Memorial Landscape Research Articles

Neighbours in the Landscape of Memory: Encounters – Juxtapositions – Mutual Influence

Neighbours in the Landscape of Memory: Encounters – Juxtapositions – Mutual Influence

Walking the Names: sensing presences and absences in a contested memory landscape

ABSTRACT Bath (UK) is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site. A National Lottery funded Landscape Partnership, Bathscape, seeks to articulate a vision for the city as a Landscape City. Walking the Names (2019–21) was a cycle of slow participatory walks reading the names of those who had died of poverty in the Bath Union Workhouse. The site-specific work took place in the burial ground of the nineteenth-century institution where the dead were buried in unmarked graves. The paper reviews the project in the context of the emergence of uneasy memories and silenced voices in the contested spaces of Bath’s memory landscape. A walking arts process is presented as slow activism, offering a participatory, corporeal, sensory engagement with landscape, power and memory. Drawing on the vision of the Landscape City, reflecting on the city as ‘wounded’, the essay explores a co-creative process of embodied critical re-memorialisation generating contemporary resonances.

Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Islands of Memory. The Landscape of the (Non)Memory of the Holocaust in Polish Education from 1989 to 2015 [Katarzyna Stec

Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Islands of Memory. The Landscape of the (Non)Memory of the Holocaust in Polish Education from 1989 to 2015 [Katarzyna Stec

Cemeteries in Europe as places of remembrance and memory landscapes

Los cementerios europeos han sido lugares de recuerdo durante siglos. Con su estructura espacial, sus monumentos y sus edificios funerarios nos informan sobre los modos cambiantes de tratar con los difuntos. Los lugares de enterramiento muestran una expresión material del sentimiento de duelo, cuyo cambio a lo largo de la historia es capaz de mostrar las múltiples interrelaciones entre muerte, sociedad y memoria. Reúnen biografías, mentalidades, ideología, relaciones de genero, estructuras y jerarquías sociales, así como elementos históricos regionales. Los cementerios son paisajes clásicos de la memoria, como ilustra el ejemplo de los cementerios europeos de época burguesa –también en aspectos políticos–, los cementerios militares y los cementerios marítimos especiales de la costa del Mar del Norte. European cemeteries have been places of remembrance for centuries. With their spatial structure, their sepulchral monuments and buildings, they report on the changing ways of dealing with the deceased. The burial sites give a materialized expression to the feeling of mourning, the change of which in the course of history is able to show the manifold interrelationships between death, society and memory. They store biographies, mentalities, ideologies, gender relations, social structures and hierarchies as well as regional historical specifics. Cemeteries are classical memory landscapes, as will be explained using the example of European cemeteries in the bourgeois era –also under political aspects–, military cemeteries and special maritime cemeteries of the North Sea coast.

Associative memory model with arbitrary Hebbian length

Conversion of temporal to spatial correlations in the cortex is one of the most intriguing functions in the brain. The learning at synapses triggering the correlation conversion can take place in a wide integration window, whose influence on the correlation conversion remains elusive. Here we propose a generalized associative memory model of pattern sequences, in which pattern separations within an arbitrary Hebbian length are learned. The model can be analytically solved, and predicts that a small Hebbian length can already significantly enhance the correlation conversion, i.e., the stimulus-induced attractor can be highly correlated with a significant number of patterns in the stored sequence, thereby facilitating state transitions in the neural representation space. Moreover, an anti-Hebbian component is able to reshape the energy landscape of memories, akin to the memory regulation function during sleep. Our work thus establishes the fundamental connection between associative memory, Hebbian length, and correlation conversion in the brain.

Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Islands of Memory. The Landscape of the (Non) Memory of the Holocaust in Polish Education from 1989 to 2015

Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Islands of Memory. The Landscape of the (Non) Memory of the Holocaust in Polish Education from 1989 to 2015

Affective Orientations: Space, Temporality, and Virtuality in Queering the Map

Launched in 2017, the website Queering the Map has since become what Ann Cvetkovich calls “an archive of feelings”. Using a Google Maps interface, the website invites its users to record their queer moments and experiences enclosed in black pins on the pink map. Navigating through this landscape of queer memories conjures up a powerful feeling of presence enabled by the anonymous bodies which inhabited a particular corner of the world in nondescript time. As such, Queering the Map assembles a “virtual” archive both in the sense that it is hosted on a digital network, and that it is a product of and at the same time produces queer time.
 Using “virtuality” as a conceptual point of connection, this paper looks at the ways in which Queering the Map brings together discussions of spatial production, networked affect, and queer temporality. Specifically, I see virtuality not as a characteristic of a technological apparatus itself, but rather as a set of emergent possibilities that lie with the affective experiences of its users. While the term “virtual” is frequently associated with digital media (as in “virtual reality”), scholars including Oliver Grau and Anne Friedberg have pointed towards longer lineages of artistic practices that can be thought of as virtual. In a similar effort to expand the concept of the virtual, Thomas Elsaesser has suggested that virtuality be understood as the conditional and the contingent, a modality not exclusive to digital media. Along these lines of thinking, I am interested in how the “virtuality” of Queering the Map connects seemingly disparate discourses on mapping, cyberspace, and queer affect. By examining conceptualizations of the virtual as a set of emergent potentials in these theoretical contexts, I show that new media do not so much produce virtuality as they reveal it.
 Following Sara Ahmed who poses the orientation in “sexual orientation” as a phenomenological question about how bodies are situated in space and grapple towards certain objects, I suggest that users’ navigation of a digital network like Queering the Map is intimately connected with their subjective orientation in the queer archive. This way, the virtual serves as a conceptual bridge between (new) media studies and queer theory, bringing together on the one hand, how presence is mediated across space and time, and on the other, the affective potentials opened up by this newfound closeness to queer places, times, and bodies.

From Underrepresentation to “Dual Heritage” and Beyond: Contemporary African American Monument-Building

Abstract The years following the Civil Rights Movement witnessed the erection of African American monuments in traditionally white-dominated public spaces, especially in the South. While this terrestrial integration acknowledges the historic centrality of race, their juxtaposition with former Confederate monuments ironically created a parallel “dual heritage.” Around the turn of the twenty-first century, newer types of counter-monuments contest prior memorialization and proffer a more nuanced history. Since the 2015 Charleston church shooting, calls for removal of old Confederate monuments have been dynamized by the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly following the murder of George Floyd. Using a framework contrasting dialogic with anti-monumental monuments, this essay analyzes the past half-century of African American monument construction to reconsider desegregation of the memorial landscape. In doing so, it further explores new ways of anti-monumental commemoration in the post-Floyd era.

Remembering, forgetting and memorialising: 1947, 1971 and the state of memory studies in South Asia

ABSTRACT The “cultural turn” in memory studies acknowledges that collective memory has a distinctive social aspect reflected in the manner in which it is communicated orally from one individual or generation to another. However, the point of departure is the emphasis on the need to account for the fact that memory is, in equal measure, shaped and mediated by tangible channels such as texts, images, objects, rituals, buildings and so on. The interactions and intersections between these two strands of approaching collective memory have been employed to write the most human and engaging histories of trauma and displacement – especially in the context of the Holocaust. This article takes this discussion forward by critically looking at the scope of the field of memory studies – with its largely Western frames of reference – to facilitate a deeper understanding of similar engagements and entanglements between communicative and culturally tangible forms of collective memory in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which the dominant discourse of nationalism is constructed and contested through the politics inherent in memorialization and memory in the South Asian context by comparing the partition of 1947 that resulted in the creation of Pakistan and the Liberation War of 1971 which gave birth to Bangladesh. Through a review of some important recent works of scholarship on the long, complex and intertwined afterlife of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, this article shows how the processes of the construction and contestation of a dominant discourse of nationalism and nationhood are fraught with their own forms of remembrance and forgetting. And yet they speak in a language of exceptionalism that mirrors a somewhat universal template for remembering “difficult pasts” characteristic of the memorial landscape of the Holocaust. Finally, it is argued that the interstices of “national memory” contain voices that unsettle or counter it. Acknowledging these voices while also recognizing their own memory politics shall broaden and nuance the dominant modes of memorializing the partition and the Liberation War in a way that better reflects the specificities and complexities of their context.

