A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2024, 1-2: Download.
PhD in history and philosophy. Previously an archivist at the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design (ArkDes); currently involved in the research project “Transnational Art and Heritage Transfer and the Formation of Value: Objects, Agents, and Institutions” at Södertörn University. Anna Kharkina previously worked in various cultural institutions in Russia and as a freelance curator and writer.
PhD in history and philosophy. Previously an archivist at the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design (ArkDes); currently involved in the research project “Transnational Art and Heritage Transfer and the Formation of Value: Objects, Agents, and Institutions” at Södertörn University.
Her main academic interests are cultural policy, cultural institutions, contemporary art, cultural theory, and political branding. Anna Kharkina previously worked in various cultural institutions in Russia as well as a freelance curator and writer, with the focus on contemporary art and its institutions.
Kulturarv: en begreppspolitik [Cultural Heritage: the politics of the concept], Johan Hegardt and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, (Södertörn philosophical studies, 2022), 124 pages.
One cannot go back in time and cannot experience it as it was. Yet this collection of memoirs is an attempt at the restoration of the immaterial culture of the 1990s in St. Petersburg. It was written with the awareness of the integrated failure of the project by all its participants.
How can the loss of connection with history be experienced and expressed? The relationship with the past is difficult to capture and describe, although at some historic moments the emotional connection with the past becomes pivotal. This article introduces the debates on loss and cultivating the sense of losing the past in modernizing Russia in the late 19th – early 20th century. It contributes to the history of emotions, analyzing the discourse on the disappearance of Russian cultural history cultivated by intellectual and artistic circles around the journals Mir Iskusstva, Starye Gody and Iskusstvo in the late Russian Empire, and tracing distinct voices that problematized the relation to earlier times in Russia and promoted the preservation of Russian cultural and historical monuments. The article concludes that the discourse of losing the connection with Russia’s own past played an important role in forming the discourse and practices of Russian heritage preservation.
What the symposium emphasized was the processes that led to the emergence of the cultural techniques and institutions as well as the conceptual apparatus to deal in practice with the suddenly highly desired Russian cultural heritage. Another focus was on the reception of the Western tradition by the Russian educated society, which took place in parallel with, and sometimes conceptually intertwined with, the re-opening of the Russian tradition.
Although the primary interest of the OSA was the heritage of the Cold War and communism, it soon extended its interests to include human rights archives. The first was an archive on the Yugoslav wars, including documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Initially, interest in this archive was based on its relation to the aftermath of communism, but later it was realized that “it was a document of human rights”, and this subject was accepted as a part of the OSA’s key activity.
Anna Kharkina visits an exhibition about childhood and sees artifacts from the Romanian countryside. The exhibition opens doors to an individual and a shared past for those with common memories of childhood in a country that no longer exists.