Memory in Transition in Southeast Europe

Sculpture in the Public Space as a Means of Addressing the Young

Roxana Modreanu

1. Figure 1:  Unknown artist, Monument of the Soviet tanker (1945?)
2. Figure 2:  Unknown artist, Obelisk commemorating the Soviet soldiers (1954?)
3. Figure 3:  Unknown artist, Monument of the Soviet tanker (1945? altered)
4. Figure 4:  Unknown artist, Obelisk commemorating the Soviet soldiers (1945? altered)
5. Figure 5:  Unknown artist, Statue commemorating the 1933 workers’ strike of the Grivița workshops (1953).
6. Figure 6:  Artúr Vetró, Bust of Janós Herbák (1960). Bust and pedestal currently missing.
7. Figure 7:  Ilarion Voinea, Iuliu Hossu (2018).

Stitching Together “Difficult” Memories

Federico Marcomini

1. Figure 1:  Valentina Stevanovska, Warrior on a Horse (left); Warrior (right), 2008–2011.
2. Figure 2:  V. Stevanovska, Porta Macedonia, 2011–2012.
3. Figure 3:  The MEPSO agency headquarters being encased by the Skopje 2014 classical shell.
4. Figure 4:  Petar Muličkoski, Government palace (former Central committee of the Communist Party), 1968–1970
5. Figure 5:  Arhitektonika DOOEL, new façade of the Government palace, 2013–2015.
6. Figure 6:  Porta Macedonia after the “Colourful Revolution” (photograph by Sašo Stanojkoviḱ, part of the long-term participatory project What’s Left of the Colourful Revolution? 2016–2018. Reproduced with permission.
7. Figure 7:  G. Vitevski, M. Dimitrovska, V. Danailov, “Beyond the Façade” (Government palace), 2018 (published in the catalogue of the exhibition. Reproduced with permission)
8. Figure 8:  M. Tornatora, O. Amaro, L. La Giusa, A. De Luca, B. Bajkovski, “Destratification”: (Na Ma Department store), 2018 (published in the catalogue of the exhibition. Reproduced with permission)
9. Figure 9:  Mould in the colonnade of the Archaeological Museum.
10. Figure 10: The plaque of the fountain of the “Mothers of Macedonia”, eradicated and vandalised.

A Silent Transition to Oblivion?

Francesco Trupia and Vesselin Alexiev

Francesco Trupia and Jasna Dragović-Soso

Memory is in transition in Southeast Europe: the generation that directly experienced communist rule and the dissolution of old regimes and states is passing, amid a dramatic geopolitical crisis, economic and social dislocation, and an unsettling of existing ideological certainties. The new “second” generation, born immediately before or during the 1990s, is left with the legacies of what is increasingly apparent to be an “unmastered past” – with conflicted affective and cognitive responses to the communist period itself, the differing ways in which it ended across the region, and, in some cases, the violence that accompanied this end. The transmission of the past is present in people’s daily lives – in narratives transmitted in families and kinship groups, in public discourses articulated by power brokers in their states and localities, in education and in the physical environment, with a built landscape inherited from multiple historical periods and the post-communist present. This is precisely the crux of the “generations after”, also known as “mnemonic generations”1: they have not experienced the past directly, but they live under its shadow2 by being the recipients of potentially altered historical narratives. In Southeast Europe, memories of violence, persecution and war, which many of this generation of “postmemory”3 have received from their parents’ generation, alternate with a “nostalgia” for other more peaceful and prosperous pasts, together reshaping, renegotiating and reinterpreting existing identity markers and future sentiments of belonging.

Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory is pertinent to the study of Southeast Europe, at a time when the liberal paradigm appears increasingly inadequate to provide an appropriate frame of analysis.4 Despite multiple promises emanating from the West about the transformative dividends that would accrue from international justice5 and the adoption of liberal democracy and a market economy, the slow pace of the transition and the aspirations of EU membership (in both the countries from the region that have joined the EU and those still remaining on the doorstep), often remained unfulfilled. Combined with the problem of “captured states and societies”6 by corrupt, illiberal domestic elites (at times supported by the West), many among the new post-socialist generation of budding entrepreneurs, scholars and citizens could not free themselves from a sense of being colonised, discriminated and racialised subjects.7 Political manipulations of recent history, coupled with geopolitical upheavals, exacerbate pre-existing and unresolved past traumas, eclipsing across the region the trends of neo-liberalisation, social mobility, democratisation, migration, and Europeanisation. The burden of violent pasts and legacies of domination and arbitrary power inherited from the communist era has become the mnemonic framework for interpreting both one’s own lived experience of poverty, divisions and hopelessness, as well as others’ experiences of war and systemic violence since 2022.8

How can we make sense of multiple and sometimes contradictory attitudes towards these different pasts (pre-communist, communist, Yugoslav, Soviet Bloc) in a context that is itself in flux, with new post-liberal paradigms emerging in Europe and beyond? How do diverging recollections of socialism influence today’s societies in Southeast Europe? Does the contemporary transmission of knowledge (or lack thereof) of the socialist period indicate a need for different and newer avenues for research?