The “Socialist Modernism” Platform
Online Archives and Knowledge Production in Central and Eastern Europe
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7918345 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maria Cristache (0000-0002-4022-5154, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Pages | 57-68 |
| Publication date | 2019-11-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Martor The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1224-6271 • E-ISSN: 2734-8350 |
| Publisher | Muzeul National al Taranului Roman (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.57225/martor.2019.24.05 |
| OpenAlex | W4320165318 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
In this article I explore the relationship between online archives and the process of knowledge production by looking at visual representations of modernist architecture. I focus on the project “Socialist Modernism,” developed by the Bureau for Art and Urban Research (B.A.C.U.) with the purpose of collecting photos of buildings erected in Central and Eastern Europe. The goal is to determine what this project reveals about the built environment in socialism and its post-socialist transformation. For this purpose, I look at the content produced and disseminated by the project team through a visual studies methodological approach. Namely, I am interested in how the images are received, used, and (re)interpreted in visual studies. I discuss the case study of the Romanița Collective Housing Tower from Chișinău with the aid of theories of landscape, space, and architecture as a form of knowledge. This entails analyzing the content generated by B.A.C.U., the pictures themselves and the ways in which the public reacts to the material circulated. In addition to the visual and textual forms of knowledge produced by B.A.C.U., the viewers place these images into a wider context, reinterpret their significance, and sometimes contest the claims made by the project team. Based on these observations, this new type of archive seems to be shaped by the interaction between different actors, such as users of digital content, professional groups, and the state
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Communism · CONTEST · Political science · Socialism · Sociology · Visual arts · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Urbanization and City Planning · Architecture
Visual Meaning
Architecture and Visual Culture
Introduction
Theorizing Visual Studies
Politics and Practice in Economic Geography
Learning to look beyond the frame
Interdisciplinary agendas in visual research
Architecture Without Architects
Communist Comfort
From socialist to post-socialist cities
Putting Architecture in its Social Place
Gazing on communism
Socialist architecture as today's dissonant heritage
Cultural Politics and Modernist Architecture
Intricate relations between Western anthropologists and Eastern ethnologists
Architectural Modes of Collective Existence
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |