Abstracts

Oskar Amiri
(Poznan University of Technology, Poland)
Educational values of commemorative public spaces in Poznań. Analysis of the urban composition elements

Memorials and monuments in townscape as markers of importance of space – both sacral and secular – can be found since the ancient times (Januchta-Szostak, 2010). They role in the city is complex – they fill the urban structure and simultaneously radiate with symbolical meanings. On the one hand they crystallize the surrounding, defining the space around them and creating a point on mental map. On the other, they role as a commemorative visual art is to educate – to transfer the message and increase awareness of societies. Paradoxically, those two roles cannot be seen as separated, for there is significant connection between them. Urban and architectural factors, such as location, visibility, availability, as well as architectural form that can be direct or indirect, influence final perception and therefore – the educational values of public space.
In presentation the elements of urban composition, introduced by K. Lynch and K. Wejchert, will be described and adopted for several examples in Poznań. Selected public spaces will be additionally analyzed for educational values, resulting from architectural and urban solutions. Examples of different approach to architectural form will be shown to exemplify the importance of its perception in educational role of public visual art.

Anna Barcz
(Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)
The Role of Animal Memorials in the Anthropocene

How such monuments like “The Animals in War” erected in London function in the context of Anthropocene? How other animal memorials present the issue of new eco- and post-anthropocentric paradigm in humanities, i.e. history is shared not only by humans but also by non-humans. 
I would like to show a few examples of animal memorials from around the world that contribute to this question and analyse them with ecocritical and posthumanistic arguments. Due to these perspectives, animal memorials can not only be seen as a tribute paid to those animals who really died because of humans’ conflicts but also because history and historical agency is attributed mainly to humans only.
In the results, I would like to outline what amendments can we introduce in the alternative history paradigm when we take into consideration animal participation in wars; what affects, aesthetics and narratives are opened by animal representation in the war monuments.

Elżbieta Błotnicka-Mazur
(The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland)
Turn to things in Polish assemblages of the 1960's – commemoration of the object?

Assemblage, closely related to cubist collage and Duchamp's ready-mades, is a three-dimensional art form created by combining different, rather non-artistic materials. From the very beginning one might consider such acting as an activity of recycling and repurposing. Most often it was realized by using something that was broken or deprived of its current use, simply rubbish. In the 1960's frequently banal materials retained their physical and functional identity. They expanded artists' possibilities, denying domination of traditional art media, as well as building a specific bridge between art and life. In fact, they became a specific type of “memorial”. Memory about something they were before the artist's intervention, containing the element of passing. On the other hand, they started thus a new stage of existence and lived their own independent artistic life. Such activity occurs also as a signum temporis, strictly connected with coming up new materials in human's surrounding (f. ex. synthetic fiber and plastics).
Works by Erna Rosenstein, Władysław Hasior, Alina Szapocznikow or Włodzimierz Borowski basically differ, but all of them reveal the authors' interest in material symptoms of modernity. However, the status of the chosen objects may have changed in a way independent from artist's intention. It encourages to decode their individual biography, creating sometimes surprising connotations and new reality.

Mischa Gabowitsch
(Einstein Forum, Potsdam, Germany)
Bronze Soldiers Fighting: On the Agency of Soviet War Memorials

In addition to their commemorative functions, from the very moment of their construction Soviet war memorials have also served geopolitical and indeed military purposes. They sometimes continue to do so, as illustrated most recently when anti-government forces in the Donbass region of Ukraine removed from their pedestals a T-34 and an a IS-3 tank that had been displayed as war memorials for decades, and sent them back into battle. This talk will take seriously the implications of viewing memorials as having an agency of their own and explore what it might mean to write a biography of Soviet war memorials without anthropomorphizing objects of marble, granite, and bronze.

Jarosław Jaworek
(Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland)
Sonic Memorials

Already in the 70s Murray Schafer when proposing a definition of soundscape coined the concept of soundmark, as a sound or soundscape of unique qualities, that made it worthy to protect. Promoted and developed by Schafer acoustic ecology influenced projects focusing on preservation of these soundmarks against loss and forgetfulness in the face of increasing noise associated with fast industrial development. This development has become the basis for drawing attention to the anthropogenic changes that characterize a new geological age called the Anthropocene.
In this presentation I will consider sound and soundscape as specific means to create memorials by analogy to architectural monuments, visual sculptures, or biological one (such as for example protected trees or ecosystems forming national parks). The sound itself will be understood in two ways: as a medium and as the subject of memories.
I will analyze chosen examples of sound sculptures, memorial sound installation or sound monuments, such as the Bill Fontana's “Urban Sound Sculpture”, Canadian “Trace” of Teri Rueb, and the American “The Sonic Memorial Project”. It provokes a question of what is the function of sound in relation to memory, space and time, when placed in the chronology of geological changes? and what is a role of a short duration of cultural/human memory when compared to the long duration of heritage of humanity as seen on a planetary scale.

