PPV #21: Commoning the Post-Socialist Ruins

What are the aesthetic and political articulations inscribed in the materiality of abandoned post-socialist sites? How can we common anew such spaces of contested histories? More crucially, what is to be done with the modern post-socialist ruins?

With the collapse of the communist regime what remained from the communist past – monuments, factories, unfinished housing buildings, memorials – were abandoned and decayed, as resembling an era that was left once and for all in the past. Here, abandonment is not something momentary that occurred in a specific temporal framework, but rather, an ongoing process, a modern ruin always in the making. While official sites of collective memory are articulated around pre-defined rhetorics, abandoned sites can become an active mode for negotiating the very process of decline and for understanding the transformation of public spaces in the post-socialist reality.

Drawing on the concept of the commons, the seminar will explore the aesthetic and political trajectories that are brought forward with artistic practices that re-inhabit and re-claim sites of modern ruination in the post-socialist space.

This event is organised by PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East), a seminar series and events platform running under the auspices of UCL SSEES'S FRINGE Centre. 

Image credit: Dimitra Gkitsa