Serendipitous Connections: Remnants of Ballet and Rocks of the West Coast

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Raisa Foster Under history, memory and forgetting. Under memory and forgetting, life. But writing a life is another story. Incompletion. – Paul Ricoeur Starting as a senior grant researcher in the Re-connect / Re-collect project at the beginning of October brought in to view connections between my childhood memories and Cold War histories, and my life as an artist and a scholar. I have to admit that I have never been interested in history; however, I have always been fascinated by memories: autobiographies of…

A Whale of a Bad Time: Memory for Sustainable Futures

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Graphic Design: Compact This blog is a thought experiment for the exhibition titled A Whale of a Bad Time. Curator: Zsófia Kókai and Exhibiting artists: Ivor Almásy, István Felsmann, Sára Gink-Miszlivetz, Katalin Kortmann-Járay, Karina Mendreczky, Balázs Máté Tóth, Márton Emil Tóth. I visited this exhibition in September 2020 with an interest to explore connections with our Reconnect / Recollect project. The exhibition portrays the 90s generations' childhood memories. While remembering childhood, the past, present and future meet. In the process of remembering, images…

‘EAST’ Premiere in Budapest

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Spacetime Provocations with Childhood Memories With overwhelming success, the play ‘KELET/EAST’ premiered to a full house in Trafo Theatre on September 22-23, 2020 in Budapest, Hungary. Performed by Dollardadd’s theater group, the play was inspired by childhood memories of the post/socialist periods produced as a part of the Recollect / Reconnect project.  The play tells the story of Roland who won the 1986 Talent Show in Hungary for his clown performance and received a much coveted award - a trip…

Summer in the Delta: A braided journey through space and time

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by Simona Szakács-Behling The story I’m about to tell is a story in three acts based on my memories of travelling with my grandfather from Bucharest to his native village of CA Rossetti in the Danube Delta during several summers in the early 1990s. I must have been between eight and eleven years old, at a time when I thought that adults are not afraid of anything and they never feel pain – not even when they go to the…

Chocolate and Surveillance: Modern Convergences

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by Robert Imre, Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland I love sportszelet. Always have. The slightly dry chocolate, with just a hint of rum flavour, and the off-normal rectangular size of 25 grams, always appealed to me, especially as a child. Being different to the chocolates that were around where I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, Canada, made it even more appealing; something unique. My earliest memory of the green label was eating the chocolates after some…

Religious socialization of a new generation in Georgia and Croatia

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In Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1989-1991 marked a watershed. Political monopoly and planned economy were exchanged with political pluralism and capitalist economies. At the same time, from total suppression, or tight control and monitoring, a religious ‘marketplace’ appeared with the rewriting of constitutions and reinstating religious freedom, in which various traditional Churches wanted to strengthen their positions and influence. Religious organizations attained a larger role in public life. There was also a substantial increase in religious…

Glances of performing memories

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text by Camila da Rosa Ribeiro It was a rainy morning - no surprises there as it is October in Helsinki - and I was rushing to get the tram that would drop me at the door of the place where we start the second Reconnect/Recollect workshop day exploring memories of childhood. Our group in Helsinki worked on memories related to materialities. Memories of toys, boots, make up and birthday parties filled the room. I wanted to be there early…

Re/connecting research and teaching: Memory work as pedagogical tool

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In our research project, ‘Re-Connect / Re-Collect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods’, we explore memory stories created in collective biography workshops that tell about experiences of childhood in socialist societies during the Cold War. The project brings into view personal histories with an aim to connect generations and the public across still existing divides. Utilizing the perspectives of our research and turning memory work into a pedagogical tool, we decided to experiment with a course at…