Hollyamber Kennedy
(Columbia University, New York, USA)
Synthetic Illuminations and Anthropocenic Imaginaries: On the Concept of the Memorial in the Age of Messianic Cosmopolitanism

In 1926, the German anarchist architect Hannes Meyer proclaimed, “in the diagram of the present age... the artist’s studio has become a scientific laboratory”. Much like the astral glass-dream prophecies of his compatriot Bruno Taut, Meyer offered his readers a new and vital vision of the future of architectural culture that advocated, at its core, a concept of construction that would draw its power, in the words of Rilke, from “the restlessness of living surfaces”. Yet paradoxically, these “living surfaces,” for Meyer, were best conveyed by and produced with synthetic material: Trolith, Galaith, Cellon, Goudron, Ripolin, to name a few. Taking up Meyer’s claims, this paper will explore the history of this trope, as ‘written’ by Meyer and Taut, and the role it played in their shared theories of an anti-memorial messianic cosmopolitanism. I will argue that at the core of Meyer’s curious and very modern braiding of science, mysticism and art, lies a new way of thinking about the memorial function of built form—a line of thought that indicates a prescient recognition, avant la lettre, of the concept of the anthropocene.
Taut’s “Glashaus”, a “monument to Glass Culture” designed for the 1914 “Werkbund”exhibition in Cologne, like Paul Scheerbart’s fantastical essay “Hausbaupflanzen” and Meyer’s influential Bauhaus manifestoes, introduced into circulation an image of an architecture in constant flux—an architecture that sat curiously out of time. In effect, Taut, Scheerbart, and Meyer gave rise to a new generation of architectural discourse guided by what Detlef Mertins has called a “bioconstructivist” impulse (what Scheerbart called a “comet nature”), a discourse that envisioned a radical spectrum of new aesthetic possibilities: genderless bodies, floating concrete towns, ships made of glass, cities of crystal, plastic, and neon that would live (and breathe) forever. Taut, like Meyer and Scheerbart, disavowed the centralizing cult of the nation, and sought, in its place, a cosmopolitan commons that would require a very different kind of memorial culture, one that anticipated, amazingly, the demise of ‘organic’ man.

Kazimierz S. Ożóg
(Opole University, Opole, Poland)
The madness of monuments in the Third Republic of Poland

It has already been 25 years since the Polish 1989 turn. In this period what has been observed in Poland is the erection of several tens of thousands of new monuments. By destroying on a mass scale the remnants of the past system, people living in this new reality started to make up the empty spaces in the landscape. Those processes have been taking place spontaneously, being out of control and good taste and very often bordering on the category of collective madness.
A uniquely Polish phenomenon is the erection of the monuments of John Paul II (until his death, there were 250 monuments whereas at present approximately 500 new monuments have been added to this overall number.). What is also easy to notice is the collections of works referring to the forbidden motifs of modern history (pro-independence underground movement, Katyn massacre). Recently, the monuments related to the Smolensk catastrophe have been erected. At the same, there are more and more works resulting from the fascinations and ambitions of individual people or small groups (the figures from Piotrkowska Street in Łódź, University Hill in Opole, Jordan Park in Cracow etc.). Particular cities make attempts at establishing their own identities and histories through the construction and erection of (spectacular, as the view them) installations and monuments commemorating the legends or old times (the most famous and – at the same time – the most problematic are the Wrocław dwarfs). The extreme examples of such activities are the two gigantic works addressed to tourists – the figure of Jesus Christ in Świebodzin and the figure of John Paul II in Częstochowa.
What dominates in those collections is the impression of resemblance or even identity of works. However, the simple and uncomplicated forms are close to kitsch. The number of the monuments in particular groups becomes extremely unwholesome; so is – in the majority of cases – their poor artistic values. I would like to focus on the works which are traditionally perceived as monuments; however, the ones under discussion have exceeded the standards of good taste, number or erection manners. With this in mind, I intend to take a closer look at the most typical thematic motifs which speak volumes about the character of our times and feelings. In those works, memory is mixed with propaganda and the resulting creation of new, frequently artificial, entities.

