Conference Program

The Conference Program is available below by clicking the corresponding tabs for each panel.

The Conference Agenda is available on the right sidebar of the page.

Visual Politics of Representation: Eastern Europe in Silent Cinema, Theater Stage Design, Cinema of Civil Protest and Media Depictions of #Euromaidan

Chair: Emanuel Crudu (Euroacademia, Paris and Brussels)

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  Adina Zidon, Lehman College, USA
  Eastern Europe as Other in Silent Cinema The following study will discuss depictions of Eastern Europe through the medium of silent film. My goal is to explore what distinguishes Eastern Europe from Western Europe and how early cinema has played a vital role in modern understanding of this divide. I will focus on three distinct images of the “orient:” traditional Judaism, vampires, and the nascent Soviet Union. It is beyond the scope of this study to fully delve into the cultural and ideological clashes of east versus west throughout history and even within the bounds of individual episodes in the past century.

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  Peter Mazalan, Faculty of Architecture of Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
  Theatre Stage Design as the Hyperrealistic Social Imitation Since the second half of the 20th century theatre has started to use completely different form of its expression tools. Mostly in German theatre society critics have started to use a term that refers to this new practice as „Regietheater“ 'director ́s theatre'. Where does this performing strategy have its own borders? How and when we could use „local architectural medium“ to discuss another „local“ stories not only as dramaturgical plan of theatres but as the dramaturgy of today’s Europe?

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  Bjorn Ingvoldstad, Bridgewater State University (USA),and Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Lithuania
  Reinventing Ukraine at 30fps: The Babylon13 Collective This presentation will discuss their work as a compelling “history of the present,” a mushrooming archive whose formal and stylistic elements, I argue, call the question of what “Europe” means to us in 2015. Indeed, similar to Timothy Garton Ash’s assertion in the wake of the “Revolutions of ‘89” that the West had much to learn from the East a quarter-century ago, I maintain that the “Maidan Revolution” and its aftermath show yet again that the (non-EU) East continues to fight for that which the European Union argues. By re-viewing Babylon13, we review this East/West binary, and we renew our commitment to being “united in diversity.”

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  Nataliya Borys, University of Geneva, Switzerland
  #Euromaidan and its Europeanness in the Ukrainian Maidan (2013-2014): The Discourses of Maidan’s Different Political and Media Actors on European Values This paper explores the different political and media actors’ discourses on Europeanness and on the European values during the Ukrainian Maidan (2013-2014). Arguing that the utopia vision of Europe played an active role in the protests, the author analyzes specific examples of European values, defined by the protesters and their demonstrations. The author concludes that Maidan wanted to show its “European” multinational and gender-equal nature mainly in contrast to Russia, which is depicted as less cultural and civilized than Ukraine and Europe.

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Readings of the Past: Sites of Memorialisation and Cultural Heritage in Central and Eastern Europe

Chair: Bjorn Ingvoldstad ( Bridgewater State University, USA)

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  Jessie Rodgers, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of Arts, London, UK
  Budapest’s ‘Memento Park’: Public Art, Communist Heritage and Contested Representations of the Past in Post-Communist Europe This paper uses an analysis of Memento Park, a park that contains forty-two of Budapest´s communist statues and monuments, to challenge discourses on communist heritage. It develops into an enquiry of the multiple paradoxes in the identities of sites displaying communist heritage in Eastern Europe, particularly those presenting works of monumental propaganda. It is centred around comparisons between Memento Park and similar parks in Lithuania, Bulgaria and Russia.

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  Sabrina DeTurk, College of Arts and Creative Enterprises, Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
  Memory of Absence: Krakow’s Jewish Ghetto Memorial as Counter-Monument The Ghetto Memorial both occupies and blends into the civic environment of Plac Bohaterow Getta 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) while also employing 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 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.

