Abstract
'Two extremes at the European peripheries: Baltic and Iberian post-industrial cultures' departs from a precise title and essays grasping distant and, to a certain extent, unrelated contemporary cultural conditions of two extremely diverse regions in the periphery of Europe, one facing the Baltic sea and the former USSR, the other facing the Atlantic and its former empires. Undergoing dissimilar historical and political processes, the Baltic region and the Iberian Peninsula relate to recent XXth and XXIst Century history differently: the resignification of past events, sites and stories can be extreme, whether celebrated or remembered, other times actively supressed and effaced. The spatial strategies towards the (industrial) past and the new unbound contemporary cultural practices are diverse and may not be represented in a single overarching map. This written essay aims to bring forth examples of resignification of the past and memory through new contemporary and spatial cultures by posing a set of questions: which pasts are celebrated and effaced through spatial intervention? Are new cultural projects altering historical narratives? The document sits in observations taken from fieldwork and research activity in three different sites – Tallinn, Chernobyl/Prypiat and Porto - and assumes a fragmentary and grounded position, inscribing the annotations and a posteriori conceptualization on a possible dialogue between the conditions and the contrasting cultural approaches.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Notes on Europe. |
| Subtitle of host publication | The dogmatic sleep. Walking around the sun. Machines, spiders and buccaneers |
| Editors | Eduarda Neves |
| Place of Publication | Porto |
| Publisher | CEAA | Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo – ESAP |
| Pages | 140-151 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9789728784898 |
| Publication status | Published - 2020 |