“Silencing” or “Magnifying” Memories? Stalin’s Repressions and the 1990s in Russian Museums

ABSTRACT Collective memories of different events often interact. There are multiple possible modes of such interaction. This article explores the interrelation of two memories in the Russian memory landscape: memories of Stalin’s repressions and the first post-Soviet decade, the 1990s. It shows that in museum exhibitions about the repressions, the 1990s are invoked in different modes. The interaction of the two memories has varying outcomes, including “silencing” through cacophonous commemoration and a “magnifying” effect of multidirectional memories. The article aims to open up the discussion of the complexity of the interrelation of the two memories.

Monumental Memorialization of Political Violence in Bulgaria (1944 – 1989): beyond Traumatization, Contestation and Dangerization of Memory

The article examines monumental memorialization of political violence in the period of communism in Bulgaria. The text reviews contemporary research presenting the topic of transitional justice, formation of victim’s identities and as part of post-communist cultural memory. A research is made of three theoretical approaches to understanding monumental memorialization – through traumatization, contestation or dangerization of memory and the social functions and meanings stemming from them. The analytical part represents a case study from Bulgaria, using ample empirical material – interviews, archive materials and other sources, part of a larger research by the author. Comparative analysis is used for description of national idiosyncrasies which is used as a basis to present their variants, temporal and spatial aspects. Social functions, political uses, interpretations, their use for reconstruction of national past and formation of national identity. A separate part of the text examines the initiators of these memorial signs – social actors, nongovernmental organizations and political parties, on which the degree of institutionalization and politization of this memory depends, as well as their use for far right radicalization. The text tracks the change of memorial landscapes and the major spatial trajectories (logics) of this post-communist topography of terror, as well as the symbolism embodied in it, combining political, traditional and religious meanings.

An affective absence: Memorialising loss at Pike River Mine, New Zealand

Pike River Mine was an ordinary, everyday workplace, unremarkable, pragmatic, an industrial aesthetic inserted into a pristine landscape. Following an explosion in November 2010, 29 men became entombed in the mine and their bodies remain there. Unfolding revelations of the culpability of the mine's management and a shocking narrative of events left the mine suspended in time. As a crime scene, it remained sealed off until mid-2019, when the process of re-entry began. All of this is set within one of the country's most sublime landscapes, with lush rainforest, dripping, moist, tranquil. The living and the dead continue to communicate, families shouting names into the portal, Mines Rescue leaving a note for the dead men to read, and out of the mine flows the water that has crossed their bodies. The dead, the living, the mine, the forest, and the deep history of Māori, coalesce in the affective landscape of Pike River. This paper explores affectivity in the context of co-designing a memorial landscape with the dead men's families, local Māori, and the Department of Conservation.

Landscape memories of land struggles in plateaus of two Nsukka villages in Nigeria

The memories of landscapes that people hold can stabilize histories and traditions in rural areas, are entwined with everyday lives and have several meanings. The paper explores the memories that people hold about plateaus in two adjoining villages (Alor-Uno and Edem-Ani) in the Nsukka area of Enugu State, Southeastern Nigeria. This area is an exciting and essential area of the world, distinctly underrepresented in landscape memory scholarship. The paper shows that the plateaus separating Alor-Uno and Edem-Ani are landscapes of political memory of the ancient wars between the two communities and more contemporary disputes regarding territorial extent of the communities and use of the land behind the plateaus if you are in Alor-Uno. Alor-Uno claims that wars waged against it by several kingdoms displaced the community, permitting occupation of parts of the community’s land, and they seek to reclaim it from Edem-Ani. However, extant narratives often recognize the disputed area as part of Edem-Ani because of the use of the plateaus as a boundary by colonial administrators. The presence of the plateaus helps the people recollect these ancient wars’ memories, and they use it to seek legitimation of their claim over the land. The paper argues that the memory of past land use reinforces the legitimacy of current land tenure configurations and shapes sensitivity to territoriality leading to exclusion. This can sustain group identities across generations translating into a ground for future fighting. It calls for more attention to the non-human agency and in connection to landscapes’ political memory, which speaks to the current post-human thinking in human geography. It suggests that resource conflicts analysis should take social meanings, memories and identities connected to the physical landscape seriously, as they contain ideological and symbolic elements foregrounding conflict environments.

