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Communist Ghosts

State-led communism in Europe ended many years ago and yet traces of this experience still exist. This project looks at situations in which fragments of communist life, such as communist buildings, identities, or narratives, disturb routines and common practices of everyday life in post-1989 Europe, and shows how these ruptures can become starting points for critical and ethical encounters with the ambiguous history of European modernity. Post-communist thresholds, so the main argument of this project goes, have the potential to trigger an intensely experienced crisis of European identities and as such become in-between places in which stories about the violence and vulnerability of the European subject can be told in new and critical ways. In times when a rise in nationalist and reactionary movements prompts fears of a return of fascism, this project looks at places and encounters that are marked by the burden of communism’s failure and shows how it is from these disrupted and liminal sites that the future as a potential place of change and repair can be retrieved.

  • Full project title: Communist Ghosts – On the crisis of European identities and contemporary art
  • Project reference: ES/S01182X/1
  • Funder: ESRC
  • Funding: £88,454
  • Length of award: From September 2019 to February 2021

PEOPLE INVOLVED

  • Dr Magda Schmukalla

METHODOLOGY

  • As a transdisciplinary intervention into critical theory Communist Ghosts explores post-communist thresholds through a conflation of art and theory. It engages with site-specific contemporary artworks which integrate and respond to relics of the communist experience, and traces in a poetic, speculative and self-reflective theory how these artworks disrupt hegemonic discourses and rituals in today’s neoliberal Europe.

RESEARCH AIMS

  • This project aims to:
    • advance and develop a new understanding of the post-communist transition as a threshold experience and to show its value for a psychosocial account of the current crisis of European identities.
    • demonstrate how an artistic and reflexive research approach allows for a critical knowledge of European modernity and to ground this approach in the liminal realm of the post-communist site.
    • identify an affective form of melancholic and self-reflective theory that brings to life the contradictions at the heart of European modernity and to propose it as the language of an alternative epistemology. 

RESEARCH OUTPUTS

  • The outputs of this project will be a monograph, Communist Ghosts (2021), which conceptualises and explores the concept of post-communist thresholds, a journal article that explores the particular form of sensual memory that is made possible in post-communist and liminal sites, and an international and transdisciplinary event, Communist Hauntings, which explores the revival and criticality of post-communist thresholds in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.