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Eastern European Histories
Ongoing research,
2018-2024
2018-2024
Based on the analysis of recent events, this project aims to rethink the place of Belarus within the context of architectural and urban historiography of Eastern Europe. In the long list of overlooked storylines, Belarus occupies an uneasy place. After its independence in 1991, the country lived through a brief democratic revival before plunging into three decades of authoritarian single-person rule. As the barely nascent democratic structures were eroding, Belarus came to be known as the “last dictatorship of Europe” and an “Eastern European time machine” which kept the Soviet past alive. While Belarusian activists and civil society struggled to organise under oscillating waves of state violence, the country hardly made international headlines beyond occasional mentions of singular protests. The status quo was unexpectedly disrupted in the summer of 2020, leading to another electoral campaign in which Belarusians decisively took it to the streets to make their voices heard. For a brief moment, newspapers worldwide were filled with photographs of Belarusian citizens organising and gathering in the cities’ urbanscapes. As the power struggle played out in the urban realm—unsurprising for a country where 80% of the population lives in cities—layers of existing urban heritage framed the backdrop of popular resistance. As Belarusian activism acquired new spatial forms in the autumn of 2020, new meanings were inscribed into the rhetoric of existing toponyms and urban landmarks, re-appropriating the heritage of the recent past.
I am particularly interested in new meanings attributed to Belarusian urban spaces of Soviet heritage, reinvented in the wake of a popular uprising and against the mounting pressure from the state. In this investigation, I rely on visual evidence from thousands of online images and a personal archive of “protest archaeology,” interested in new meanings inscribed into existing layers of urban heritage. I argue that Belarus offers a unique case in which heritage was re-invented through political activism and a re-inscribed sense of belonging.