Memory matters

Post-socialist Wastelands as Materials Bearing Witness

Authors

  • Dimitra Gkitsa

Abstract

This article engages with Albania’s abandoned postindustrial wastelands to investigate the matters and materiality of collective memory inscribed in de-industrialized landscapes. The article starts by developing an analysis of depictions and perceptions of nature during the socialist regime that were also crucial in constructing the Albanian countryside as well as the many industrial towns in the periphery that were built from scratch to accommodate factory workers. The article then focuses on the ruination, emptiness, and decay of those former places that once were the epitome of collective work, production, and socialist modernity. In exploring the human and more-thanhuman matters that remain in those abandoned spaces as well as the ways in which contemporary artists have incorporated the materiality of post-industrial and post-socialist sites in their practice, the article argues that post-socialist wastelands have borne witness to the multiple abrupt socio-political changes that have occurred in Albania’s recent history while transgressing linear understandings of time and space.

Keywords:

post-industrialism, post-socialist landscape, terraforming, collective memory, visual cultures

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Published

2024-11-20

How to Cite

Gkitsa, D. (2024). Memory matters: Post-socialist Wastelands as Materials Bearing Witness. Art Studies, (22), 113–155. Retrieved from https://albanica.al/studime_arti/article/view/5809

Issue

No. 22 (2023): Art Studies

Section

Articles