Our memory forms our identity. The same could be claimed about a city, or even, if we take the Greek understanding of a polis as a basis for theoretical proposition, about a state. At the same time, the pair history/identity could be understood not as a linear sequence, not as a given primordial truth, but more as an ideological construction that derives from and through discourse. The main question of the research is what, why and how we choose to remember or forget and how this influence our identity.

In his book ‘Urban Palimpsest and the Politics of the Memory’ Andreas Huyssen  reflects on  a shift in relationships between history and memory. The modernist assumption of history assumed that one could learn from it. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ —will say philosopher George Santayana. National and universal pasts were monumentalised so as to legitimise and give meaning to the present. Meanwhile, memory was considered to be rather poetical topic. Today, claims Huyssen, history is no longer thought to be objective and scientific. Instead, unlike in Wordsworth’s or Proust’s times, memory speaks about social and political issues. 

For the post-Soviet space as well as for post-Soviet art those questions became even more important. The feeling of lost identity which came with a loss of history is a key question to many artists of Eastern Europe (or those whose art is linked to the post-Soviet space).