Architectural Forms of Collective Memory

Pascal Moliner,Inna Bovina

doi:10.5334/irsp.236

Abstract

In 2015, the Moscow City Hall and the Gulag History Museum launched a competition for the creation of a commemorative monument dedicated to the victims of political repression in Russia during the 1920s to the 1950s. In this article we present three studies carried out on an array of 309 images (digital images, model photographs, drawings) related to the projects submitted for this competition. Each project image was accompanied by a text written by the author (artist, architect, designer). These images and texts were analyzed within the framework of the concept of collective memory and the theory of social representations. The first study focused on the texts and suggested that there are two dimensions of the collective memory about the commemorated event, a historical dimension and a human dimension. The second study focused on images, two dominant forms in the monument projects were identified. The third study showed that depending on whether the accompanying text favors the historical dimension of the event or its human dimension, the designers did not make identical use of the different architectural forms (identified in the previous study) to elaborate their project. These results suggest that the architectural forms of monument projects vary according to the historical vs. human dimension favored by the collective memory of their authors.

Highlights

In 2015, the Moscow City Hall and the Gulag History Museum launched a competition for the creation of a commemorative monument dedicated to the victims of political repression in Russia during the 1920s to the 1950s
We were able to obtain these images and texts and to analyze them in order to answer two questions: Do the texts written by the competition participants tell us anything about the collective memory that they share about the political repression that took place in their country? How has this collective memory been expressed when it is translated into concrete and visible commemorative monument forms?
As it can be seen, depending on whether it is referred to political repression in historical terms or to its human aspects, the designers did not made identical use of the different architectural forms that we were able to identify

Summary

Introduction

In 2015, the Moscow City Hall and the Gulag History Museum launched a competition for the creation of a commemorative monument dedicated to the victims of political repression in Russia during the 1920s to the 1950s. The third study showed that depending on whether the accompanying text favors the historical dimension of the event or its human dimension, the designers did not make identical use of the different architectural forms (identified in the previous study) to elaborate their project These results suggest that the architectural forms of monument projects vary according to the historical vs human dimension favored by the collective memory of their authors. The artists, designers or architects wishing to participate in this competition had to summarize their proposal in the form of a computer-generated image, a drawing or a photograph of a model showing their project as it would appear once completed They were asked to write a text presenting or explaining their project, its symbolism and its links with the theme of the competition. This specificity has probably disrupted the implementation of the resilience mechanisms that should have occurred in a society that has experienced such a disaster (Etkind, 2013)

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Discussion

Conclusion