Rubble with a cause

Space and the Memories of Violence, 2014

The remains of fallen soldiers interred in war cemeteries, and those resting at former battlefields and never properly buried are common features of post-conflict landscapes. Such remains of troubled pasts, currently found in the landscape can serve as reminders and material warnings of the tremendous and long lasting impact of warfare and violence in the world around us only, if they are present in a full sense and perceived as valuable. In this paper, we examine a specific category of contested landscape that have almost lost their value as material warning. We explore the area, where over 80,000 soldiers from both sides lost their lives in a few months, and where human remains have invariably remained problematic for over one hundred years and are currently perceived as absent present. At the current stage of our research project, the ' Archaeological Revival of Memory of the Great War' , we are well aware of the complex reasons for such situation. However here, we focus only on a narrow but in our opinion an important aspect, and that is the relationship between the current material condition of certain Great War Eastern Front war cemeteries, including their surface visibility, and the mechanisms and processes that cause these specific material traces to be either forgotten or which gives them significance and value. We hope that there is a chance that by maintaining, protecting, and preserving these cemeteries, particularly through the efforts of archaeologists, their value and significance can be reestablished.

Holocaust studies, 2019

The essay critically examines the participatory excavation project The Cut (2015) performed in the former ghetto area of Warsaw in relation to the artists-in-residence program administered by POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. By investigating the spatial, social and historical framing of the artistic intervention and the discourses it mobilizes, the author contests the underlying presumption that participatory art inherently produces democratic and positive social and spatial relations. The author argues that unaddressed socio-historical contexts of Polish-Jewish relations in such art genres may lead to reproduction of the oppressive patterns of culture that include exclusion and appropriation.

The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945, 2017

This chapter tries to determine the origins and trajectories of the conflicts over the memorial landscape in Poland and to explore the memory tensions between the state and others engaged in memory production. It seeks answers to the following questions: What means did the newly democratised state have at its disposal to exercise control over public space? What legitimation did it invoke when imposing a dominant narrative on communities that resist change? What kinds of practices and discursive strategies were used to influence different groups’ attitudes towards the past and why were these not always successful? Finally, the chapter probes the larger issue of the specific characteristics of the decline of authoritative memories in a transitional state. The question is whether, and if so to what extent, transitional states are experiencing the same progressive erosion of the central authorities’ dominant position in constructing commemorative practices as we have witnessed in mature democracies.

International Journal of Historical Archaeology , 2017

Many sites related to the First World War are forgotten and neglected in today’s Poland. This paper shortly presents the ways of practicing conflict archaeology in Poland and it discusses results of the non-invasive archaeological survey conducted in Tuchola and Czersk, places where during the First World War Germans built and run prisoners of war camps. In the article the material remains of the camps that have survived in the local landscapes till the present are analyzed. Both sites are at the same time remembered and forgotten by local communities. This paper tries to account for oblivion as an inherent part of local landscapes that adds a unique value to them.

Thinking Through Ruins, 2021

Re-Inventing Eastern Europe Conference, Krakow, Poland, 2015

In 1992, scholar James Young published an article in Critical Inquiry examining the rise of the counter-monument in Germany. Young considered the counter-monument a memorialization strategy particularly suited to a country seeking to remember and honor the victims of its own national crimes. Although Young was particularly interested in vanishing monuments, such as the Harburg Monument against Fascism designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev Gerz, his description of the characteristics of a successful counter-monument fits numerous Holocaust monuments and memorials erected not only in Germany but across Central and Eastern Europe in recent years. According to Young, the counter-monument provokes its viewers, demands interaction, has the possibility to change over time and insists that memory work be the burden of the viewer, not of the monument itself. Krakow’s Jewish Ghetto Memorial, the so-called “empty chairs memorial,” was designed by architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak and inaugurated in 2005. The Ghetto Memorial both occupies and blends into the civic environment of Plac Bohaterow Getta (Ghetto Heroes Square) and intentionally invites interaction from passersby who use the chairs while waiting for public transportation. Its design reflects the specificity of its site, through its allusion to furniture being piled in the Square prior to the deportation of the Jews. However the memorial also employs design strategies used in other contemporary memorials such as those to the 1995 bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and that to the 9/11 terrorist attacks at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. This paper examines Krakow’s Jewish Ghetto Memorial as an example of a counter-monument and considers its impact on viewers and its efficacy as a public memorial space.

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2024

Many WWII camps and killing sites in Poland were memorialised in the 1960s without public consultation. However, some camps, including Krakow’s KL Plaszow (featured in the film Schindler’s List), remained nonsites of memory , or spaces embodying sociologically significant gaps in collective memory: non-memory (Hirszowicz and Neyman 2001, Hirszorowicz and Neyman 2007). This article examines the conflict over establishing The KL Plaszow Memorial Museum and engages in a discussion of the concept of counter-heritage. Using Interviews, the study reveals how divergent stakeholders, including survivors’ descendants, museum representatives, local residents, and activists, navigate the intricate web of commemoration. Our analysis identifies the tensions and transformative potential within these commemorative conflicts across three interconnected time frames: the past’s tendency towards oblivion, the current role and significance, and future challenges. We argue that public consultations triggered the empowerment of various stakeholder groups, fostering a new vision for the institution. This vision broadens the museum’s mission from solely commemorating a difficult past to also facilitating present-day engagement. Adopting this vision could be particularly effective in promoting the emancipation of counter-heritage and in empowering local communities.

In recent years, Krakow's district of Podgórze has witnessed the erection of several works in public space that are concerned with the memory of the place. A monumental piece erected by Witold Cęckiewicz in the 1960s in the former Płaszów Concentration Camp has been joined by contemporary works. It is especially the Ghetto Heroes Square and its direct vicinity that have been addressed by artists and designers who, through their works, i.e. Mateusz Okoński's Purification, Łukasz Skąpski's 10 cubic metres of Krakow's wintertime air, and a structure in the form of multiple chairs by Lewicki and Łatak's studio entered into a dialogue with the paradigm of counter-monumentality and postmemory. For common viewers and casual passers-by, as well as for residents of the district, these works are hardly evocative of recent history, or the events they are meant to commemorate. Do these works, with their consciously taken position on the verge of the visible, that is, on the verge of what can be considered art, fulfil their commemorative role? Can the excess of the invisible change at some point into the visible? These questions offer a starting point not only for the discussion of the above-mentioned works in the context of analogous creations in contemporary art of the last two decades, but also for a wider discussion of monumental and counter-monumental art after the Shoah.

2015