Memory Landscapes is my ongoing multidisciplinary project that combines archival research, museology, visual art, and writing on the vast topic of collective memory manipulation, nostalgia used by current authoritative regimes and/or populists as a tool of propaganda, and the role of museums and memorials at the sites of former concentration camps and places of mass executions in Europe.
But back in 2022, as I came to Berlin as an ICORN Fellow, it certainly did not start with such broad ambitions. The project was conceived in January that year after I visited the memorial in Dachau, Germany, and saw the poplars that were growing there, almost unchanged, since the Nazi times, unlike many other structures demolished after 1945 and then rebuilt - already as a part of the newly made memory site. The inner urge to reflect, contact and interact with the nature of the places of traumatic past brought me to eventually visit 19 of them (in Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Montenegro), collecting information about these countries memorial politics, interviewing activists and - the visual part of the project - taking Instax photos of various natural elements I discovered there: stones, trees trunks, bark, branches, grass, earth, etc.