Palimpsestic Memorializations of World War II: A Visual Essay on Material Displacements and Discursive Struggles in the Estonian Memorialscape
Abstrakt
The article combines the genre of the visual essay with written-textual contextualizations, to analyse the attempts to reconstruct the Estonian memorialscape through the removal of Soviet memorials in the second part of 2022. Theoretically grounded in a theory of discursive-material entanglement and assemblage theory, the article investigates these attempts to fixate history, but also the resistance they generate, by paying attention to the human contestations (mainly through a politics of mourning) but also the material resistance and the recalcitrance of historical traces, through everyday life's desacralizing routines and novel infrastructures, and material decay and neglect. The article ends with a reflection on the impossibility of discursive-material fixation, and on the mechanisms to transform the Estonian memorialscape in a more agonistic, participatory-dialogic and diverse space for the remembrance of World War II.