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  Regina Wenninger, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI),Munich
  Art, Politics, and PR. The Krupp Company and the First “Semi-official „Exhibition of Polish Art in Western Germany 1962/63 Drawing on new archival material from both German and Polish archives, the paper explores and analyzes the multifaceted entanglement of politics, culture and PR exemplified by the exhibition’s background and reception. The Folkwang exhibition not only provides a striking example for the interdependences of political fiascoes on the one and successes of cultural initiatives on the other hand. It also illustrates how in the process of Polish Western-German rapprochement art and culture were used as instruments of political image-cultivation. Not least, the exhibition epitomizes a period in which the rigid principles of Western German Ostpolitik began to corrode: The ambivalent stance, often resembling a veritable walk on egg shells, which Western German representatives took on the exhibition – sometimes declaring it neutral ground, sometimes charging it with political significance–is symptomatic here.

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Narrating the East/West Dichotomy: Perceptions, Stories and Cultural Categories in the Making of Eastern Europe

Chair: Gerhard Eichweber (Value Group, Switzerland)

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  John Edward Fahey, Purdue University, USA
  Garrison Stories: Poland in the Imagination of Twentieth Century Western Soldiers The myth of Eastern Europe stems from many sources, but study of the myth makers has focused primarily on politicians, philosophers, writers and other intellectuals. This focus overlooks many other groups of myth makers, including soldiers. Soldiers make up a vital resource for studying the myth of Eastern Europe. Military personnel make up a large percentage of “visitors” to Eastern Europe in both war and peace, and their memoirs, memories, and perceptions of Eastern Europe decisively shape the perception of “over there” when they return home. Even more importantly, soldiers’ imaginations about fighting in Eastern Europe help to shape the popular imagination of the region in a way that intellectuals do not.

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  Michael Damon Reid, Singapore University of Technology and Design
  Conrad Under Western Eyes My essay, uses the case of Joseph Conrad to document the shifting ways that Anglo-American scholars have written about this émigré Polish novelist over the course of the twentieth-century. Less a study of Conrad's fiction than a reception history of the changing ways that Conrad's fiction and authorial persona have been construed by Anglo-American scholars over the last century, my paper uses Conrad to chart the changing 'imagined communities' that emerge not in Conrad's fiction but in the act of critical and scholarly engagement with his fictions.

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  Magda Dolinska-Rydzek, International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany
  “The Antichrist Lives in the West”: The United States and Western Europe as Russia’s Geopolitical “Other” After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian political elites continuously attempt to “re-invent” Russia and establish its relationship with the West anew. Interestingly, the notion of the Antichrist plays an important role in many conceptions aiming at re-inventing the post-Soviet Russia. It appears not only in the Dugin's neo-Eurasianism, but also in other political, historiosophical, and even scientific conceptions.

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  Gerhard Eichweber, Silva Plan / Value Group, Switzerland
  Eastern Europe – Integral Part of Europe. Retrospective into the Future Ever since, the European concept of harvesting on cultural diversity for common prosperity and peace, materialised in terms such as "EU-Regio" and “Interregio” etc. apparently has been undermijned and financially reduced into a fig-leaf, while egalitarian and merely quantitative "convergence" criteria are enforced upon all. Moreover, with reducing everything to numbers, an erroneous and counterproductive paradigm of finance overruling and sabotaging what meanwhile has been called "real economy" is the main tool of repressing European countries and their self determination together and in peaceful with their neighbors. Europe, and its perception in the world, thus, remains increasingly far behind its potentials.

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Eastern Europe and the EU: Assessing Normative Claims – Europeanization, Convergence and Integration

Chair: Emanuel Crudu (Euroacademia, Paris & Brussels)

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  Dmytro Panchuk, Ghent University, Belgium
  Participation of Member States in EU Functional Cooperation: The Case of Twinning in Ukraine The present paper means to explore and explain the process of selection of Twinning partners from different EU member states (MS) by the Ukrainian government. The Twinning instrument is an integral part of EU functional cooperation, which entails financial and technical assistance to the ENP countries in a bid to support the latter with administrative reforms and legislative approximation to the EU acquis communautaire. Although there exists a formal selection procedure drawing on the quality and relevance of MS administrative system for the needs of the beneficiary country, there has been little scholarly evidence of its actual application to date.

