Expanded Cities in Expanded Europe: Resisting Identities, Feminist Politics and their Utopias

Abstract

Research into the (re)construction of the professional and private lifeworlds as well as additional categories of the ‘political’, technological and performative has opened up the field of video as a space of organisation of forms for resistance to the dominant discourse in contemporary arts. This article examines the examples of video installation works from new EU territories of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that attend to both ambiguous constructions of self and the difficulty of political identifications with realities of post‐Socialist transformation in the context of expanded cities, as reflected in the works of Marina Grzinič and Aina Šmid (Slovenia), Julita Wójcik (Poland) and Ene‐Liis Semper (Estonia). Artistic strategies enveloped in feminist politics discussed here can offer a productive perspective to reflect on the complexity of identity representation in Europe. The author will examine paradoxes of identity construction in the expanded cities of expanded Europe represented in the selected video/installation works, and their inconsistencies in terms of the conjunction between memory, self, and (un)conscious reflection.