Abstrakt
Monuments and memorials are architectural-communicational gestures of political representation, armed in public spaces, interpellating citizens to reflect on past events. Memorials attempt to freeze time and their permanence is legitimised by historical/political significance and celebrated in cyclic official acts and ceremonies.
If the projection and construction of monuments is an exercise of authorship and power relationships, the projection and construction of memory is a more di!use and collective exercise of celebration, denial, resignification and erasure of past events, and, as well, of shifting narratives on the past. In this essay we address recent tensions around a specific selection of Soviet Monuments situated in the republics that define the western limits of the former Soviet Union, particularly in Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine, based on our field observations and depictions.