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Memory matters: post-socialist wastelands as materials bearing witness

Memory matters: post-socialist wastelands as materials bearing witness
Memory matters: post-socialist wastelands as materials bearing witness
This article engages with Albania’s abandoned post-industrial wastelands to investigate the matters and materiality of collective memory inscribed in de-industrialized landscapes. The article starts by developing an analysis of depictions and perceptions of nature during the socialist regime that were also crucial in constructing the Albanian countryside as well as the many industrial towns in the periphery that were built from scratch to accommodate factory workers. The article then focuses on the ruination, emptiness, and decay of those former places that once were the epitome of collective work, production, and socialist modernity. In exploring the human and more-than-human matters that remain in those abandoned spaces as well as the ways in which contemporary artists have incorporated the materiality of post-industrial and post-socialist sites in their practice, the article argues that post-socialist wastelands have borne witness to the multiple abrupt socio-political changes that have occurred in Albania’s recent history while transgressing linear understandings of time and space.
post-industrialism, post-socialist landscape, environmental degradation, terraforming, collective memory, visual cultures
2309-5741
111-152
Gkitsa, Dimitra
56cef9a1-10c4-4c8a-978b-51139c04fc74
Gkitsa, Dimitra
56cef9a1-10c4-4c8a-978b-51139c04fc74

Gkitsa, Dimitra (2024) Memory matters: post-socialist wastelands as materials bearing witness. Art Studies (Studime Per Artin), 22, 111-152. (doi:10.71398/as.vi22.5809).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This article engages with Albania’s abandoned post-industrial wastelands to investigate the matters and materiality of collective memory inscribed in de-industrialized landscapes. The article starts by developing an analysis of depictions and perceptions of nature during the socialist regime that were also crucial in constructing the Albanian countryside as well as the many industrial towns in the periphery that were built from scratch to accommodate factory workers. The article then focuses on the ruination, emptiness, and decay of those former places that once were the epitome of collective work, production, and socialist modernity. In exploring the human and more-than-human matters that remain in those abandoned spaces as well as the ways in which contemporary artists have incorporated the materiality of post-industrial and post-socialist sites in their practice, the article argues that post-socialist wastelands have borne witness to the multiple abrupt socio-political changes that have occurred in Albania’s recent history while transgressing linear understandings of time and space.

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Memory Matters (ENG)
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Memory Matters (Çeshtje të Kujtesës-ALB)
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More information

Published date: 11 November 2024
Keywords: post-industrialism, post-socialist landscape, environmental degradation, terraforming, collective memory, visual cultures

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 495901
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/495901
ISSN: 2309-5741
PURE UUID: c1d2f18a-0953-4c4c-a2c6-26978b7ff621
ORCID for Dimitra Gkitsa: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-3681-6047

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Date deposited: 27 Nov 2024 17:33
Last modified: 30 Jul 2025 02:10

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Author: Dimitra Gkitsa ORCID iD

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