Monument to the victims of the German occupation, Szabadság square, Budapest, Photo by Szilas
DEADLINE FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: 16TH FEBRUARY
We invite you to contribute to Writing/Erasing: Monument Politics in Post-Socialist Times, a collaborative research project initiated by Fokus Grupa and Gal Kirn that wants to examine forms of ongoing and new revisionism as manifested in public monuments in the times that are marked by increasing tensions and militarisation. We aim to document monuments that rehabilitate or celebrate local collaborationists, pro-fascist ideologies and figures, and nationalist narratives in post-socialist times.
Your contributions will help us evaluate the extent and range of this development and address crucial questions about monument politics in the contemporary moment. The selected cases will inform a broader long-term mapping initiative that will be showcased as part of the project Writing/Erasing: Monument Politics in Post-socialist Times at the exhibition (Un)Equal Geographies. The Politics of Memory, Power, and Resistance hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) in Ljubljana. We welcome submissions from researchers, historians, artists, and local witnesses to these transformations.
We are looking for older and new pro-fascist or nationalist monuments that rehabilitate or celebrate fascist figures and collaborationists. We are interested in monuments but also strong public visuals like murals or inscriptions on the monuments that show contestation. We invite you to share case studies, images, links, or descriptions of monuments highlighting political and memorial revisionism in public spaces.
To submit case studies, please follow the link to an online form. When adding your contribution, you can remain anonymous by selecting this option in the form. We will also add some cases collected during our earlier collaboration titled Mapping Revisionist Monuments.
Selected cases contributed by the 16th of February will be included in the map at the opening of the exhibition (Un)equal Geographies hosted by +MSUM in Ljubljana. Subsequent contributions will be considered and added to the physical map in the museum at regular intervals. The project will run in stages, mapping different commemorative practices through specific calls. Selected case studies will be presented online and at the exhibition in +MSUM.
For additional information on the project, feel free to inquire more [Email].
When socialism in Europe dissolved after 1989, the former Eastern Bloc and Yugoslavia experienced a wave of historical revisionism and monumental iconoclasm that targeted mostly monuments and collective memory related to the antifascist, socialist, and Soviet past. Despite heterogeneous socialist histories, it became increasingly concerning that one of the central pillars of post-WWII Europe, the antifascist struggle and its legacy, came under heavy revision: sometimes erased or slowly forgotten, at other times even equated with fascism. Writing/Erasing: Monument Politics in Post-socialist Times proposes that these changes were not felt and conducted only in the post-socialist states but also in what became known as the former West. Moreover, there was an array of countries in the West that continued to preserve (pro)fascist monuments.
Historical revisionism translated into different commemorative strategies: from the destruction of the existing partisan, socialist, and Soviet monuments to changing their meaning by substituting the original symbols, from the erection of monuments to national reconciliation that equates fascists and antifascists to the erection of monuments celebrating fascists and local collaborationists. In the last decade, the trend to equate fascism and communism culminated in an attempt to conflate diverse experiences and political institutions as equally oppressive on a European level. The open call for the Pan-European Memorial for the Victims of Totalitarianism in Brussels was a pinnacle of this ideological move. In response, we initiated the Map of Revisionist Monuments (2018), a research project to classify and analyse these trends. Several years after this initial research some of its hypotheses were clearly confirmed: there have been multiple right-wing authoritarian conquests of power across the globe, a growing normalisation of violence and war, while the antifascist legacy and politics have been either ignored, attacked, or further degraded. All the while, they are more needed than ever and less and less visible.
We thus believe it is urgent to critically address and rethink antifascist memory and politics and counter the trend of weakening of antifascism. While autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin co-opt and nationalise antifascism in “glorious Russian history” as a pretext for warmongering and territorial expansion, Europe is witnessing renewed calls to remove antifascist monuments and monuments related to WW2 or to simply minimise that part of memorial legacy. It seems that the majority of the official memory of World War II deals only with Holocaust and Soviet occupation/liberation, while the memory of resistance, transformation and utopia has become increasingly marginalised. Simultaneously, as geopolitical frames shift, increasing exculpation of the European colonial past has been met with fierce demands for decolonial justice. The latter has been demanding just re-evaluation of historical narratives in public spaces.
By responding to this call for contributions, you become part of our investigation into these and other pressing realities. Submit revisionist monument case studies via the online form here.
In solidarity,
Fokus Grupa & Gal Kirn
