Marina Grisko | Remembering Soviet Infrastructures in Eastern Europe: Visual Poetics and Politics.

Marina Grisko | Remembering Soviet Infrastructures in Eastern Europe: Visual Poetics and Politics | University of Groningen | Supervisors: Alberto Godioli, Ksenia Robbe, Senka Neuman-Stanivukovic | November 1, 2024 – November 1, 2028

The Soviet Union left infrastructures that often become a matter of conflict and participate in maintaining a culture of  memory wars in Eastern Europe. Cultural and political analysis usually discusses how this infrastructure is collapsing and how it should almost disappear in Eastern Europe. But people live with these infrastructures, use them and interact with them every day, building relationships with them, making meanings. Cultural producers engage with these processes and make infrastructures visible for broader communities in different ways.  They create  concepts and myths around infrastructures that symbolize power changes, shape collective identities, and provide a critique to a different extent and effect, including empowerment and disempowerment. The emerging (dis)connections of these mediations depend on the background, beliefs and experiences of those engaged in cultural production but also on the type of infrastructure and on the type of medium. Thus, my project focuses on the complexities of clashing and overlapping visions articulated in visual culture (documentary films, youtube blogs, and photography) in relation to the industrial memory and post-Soviet ‘transition’. My aim is to understand how the perceptions of crises and uncertainty provoked by the collapse of the Soviet Union and (de)-industrialisation, orientate the interpretation of urban environment, future development, and connectivity. I engage with the following questions:  What are the functions of representations of infrastructures in contemporary visual culture in Eastern Europe? Which forms of spatial and temporal connectivity are being constructed by these functions and their effects? In what ways do EU- and non-EU-funded cultural productions mediate uncertainty related to geopolitical,  social, and economic changes in post-socialist societies? The project argues that memory about transition, progress, and development play an important role in constructing present and future connectivity, (geo)political orders and governance in times of crisis, uncertainty and mutual distrust. Cultural producers use infrastructures to disrupt and/or habitualise the ideas about existing power relations and mobilize social critique as a response to inequalities in different ways and to different effects. By examining infrastructural cultural narratives, this project offers new insights into the material constructions of power, memory, and potential for a dialogue in Eastern Europe.