Anne Peschken
(Urban Art, Berlin/Myślibórz, Germany/Poland)
The Wandering Buoy – a Solar-Driven, Mobile Remembrance Tool

The paper portrays the process how we devised a new formula for a sculpture that would allow for an individualized way of commemorating historical events and how we designed a mobile memorial completely free of content – a kind of anti-memorial. The paper concentrates on how we developed a mere tool (figuratively: a screwdriver on a plinth) open for use to the public and how we hoped to sidestep in this way any kind of authoritarian messaging from above and created instead a playful possibility to express and display diverging messages about the past.
I will also present our recent experience of interacting with the public made during summer 2014, when the Wandering Buoy toured Bale, Switzerland over the duration of five weeks, tracking the unearthing a ‘new’ town history and in how far our idea of creating a kind of open-source tool works in reality.
Finally, I will expand on the phenomena of waning visibility of permanently installed sculptures and the interaction of perception and consciousness, thereby recurring back to the Wandering Buoy’s mobility. In this context I will examine in how far the act of casting ones view on things can have an equally deteriorating effect on memorials as acid rain or other environmental influences.
My approach won’t be scientific but rather in line with the heaving of the Wandering Buoy itself, that appears and disappears within the seas of history.

Małgorzata Praczyk
(Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland)
“Terraforming” memorial. Utoya Memory Wound and the need of marking the Earth.

A design of the memorial to victims of the massacre on the island of Utoya (22 July 2011) shows how human actions can be rewritten in the landscape. Jonas Dahlberg's winning design of the memorial proposes a 3.5 meter cut in the body of Utoya Island. It will devide the island into two parts and will make impossible to reach the end of the headland. The memorial is concieved by the designer as the "wound or cut in nature itself". The project refers more to emotions and experience since it should rather reflect than commemorate the event and should be perceived as the wound and scar showing the permament loss of 69 people killed in the massacre.
The design shows the specific state of the Anthropocene wich can be treated not only as the geological epoch but also as the mental condition of people living in it. The designed Memorial is a very good example of the human-made influance wich is executed on the surface of the Earth and in that context it raises many questions about the contemporaneity we live in. Why do we need to signify our presens by marking the Earth? Does that kind of action show the special relation to nature that defines present day societies? Does the act of bounding the commemration with nature touches the problem of decentralization of the human beings living in the ecosphere of many different equal entities?

Roma Sendyka
(Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland)
Forensic memorials. Memorializations on non-sites of memory

Central and Eastern Europe, the  scene of brutal genocides of the past century, is dotted by sites of trauma. Recently, the researchers of the Holocaust Memorial Museum have cataloged  42500 such memorializable sites (ghettos, camps) related to the Shoah.  The IHRA Killing Sites initiative reminds in its documents that 2.2 million  Jews is killed by bullets on dispersed killing sites.  Only some of those potential sites of memory are signed with plaques,  gravestones or memorials. I am interested in the sites that has been left behind, contested or forgotten.
The contested sites remain unmarked  if we think of memorialization practices in a traditional way. They seem  overlooked, absorbed by woods and bushes or new buildings. Yet their location is  recognizable  to locals. They lead researchers to mass graves with no mistake, so the sites must be somehow - marked.  But how are the  sites, where  human remains, flora and soil turned into an entangled, undiscernible entity, different from their physical surroundings, since there is no post, no information, no monument to sign the spot?
I would like to present a preliminary hypothesis on the types of memorialization practices related to those contested  sites. Photographs from Galicia by Chris Schwarz document cases of  trees and plants used as “discerning structure”;  works from Kurdistan done by a New York photographer Susan Meiselas show personal belongings and pieces of clothing  used for the same purpose;  photographs from Ukraine by Patrick Desbois show  how  the memorial function is taken over by agricultural machines, documentary essays by Jason Francisco contain evidence of garbage covering such sites .
How should we understand the agency of  those “memorials”? Are they “memorials” in the sense of latin root sense of the word moneo – meaning “warning” or  “instructing, advising”? Or, as typical monuments, are they “reminding” of something? Are they tools of memory or oblivion? Can they be understood with the  help of classical studies on commemorative structures and concepts devised by memory studies? I  would like to prove that due to the specific physical state of the contested sites, their “markers” can be understood more efficiently only if non-anthropocentric approach will support the reasoning of the researcher.

