Authors

Discussion

The removal of the socialist-era monuments across eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union often invokes an image of a rupture.  My paper proposes to refocus our attention away from this moment of material discontinuity and onto their endurance within the mnemonic layers of the urban space. My illustrative discussion of this perspective will be anchored by two art installations on the empty site of the removed V.I. Lenin monument in Riga, Latvia. By looking at the art installations of Ulf Rollof (1995) and Aigars Bikše (2014) on the empty site of the removed monument, my paper will explore the tensions in a slow transition of memory in the city and the role that the socialist-era monument can play in absentia. Further, by tracing the evolution of the commemorative use of the empty site within the timeframe of the two artworks, I will highlight the emergence and the gradual disintegration of a ‘postcommunist site’ (Schmukalla, 2017). Taken together, the works by Ulf Rollof and Aigars Bikše will help me to shed light on the ambivalence of post-socialist transition and the often-contradictory relationship between remembrance and forgetting in slow transformations.