, causality reception, and the time-space orientation of man. Using space, with its physical and symbolic expression, is their strategy; a specific interest is the process of searching, changing or losing the identity in a historically complicated area of Central Europe. The article examines relations between collective memory, identity and nostalgia, captured in the artistic reflection and thus mirroring the actual state of a society.

/pdf/whose-nostalgia-is-ostalgia-post-communist-nostalgia-in-2s8wzpvn33.pdf

Whose Nostalgia is Ostalgia? Post – Communist Nostalgia in Central-European Contemporary Art

This article analyses the curatorial practices behind the 2018 Taipei Biennial by considering its ethos of public engagement that fostered a merging of artistic means and civic aims. Entitled ‘Post-Nature: A Museum as an Ecosystem’, the biennial confronted the timely theme
 of environmental precarity and positioned itself as a substantive stakeholder in the public debate on climate change. It mobilized the biennial platform to marshal artists, community groups, conservationists and others to spur on new thinking and, perhaps more importantly, to create solutions.
 By adopting this new role as an environmental problem solver, the biennial expanded itself from the ensconced space of aesthetic inquiry and sought to generate new forms of institutional relations and to nurture in its audience an ecological consciousness. These exhibition strategies underscore
 many international biennials’ self-assigned mandates to claim a socially relevant role and to adopt an interventionist posture. But while the biennial showcased multifaceted ecological visions of the present, it also delimited its range of critique and the possible modes of collective
 action. In this way, the exhibition becomes a valuable searchlight into the social and political relevance of global biennials, as well as their contention for legitimacy and significance as agents of social transformation.

Curating climate change: The Taipei Biennial as an environmental problem solver

Post-socialist societies struggle with contradictions between traditional social structures and the newly emerging free individual.1 While the former represent communitarian solutions for social malaises, the latter reflects the ontological changes in these societies as they embrace western-style capitalism. Artists live amidst such struggles, interpret them artistically and discover ironies that often leave audiences perplexed about human fate in this new social order. Often, philosophical answers are given unintentionally, and the possibility that neither the free individual nor social structures will prevail leads to fatalistic conclusions. On one hand, such conclusions reflect the artist's difficulty in finding a moral compass during the hardships of transition; on the other, they reflect the sustained will of the intellectual fight for agency. We will consider the background of three post-socialist Albanian films: Gjoleka, djali i Abazit/Father and Godfather (Dhimiter Anagnosti 2005); Tuneli/...

Agency and structure in Albanian post-socialist cinema: Lessons from three films

Exploratory diagrams can be distinguished from statistical and explanatory diagrams in that they do not merely communicate what already exists, but provide a method of discovery, experiment and cre...

Exploratory diagramming and diagram theory: Greimas, Peirce and Châtelet

The article is intended as a broad contextualisation of the political concerns that underpin the special issue Anti-fascism/Art/Theory as the second decade of the twenty-first century is drawing to...

/pdf/anti-fascism-art-theory-an-introduction-to-what-hurts-us-xnl4fje9z0.pdf

Anti-fascism/Art/Theory: An Introduction to What Hurts Us

Contemporary art in the Baltic States has recently undergone a ‘documentary turn’, part of a global tendency towards the use of documentary aesthetics and formal structures in art. In the Baltic co...

/pdf/re-cognizing-the-post-soviet-condition-the-documentary-turn-58almsh51o.pdf

Re-cognizing the post-Soviet condition: the documentary turn in contemporary art in the Baltic States

This article examines Georges Bataille’s engagements with fascism and community during the 1930s as a means of providing a living historical lesson which might assist the navigation of the ...

The Weapons of our Adversaries

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Harry Weeks

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Anti-fascism/Art/Theory: An Introduction to What Hurts Us

Re-cognizing the post-Soviet condition: the documentary turn in contemporary art in the Baltic States

The Weapons of our Adversaries