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  Kristina Piilik, Free University Berlin, Germany
  The Role of the European Union in Democratic Developments in the Baltic States After the collapse of the Soviet Union newly independent states were free to choose their own political and economic paths. Despite the fact all the Soviet Socialist Republics and Soviet satellite states share the same point of departure, only some of them experienced the successful transition from communism to democracy. On the examples of the Baltic States and Moldova, this paper will analyze the role of the economic performance and external incentives, in this case manly the role of the EU that may have influenced the course of the transition from communism to democracy in those countries.

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  Lia Tsuladze, Tbilisi State University and Research Fellow, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford
  The Georgian Dilemma: Backstage vs. Front Stage Discourses on Europeanisation The paper analyzes the Georgians’ popular discourses on Europeanisation after the country initialled the Association Agreement with the EU in November 2013.It investigates into a dilemma the Georgians encounter: their strong aspiration to integrate with the EU is combined with their perception of Europeanisation as a threat to the national identity.

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  Julija Brsakoska Bazerkoska, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia
  The Regional Cooperation Prospects of the Western Balkans: Can the EU’s Pre-Accession Conditionality Work Again? the paper analyses the EU conditionality in the Balkans as a multi-dimensional instrument that is directed towards reconciliation, reconstruction and reform. As the Union uses both regional and country-by-country strategies for the Western Balkans countries, the paper aims to propose how and what kinds of strengthened regional co-operation in the areas of justice, freedom and security can contribute to fostering their EU integration.

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Visual Transformations: Transition and Change in Urban Image Construction in Central and Eastern Europe

Chair: Dana Domsodi (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy)

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  Dominika Glogowski, artEC/Oindustry and University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria
  Katowice’s Urban Transformation: Redefining the Post – Mining Identity through the Arts My paper addresses the site’s revitalization process in the realm of the city’s aim of a Metropolis and animates the discourse on the local, regional and international significance of the design concept and infrastructure, the implementation of the cultural mining heritage, the arts as creator of belonging and the function of culture in place marketing and sustainable economic development.

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  Anna Gondová, Faculty of Architecture of Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
  Bratislava Castle and Changes to the Methodological Approach of Monument Restoration in Correlation of Modern Europe Lack of authentic elements and preserved interiors and exteriors as well lead to a question, how to stand up to the methodological matters of restoration of Bratislava castle, which was considered as highly important task even in a context of socialist Czechoslovakia. Task, that was supposed to represent country in the world. What kind of architectural means of expression should define the approach of young socialist nation, according to the state ideology and according to effort of presenting Slovaks as a modern european nation to the preservation of this monument? Modernism.

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  Ivana Sidzimovska, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany
  Notes on Skopje. Hegemonic and Speculative Urban Narratives The paper deals with the ongoing government-funded reconstruction of the Macedonian capital, dubbed "Skopje 2014". The urban revamp involves erection of numerous government and cultural buildings (in an exclusively "neo-classical" style), (over forty) figurative monuments and equestrian statues of national heroes, bridges and monumental objects (i.e. a Triumphal Arc), reconstruction of facades (in "baroque" style) and other miscellaneous objects, in an attempt to support and provide material illustration of long and continuous Macedonian national narrative, that claims direct descent-line to the ancient hero, Alexander the Great.

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Readings of the Past: On Memory and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe

Chair: Emanuel Crudu (Euroacademia, Paris & Brussels)

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  Ronit Fisher, University of Haifa, Israel
  Ethnic Heterogeneity of “Greater Romania”: The Ethnic Element in Romania’s Memory and Identity since the Second World War to the Post-Communist Period This paper looks at how the ethnic heterogeneity of Romanian society during the inter-wars years had affected the development of the "Romanization Policy" by the Romanian government, and how it subsequently appears at the historical narratives of the Communist and Post-communist research. This paper will analyze the ways in which the Romanian historical research had dealt with the Ethnic heterogeneity of "Greater Romania" after the Second World War during – by focusing on one of the many ethnic groups, which had been subjected to fatal changes by the "Ethnic Policies" of the Romanian Government: The Jewish-Ethnic population.