Enacting memory and grief in poetic landscapes

Much geographical work has focused on sites of memory, where memories and grief are inherently tied to particular places, monuments and landscapes. Memories and grief can also, however, be spatially and temporally dispersed and fragmentary, creating landscapes in which things are simultaneously present and absent. In this paper I trace the creation of a memorial poem - a marwnad - for my great aunt, who lived her entire life on the margins of Cors Goch, a lowland bog in rural south-west Wales, as part of a long tradition in Welsh-language poetry. Like many Welsh marwnadau, the poem highlights spatial and temporal complexities of memory, emotion and grief. They are both inherently tied to shifting, ephemeral, fluid landscapes and politicised in changing regional and national cultural landscapes, speaking to challenges faced by rural communities and the changing geographies of the Welsh language. As well as reflecting the temporality and seasonality of site-specific memory and grief, the poem contributes to that temporality as memories resurface and intensify during composition and in subsequent personal readings. I discuss the place of such performative poetry in mapping grief and the implications of poetic grieving and memory-making for absence and presence and relationships with the landscape.

COVID-19 Impacts on Historic Soundscape Perception and Site Usage

The ISO 12913 standards acknowledge the primacy of context in perceiving acoustic environments. In soundscape assessments, context is constituted by both physical surroundings and psychological, social, and cultural factors. Previous studies have revealed similarities in people’s soundscape assessments in comparable physical surroundings, such as urban or national parks, despite differing individual associative contexts. However, these assessments were found to be capable of shifting in the historic setting of the Berlin Wall Memorial. Providing contextual information from the past appears to have some bearing on soundscape perception. The COVID-19 lockdown measures enacted since March 2020 in Germany have prevented most tourist activity at the memorial, and a resulting shift in user activity has been observed in the otherwise open and accessible memorial landscape. Building on previous soundscape investigations conducted at the memorial, this paper investigates what effect the restrictions have had on the soundscape context and its perception by visitors. Informal interviews paired with comparative measurements indicated context pliability for local stakeholders. In contrast to site programming alone, tourist presence also appears to affect context perception for local users. This holds repercussions for soundscape and heritage site designs serving local and tourist populations—and their divergent perceptions—alike. The impacts of soundscape assessments being neither static nor generalizable across stakeholders are discussed with suggestions for further research.

The Iraqi Ba'ath Archives: Collective Memory Loss and Authoritarian Nostalgia in the Post-Saddam Era

Abstract This article analyzes how the seizure of the Ba'ath archives from Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 influenced the country's memory landscape and rise in pro-Ba'ath authoritarian nostalgia (hanin). Literature on the Ba'ath archives has focused on the ethics of their removal, custodianship, and laws governing war archives. However, there has been virtually no literature analyzing the long-term consequences of this removal on Iraqi collective memory or examining Ba'ath nostalgia in a larger dialogue about Iraqi archives. Has the removal of the Ba'ath records distorted Iraq's post-regime memory landscape, and is this a factor in the rise of authoritarian nostalgia? By reviewing existing literature on archives and collective memory, examining instances of Ba'ath nostalgia in Iraq, exploring effects of de-Ba'athification on the education system, and comparing Iraq's situation to South Africa, this article will contemplate the effects of archives loss on Iraqi memory distortion and authoritarian nostalgia.

Denkmalpflege, Denazification, and the Bureaucratic Manufacture of Memory in Bavaria

How, in the aftermath of National Socialism and World War II, was the memory landscape of Munich and Bavaria denazified under the Office of the Military Government of the United States? Supplementing existing cultural approaches and scholarship on denazification in Bavaria, this article considers the execution of Allied Control Council Directive Number 30 by the American occupation government (omgus) in Bavaria, in conjunction with appropriated native Bavarian bureaucracies and bureaucrats, to inventory and assess the built environment in order to register militaristic or Nazi monuments and prioritize their removal or modification. The limitations of the project to renew or restore the monument landscape confront in turn the limitations on the “bureaucratic manufacture of memory” in the modification of individual memory.

