Dissonant Heritage

“Living Statues” and Nonuments as “Performative Monument Events” in Post-Socialist South-Eastern Europe

“…In fact, the meaning of the former socialist monuments has changed in the thirty years that have passed since the end of the regimes. According to Aleksandra Kuczyńska-Zonik, the former Soviet monuments/statues represent a form of dissonant heritage, that “may be cause for discord: It is simultaneously perceived as pleasant, resulting in satisfaction, or as distorted, with an unpleasant and painful effect” (Kuczyńska-Zonik 2018, 103). Duncan Light and Craig Young observed how the socialist statuary are forms of post-socialist hybrids, as their meaning has been transformed by a series of “de- and re-contextualisations.…”

“…The former socialist monuments and statues that are seen as a form of dissonant heritage (Kuczyńska-Zonik 2018) have become post-socialist hybrids (Light and Young). In what follows, this article analyzes several types of “performative monument events” that used various “de- and re-contextualisations” (Light and Young).…”

“…Statues were pulled out, lifted up, or broken down following a similar pattern. They were destroyed or taken to military cemeteries or museums and replaced by national heroes (Kuczyńska-Zonik 2018, 104).…”

“…Questioning this irreversibility, the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius, in his video work Once in the XX century (2004), brought back Lenin on his pedestal in Vilnius, thirteen years after the statue was removed. In some countries of the region, the erasure of the communist symbols has continued after this moment of removal as four former communist countries have introduced so called decommunization laws: Lithuania in 2008, Georgia in 2011, Ukraine in 2015, and Poland in 2016 (Kuczyńska-Zonik 2018). Thus, in a work from 2016, Narkevičius registered a new removal: the erasure of eight socialist realist (1952) statues from a bridge in the center of Vilnius in the video work titled 20 July 2015.…”

“…This approach reunites several analytical foci that have been discussed separately, such as the interest in monuments in the socialist afterworld by art historians (Belcheva 2017), historians (Williams 2008;Kuczyńska-Zonik 2018), geographers (Alderman, Brasher, and Dwyer 2020;Light and Young 2011) or political scientists (Forest and Johnson 2011); and the analysis of performance practices by art history (Jones and Stephenson 2005;Widrich 2014) or performance studies (Taylor 2003;Edkins 2003;Del Campo 2004;Popescu and Schult 2020). At the same time, cultural memory studies (Etkind 2010;Erll and Nunning 2008;Jelin 2001;Bull and Hansen 2020) and the examination of the role of art in transitional processes (Garnsey 2016;Barat 2014;Simic 2015) have not dedicated a lot of attention to the case of monuments (Buckley-Zistel and Schäfer 2014;Drinot 2009;Hite 2007;Milton 2011), and scarcely so in Eastern Europe (Light and Young 2011;Light and Young 2015).…”