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Re-Reading Monuments of the Past

Publication at Faculty of Social Sciences |
2015

Abstract

The paper provides a deep insight into the commemorative practices of the representatives of contemporary art in the Czech Republic. How do young Czech artists remember the communist past? How do they work with the visual fragments of the communist era coming from the public space (the memorials) as well as from the private sphere (the family photos, the postcards)? On the base of a wide research this contribution reflects a position of young Czech artists in the politics of remembrance.

The group is considered as a generation not having a strong long-life experience of living in the period of communism, therefore having a special kind of a post-memory, which has been reproduced from the sites of witnesses, media and educational media. The paper reveals three particular strategies which have been used in fields of the theory of architecture (the reinterpretation of buildings dated to the communist era), the memorials (the revitalization of the old forgotten memorials, the mapping of the missing ones) and the visual art (the re-enactments of old photos and postcard as mediums of memory), that are based on the dialectical relationship between the communicative and the collective memory.