Creative Destructions: On Memory and Resistance in Belarusian Urbanscapes
Essay for the Journal of Architectural Design and History,
“Destruction,” volume 2,
August 2023 [forthcoming 2024].
“Destruction,” volume 2,
August 2023 [forthcoming 2024].
On the night of March 29, 2023, a strange event happened in a small town in Belarus—a large concrete monument dedicated to one of the few 20th-century national female poets disappeared overnight. Nobody seemed to know what happened and whose responsibility it was until a video of communal city workers demounting it in the middle of the night resurfaced in local Telegram channels a few days later. What seemed to be a prank gone astray was an event symptomatic of the anxious desire of the contemporary Belarusian state to actively revise its historiography and physically erase any, even remote, references to historical events that are misaligned with the accepted current. While the idea of managing collective memories through acts of destruction is not new, the case of contemporary Belarus is exemplary in this regard. In its pursuit of sterile urbanscapes, the state continues to employ the long-and-tried Soviet techniques of brute destruction. However, even in the most oppressive contexts, these techniques are no longer effective with online media coverage and extended horizontal collaborations. Instead, they create new intangible memory marks that define the city's symbolic and lived experiences through this new intentional absence much more so than through the previously accidental presence.
The essay is particularly interested in the generative effects of state-sanctioned destructions. New collective identities are forged against the act of destruction and find their definition through the absence. If heritage and collective memories are ultimately political concepts, then acts of heritage destruction can be considered acts of oppression. The process of memorisation then becomes resistance, which, in the words of Milan Kundera, is the “struggle of memory against forgetting.” Through a collection of case studies of contemporary Belarusian urbanscapes—from a make-shift memorial to the victims of Soviet repressions to acts of censorship on city walls and the intensive struggle over a mural in a housing courtyard—the essay explores how different shared memories and collective identities are forged in opposition to the acts of destruction. In the cycle of destruction and creation, successive bids to power generate new ideas, growing national consciousness and horizontal networks of solidarity. However, despite these “productive” effects of destruction dialectics, these newly fostered identities have a limited temporal horizon without tangible heritage. As their embodiment is denied, these memories are forced to adapt to other vessels and signs of memory or ultimately disappear.