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  Dana Dolghin, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  Negotiating Memory Canons: The Issue of Political Violence in Romanian Memory Culture This contribution argues that the intersection between a local perspective where a moralizing discourse largely informs the rationale of relating to the past and transnational remembrance ethics associated to the European sphere has produced new memorial constructions. By looking at conceptual debates around recent public acts of remembrance and transmission of memory, the paper analyzes “reflexive particularism” (D. Levy 2011) as means of explaining how an apolitical consensus around remembrance and a transnational-oriented configuration of reconciliation have become proper to particular memorial “languages”.

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  Emanuel Crudu, Euroacademia (Paris, Lucca & Brussels)
  Shaping the European Identity: Convergent Patterns of Memory and Amnesia After 1945/1989 Trademarks After 1989 Europe was exposed to a double re-evaluation: new memories of war and post-war were on table together with Western ‘confused sentimentality’ towards East. On the other side Eastern European nations had now to revisit their own Second World War history and feelings of abandonment after 1945. Since memory and remembrance are more about identity than about outcomes of institutional politics or realist history my paper is an inquiry about perceived gaps in the so called European identity and discontinuities involved in approaching the past in the “reunified” Europe.

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Art as Cultural Diplomacy

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  Deborah Bouchette, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, USA
  The Artist-in-Residence as Cultural Mediator This investigation primarily utilizes theories of Homi Bhabha and Richard Kearney to showcase how the artist-in-residence has potential as a unique catalyst of positive global change, participating in the constitution of inter-cultural subject formation. Then Paul Ricoeur’s concepts of translation capture the deeper process that integrates the artist’s ethical encounter with the “other” by modeling a comprehensive, hermeneutic understanding of inter-subjectivity.

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  Thor J. Mednick, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA
  David Loewenstein: Art Intervention as Social Practice This presentation focuses on the use of art as a means of social interventional in the United States, focusing specifically on the writings and practice of Kansas-based community artist David Loewenstein. Loewenstein’s career provides an interesting example of the constant negotiation between private and public interests required of a practitioner in this field.

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  André Silveira, Instituto de História da Arte - FCSH Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
  The Exhibition-Dialogue on Contemporary Art in Europe (Lisbon, 1985) as Part of the Council of Europe’s Cultural Diplomacy This paper will focus on the Exhibition-Dialogue as part of the COE's cultural diplomacy by positioning it on the series of exhibitions organized until the middle 1990's. Furthermore, it will also discuss the possible relations between the Exhibition-Dialogues' conceptual apparatus and the COE's political program as a first level of pan-European political coordination that precedes the European Union's membership.

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  Marija Podzorova, University Paris 7 – Paris Diderot and University Paris 1 – Paris Sorbonne, France
  Through Art to Good Diplomatic Relations: Exhibitions of Soviet Art in Germany, Italy and the US in the 1920s The aim of this paper is to bring a light on the way how the multi-institutional organization of these exhibitions influenced the choice of artworks to be presented and artists to be employed and also how these choices influenced the creation of an image of the Soviet Union as a country of tolerance and open-mindedness in the artistic field in the 1920s.

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  BojanaVidekanic, Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo, Canada
  Non-Aligned Modernism: Yugoslavian Modernist Art and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy This paper examines aspects of the history of modernism in the socialist Yugoslavia by studying the influence of Cold War cultural diplomacy in Yugoslavian culture and politics of the 1950s and 1960s. More specifically, it does this by looking at the 1956 MoMa exhibition of Abstract Expressionism which legitimized modernist ethos as an accepted political, social, and cultural form during Yugoslavia’s transition from a hard-line Soviet-style state, to a more open, humanist-socialist one.

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