Marta Smolińska
(Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland)
Nomadic Monument. "Wandering Buoy" by Peschken & Pisarsky and "Sofa" by Josef Trattner

The aim of this talk is to distinguish and present a new type of nomadic monuments, which – in contrast to traditional monuments, erected in concrete locations permanently – travel constantly and change their message, interacting, at the same time, not only with the inhabitants of a particular area, but also with its history and its natural environment. As its theoretical framework, the present discussion takes, among others, the notion of nomadism by Deleuze and Guattari, understood as a critical and continuous train of thought: perpetual desertion of a given place, void of pretensions, taming, divisions and centers to be demarcated.  
The analysis encompasses two works: "Wandering Buoy" by a Berliner duo Anne Peschken and Mark Pisarsky, as well as "Sofa" by an Austrian artist, Josef Trattner. "Wandering Buoy" stops at those places that have a complicated history, blurred with the passing of time. The task of this nomadic monument is to remind about those things which are slowly fading into oblivion, as well as to collect individual narrations (e.g. on the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, being ordered by the city council, "Wandering Buoy" traveled along the line where the Wall once stood, while the volunteers noted down the memories of passers-by that were associated with the Wall and its Fall, in order to present them via a display on the nomadic monument). Instead of appearing on a traditional honoring plaque, informations are being displayed on the “Wandering Buoy”. For instance, one would read “here was a workplace” if the sculpture broke its wander in front of a deserted factory with smashed windows. The presence of the nomadic object in the purposefully selected locations contributes to the animation of the political contexts. The essence of the Peschken & Pisarsky's work is its mobility, communicativeness and interactivity – it is possible to rent the piece and type one's own text, describing whatever one wishes to commemorate.
Since 2004 Josef Trattner – a kind of a Nomadic So´f´ist – has been on the go, traveling across Europe, in a company of his sofa, a piece of furniture made of polyurethane foam. The artist, when willing to discover the history of a given city, does not visit the monuments located in it, but he proposes a kind of a nomadic monument, i.e. a sofa, which – being placed in various locations as a platform for encountering the native writers, musicians and the local community – becomes the opposite of a traditional concept of commemoration by means of monuments ascribed to a specific site. After the show, the sofa remains where it was placed by Trattner and blends into the environment, often causing surprise among the daily crowd.

Agata Stolarz
(Institute of Central and Eastern Europe, Lublin, Poland)
Museum as a memorial? The curious case of Musée du quai Branly

Among the many different forms of memorial museum there is the most extensive one, if in fact, it can be named in such a term. I will discuss this statement by referring to the example of the French Musée du quai Branly in Paris. This museum of non-European art, cultures and civilization has very distinctive architectural form; glass walls combined with geometric shapes of colorful boxes give on the one hand a sense of disorganization and on the other the orderly chaos. Inside the museum we have to deal with changes of lines, colors, and light sources, but also with separate zones. The form of museum is also curious for uninformed tourists hurrying toward the near Eiffel Tower. Overgrown with plants vertical spaces, glass spaces and fuzzy images caused them to stop and focus attention on what is behind the wall. The boundaries between the museum and the city are blurred. Jean Nouvel, the creator of the project says: "The means are unimportant—it is the results that count: what is solid seems to disappear, giving the impression that the museum is a simple façade-less shelter in the middle of a wood." How such a form of museum influences the reception and also the urban environment? Is the form a key to read the exhibitions and to the meaning of existence of the museum?
Answers to these questions will allow further conclusions about the relationship of the “Musée du quai Branly” and postcolonialism in the context of the history of France. It is also important in the broader perspective of the connection between a museum, a cultural heritage and a politics of memory.

Małgorzata Wosińska
(Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland)
The embodied memorial. Local commemoration of genocide in Rwanda from an ecological perspective

In 1994 an ethnic civil war breaks out in Rwanda. Within 100 days (April – July) between 870,000 – 1,000,000 Tutsi civilians are killed by the Hutu paramilitary groups. The conflict is legally recognised as genocide, and in the following years, within Holocaust and Genocide Studies discourse it is recognised as the so-called close genocide. The concept of closeness in the present context of use is understood as transgressing the borders of kinship relations (as mothers killed children from mixed marriages), social roles (priests killed the members of their congregations). It also relates to the type of the weapon– the machete can only be used when the victim remains within the hands’ reach of the perpetrator. Finally, it refers to the closeness between the hiding / the survivors and the dead bodies. Rwanda is not a big country and the mass graves covered only in lime are a feature of landscape in practically every village and town.
In Rwanda today, the commemorative practices are a key element of social and international policy. They are predominantly based on oral tradition linked to the traditional local performative culture. A memorial, a museum, an artefact are alien forms, stemming from the colonial past, however, due to the closeness of the mass graves to the survivors in 1994, these forms have been adapted in the process of creating local representations in specific ways. The forms of visual representation dominant in Rwanda raise controversies in European Museum Management are human remains / bodies in situ, often at different stages of decomposition. They are mass graves without a clear legal or institutional status, open for commemoration practices and visiting.
The present paper will focus on the following questions: what is the cultural and symbolic meaning and what are the social and protest functions of this manner of commemoration and the commemoration themselves for the local community? And what does it mean that the genocide as a phenomenon, an overwhelming symbol of anthropocene, can have an ecological character?