Call for Participation in Academic Conference *POSTPONED*

(Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground

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The ‘archival turn’ has changed the landscape of philosophy, cultural studies and arts of the last thirty years. Poststructuralism, and most of all Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, updated the notion of the archive, turning it into an episteme of historical memory and also control over it. Archiving was conceptualized as one of the central memorial practices which not (only) reconstructs the narrative of the past, but produces and legitimises it. The increasing interest in the ‘management apparatus’ of collective memory in humanities and arts is symptomatic in the last decades, following the fall of authoritarian and colonial regimes and, moreover, as a reaction to the mass extermination of human life. The research focused on such topics as unequal distribution of memorial resources; conditions and practices of archiving tabooed or (temporarily) unclaimed layers of culture and history; the destruction and concealment of documents; and patterns of collective remembering that were often contingent on power and politics.

Soviet unofficial culture was not only the object of repression itself, but also a platform, or rather a whole range of platforms for the maintenance, systematisation and study of neglected or forbidden memory. This level of cultural and philological (self)reflection and its aesthetics are still little known. The practices of collecting, distributing and archiving were the result of isolation: the absence of institutions, traditionally taking on the work of organising and therefore effectuating the canonisation of cultural heritage. The fact that the delegation of the preservation, selection and analysis of artefacts and ideas was hardly possible, led to a culture of amateurish archives and private memorial practices. Vadim Zakharov, one of founders of the MANI archive, wrote about an obsession that a considerable number of underground artists had with the haphazard, unstoppable collecting of artefacts.

The topic “Archive and Underground” includes various aspects that should form the basis for discussions.

For more information please visit our website: https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/slk/slavistik/das-institut/professuren-und-lehrbereiche/litwi/conference-2021?set_language=en