Abstract

In this article, I discuss how memorials exist in time by conceptualising memory politics in relation to monumental neglect and a lack of maintenance work. I also study the way political discourses have material resonances by foregrounding how the Soviet memory is silenced in Estonia through the crumbling materiality of its cultural heritage – as a slow-motion sacrifice. In my research, I focused on the Maarjamäe memorial complex in Tallinn (which comprises a Soviet monumental landscape design, a cemetery of German soldiers, a Russian palace currently hosting the Estonian History Museum and the newly-built memorial of Victims of Communism), to show how part of it has been devalued by the political work of disrepair and institutional neglect, thus presenting the socialist past as something separated from the present. New developments at this site might potentially change its situation of abandonment since the construction of a novel antagonist element – the memorial of Victims of Communism – might produce a more attentive maintenance of the Soviet monumental design (adding another layer of meaning), or its final demolition in turn (thus producing a haunting afterlife). In any case, Maarjamäe makes clear that material memorials never simply speak for themselves and are, instead, multiple and contested in meaning. It also shows that if the tidiness of a memorial is the reminder of an obligation to remember, then its neglect can be but an invitation to forget, or to remember badly.

Highlights

  • In this article, I discuss how memorials exist in time by conceptualising memory politics in relation to monumental neglect and a lack of maintenance work

  • The research deals with one large site consisting of a number of memorials

  • In this article, I explore how disrepair is brought into political action, as well as the complex relationship between the tangibility and intangibility of cultural heritage

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Summary

The materiality of memory

Inspired by current literature on the socio-material decay and ruination of modern projects,[2] this article addresses the different ages of memory and the dynamic ways in which national identity and historical representations are constructed through materiality. By presenting disrepair as a form of state intervention, the article raises important questions pertaining to the sustainability of and responsibility and care for undesirable memorial legacies from a previous past (radically different from the actual one) It reflects on how experiences of material decay, breakage and dirtiness in relation to cultural heritage are generative of undone memory, producing a symbolic reordering. The research takes the planned abandonment and deliberate deaccession of cultural heritage as a form of memory politics and as evidence of wider systems of value, foregrounding that memorials are identity-forming spaces in their neglect In this sense, it shows different modalities of silencing memory and how disrepair can be a material carrier of hegemonic historical representations. Is the case of the Soviet memorial landscape of Maarjamäe – the key object of study of this article, a place dense with symbolic things left behind by those who came before us

Memory undone
The Maarjamäe memory complex
The interval of neglect
Condemnation of memory
Conclusion
Findings
Author biography
Full Text
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