Sacred memory, creole orientalism and India in the plantationscape of Mauritius

This article disentangles the relationship between memory and the sacred through the life and selected writings of Léoville L’Homme (1857–1928), who rose to prominence as poet and journalist in the 19th century as sugar production expanded in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. A man of colour and a Christian, L’Homme instrumentalised genealogy, cultural memory and the sacred in the vindication of exclusive forms of social justice in what I call the Mauritian plantationscape. His carefully-crafted sacred memory project, heavily modulated by French and British Orientalism, and characterised by tension between memory and the sacred, resulted in the perpetuation of discursive and colonial injustice against India, the homeland of his grandmother, and Indian indentured labourers. After identifying signs of trauma underlying his strained cultural memory landscape and implication, I argue that the organic creolisation present in the colony intervenes to turn the Hindu Goddess Sita, with whom L’Homme sought poetic intimacy, into a symbol of desire for India. This symbol impels an intercultural dialogue where Christianity and Hinduism meet to repair and bestow a reparative vector upon sacred memory. Intercultural dialogue creolises Orientalism, L’Homme’s primary portal into Indian cultural memory, and Creole Orientalism impedes cultural erasure. This sacred and inherently gendered creole cultural memory matrix redresses L’Homme’s relationship with India, his Otherness and Indian cultural memory. It injects an ethical economy in his activism that promises new definitions of a Mauritian collective ahead of decolonisation which remain germane to considerations of identity in the multicultural island’s post-colonial era.

Skyrmionics—Computing and memory technologies based on topological excitations in magnets

Solitonic magnetic excitations such as domain walls and, specifically, skyrmionics enable the possibility of compact, high density, ultrafast, all-electronic, low-energy devices, which is the basis for the emerging area of skyrmionics. The topological winding of skyrmion spins affects their overall lifetime, energetics, and dynamical behavior. In this Perspective, we discuss skyrmionics in the context of the present-day solid-state memory landscape and show how their size, stability, and mobility can be controlled by material engineering, as well as how they can be nucleated and detected. Ferrimagnets near their compensation points are promising candidates for this application, leading to a detailed exploration of amorphous CoGd as well as the study of emergent materials such as Mn4N and inverse Heusler alloys. Along with material properties, geometrical parameters such as film thickness, defect density, and notches can be used to tune skyrmion properties, such as their size and stability. Topology, however, can be a double-edged sword, especially for isolated metastable skyrmions, as it brings stability at the cost of additional damping and deflective Magnus forces compared to domain walls. Skyrmion deformation in response to forces also makes them intrinsically slower than domain walls. We explore potential analog applications of skyrmions, including temporal memory at low density—one skyrmion per racetrack—that capitalizes on their near ballistic current–velocity relation to map temporal data to spatial data and decorrelators for stochastic computing at a higher density that capitalizes on their interactions. We summarize the main challenges of achieving a skyrmionics technology, including maintaining positional stability with very high accuracy and electrical readout, especially for small ferrimagnetic skyrmions, deterministic nucleation, and annihilation and overall integration with digital circuits with the associated circuit overhead.

Unsettling sovereignty: Violence, myths and the politics of history in the Ethiopian Somali metropolis

An increasingly consolidated anthropological scholarship has moved from a legal notion of sovereignty towards an analysis of its violent enactment. Yet, it has paid insufficient attention to the ways in which the idea of sovereignty forms and operates in localized political struggles. Taking seriously Bonilla’s (2017) call for the “unsettling” of sovereignty, this article scrutinizes how ideas of legitimate rule have formed around myths of violence in the capital of the Ethiopian Somali region. It uses ethnographic material to examine the politics of history around material constructions through which myths of violence are entangled with the city's landscape of memory. It reveals sovereignty in the process of formation, becoming culturally and materially grounded in the myths of violence of an emerging Somali nation within the ethnic federal Ethiopian state. This article argues that past claims to sovereignty continue to affect the politics of history, with profound consequences for ongoing nation-state building projects and the corresponding territorial imaginations. It thus highlights the inherently fragile nature of ideas of state sovereignty in the frontier metropolis. On this basis, it contributes to a geographically differentiated anthropology of sovereignty and to an understanding of its co-constitution through violence in the frontier and myths in the metropolis.