Soviet Ellipses (completed)

About the project

“Soviet Ellipses” (SOVEL) deals with the creation and representation of ellipsis (i.e. conscious omission) in Soviet photography, literature, and everyday life.

It sets out from the premise that the significant accumulation of omission practices during Soviet times (1917–1991) did not occur by accident, but rather served as a subversive strategy to undermine censorship, political repressions, and trauma-induced speechlessness, which had been dominating the Soviet society for so long.

By bringing together Literary Studies, Border Studies, Image Theory, Cultural Semiotics, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) the research examines the making, the accumulation, the function, and the creative power of ellipses with regard to different media and in a diachronic and comparative scope.

Objectives

The main objective of the project is to demonstrate how ellipses function as techniques that challenge (constructed symbolic) borders. It focuses on techniques of creation at the level of creative production and representation, and aims to reframe our understanding of cultural (counter) practices within Soviet society.

Events

Conference

Trauma, Memory, and Counter-Culture. Borders and Border Transgressions in (Post-)Communist Europe

The conference explores borders and border transgressions in the context of trauma, memory, and counter-culture and aims to highlight the specific relevance of Border Studies for better understanding literature, arts, and everyday culture in repressive, transformative and (post-)war societies.

Time and place: June 1, 2023 10:00 AM – June 2, 2023 7:00 PM, University of Oslo, ILOS

Conference Program

Thursday, June 1                            

10:00 – 10:15: Registration

10:15 – 10:30: Welcome

• Vera Faber (Oslo / Kirkenes)
• Christine Meklenborg Nilsen (Head of the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo)

10:30 – 12:00: Concrete and imagined Borders
Chair: Vera Faber (Oslo / Kirkenes)

• Tetiana Ostapchuk (London)
  Crossing Borders of Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: from Real to Imaginary and Back
• Marta Smolińska (Poznań) and Burcu Dogramaci (München)
  Artistic Borderscaping of Migration and Economics: the Polish-German Border as a Phantom Border between East and West
• Olha Polishchuk (Mykolaiv / Saarbrücken)
  The real and mental Border in T. Antypovych‘s Novel “Pomyrana”

12:00 – 12:15: Break

12:15 – 13:15: Keynote
Moderator: Aileen A. Espíritu (Kirkenes)

• Susanne Frank (Berlin)
  1922-2022: Soviet “binary” Border Politics, monolingual Nation-building, and a fatal Legacy.

13:15 – 14:15: Lunch Break

14:15 – 15:45: Shifting Borders       
Chair: Bjarge S. Fors (Kirkenes)

• Tetiana Shestopalova (Mykolaiv / Saarbrücken)
  Borders of Memory and Identity of Donbas in the Novels of Olena Styazhkina and Volodymyr Rafeyenko
• Elena Nikiforova (Helsinki / Athens)
  “Narva that we lost and gained”: Cultural Rebordering of a Border City through the Means of documentary Theater
• Irene Sywenky (Alberta)
  Shifting eco-borders: Environmental Visual Art in Poland and Ukraine

15:45 – 16:00: Break

16:00 – 17:30: Border Transformations      
Chair: Tuulikki Kurki (Joensuu)

• Aigi Heero (Talinn)
  Going back to Ukraine. Dmitrij Kapitelman’s Novel “Eine Formalie in Kiew” (A Formality in Kyiv)
• Even Teistung (Oslo)
  East German non-identities. Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Aller Tage Abend”
• Johan Schimanski (Oslo)
  Towards a Border Poetics of European Borderlands

17:45: Reception

Friday, June 2          

10:00 – 11:00: War, Memory, and Trauma 
Chair: Aileen A. Espíritu (Kirkenes)

• Alina Mozolevska (Mykolaiv / Saarbrücken)
  Discursive Power of Maps and Borders in Ukrainian Visual Arts: Narrating Russia’s War in Ukraine
• Damjan Božinović (Oslo)
  Reading Border Aesthetics in Kristian Novak’s “Dark Mother Earth” (Črna Mati Zemla) (2013) and “Gypsy, but Fairest of them All” (Ciganin, al’ Najljepši) (2016)

11:00 – 11:15: Break

11:15 – 12:45: Oppression, Memory, and Trauma
Chair: Susanne Frank (Berlin)

• Elizaveta Khachaturyan (Oslo)
  How to narrate Silence and Fear: Children’s Books about the Thirties in the Soviet Union
• Mónika Dánél (Budapest) and Stijn Vervaet (Oslo)
  Transnational Memory, Border-Crossing, and Perpetrator Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Fiction: Zoltán Danyi and Faruk Šehić
• Svitlana Kot (Mykolaiv / Saarbrücken)
  “Perimeters of our Lives”: exploring Biopolitics of Borders in repressive Societies through the Lens of Dystopias

12:45 – 13:45: Lunch Break

13:45 – 14:45: Round Table – (Post-)repressive Spaces         
Moderator: Johan Schimanski (Oslo)

• Tuulikki Kurki (Joensuu)
  Short Keynote: After the Narrative: Vernacular Memory of Trauma in Borderlands
• Vera Dubina (Bremen / Berlin)
  Public History, Soviet Union, Putin‘s Russia
• Bjarge S. Fors (Kirkenes)
  Border Studies, Border Regions, Anthropology
• Yngvar B. Steinholt (Tromsø)
  Slavonic Studies, Cultural Studies, Popular Music Studies

14:45 – 15:45: Challenged Borders 
Chair: Zhanna Guzenko (Kirkenes)

• Witold Kanicki (Poznań)
  POLAROID. Cultural Contraband of the Cold War Era
• Vera Faber (Oslo / Kirkenes)
  Soviet Ellipses – Omission as Border Transgression in Photography of the Soviet Era

15:45 – 16:00: Break

16:00 – 17:30: (De-)Materialized Borders  
Chair: Marta Smolińska (Poznań)

• Natalija Arlauskaite (Vilnius)
  Stitching Political Body: Microsurgery, Geography, and Soviet Medical Imagery
• Agnese Zviedre (Riga)
  Overcoming Borders: Creating Accessibility in the Exhibition “Invisible Lives”
• Fabian Heffermehl (Oslo)
  Borders of Skin

18:00 – 19:00: Public Lecture (Sophus Lies Auditorium)
Moderator: Vera Faber (Oslo / Kirkenes)

• Vera Dubina (Bremen / Berlin)
  The Weapons of the Weak. Silent Protest in Russia

19:30: Dinner

Location: Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS), University of Oslo (UiO), Norway.

Panels: HF-12 Niels Treschow Hus, Niels Henrik Abels vei 36, UiO Blindern.
Public Lecture: Sophus Lies Auditorium at UiO, Moltke Moes vei 35, UiO Blindern.

The conference builds on the MSCA-project “Soviet Ellipses. Omissions as Techniques of Border Transgression in Photography, Literature, and Everyday Life” (SOVEL) at UiO.

Organizer

Vera Faber

With cooperation of the Barents Institute Kirkenes and Johan Schimanski.
Co-funded by ​The European Union, UiO:ILOS, ​​​​​​The Barents Institute (UiT), UiO:demokrati, and Border Readings (UiO).

Student Assistant: Eleonora Mincheva.

Conference – Call for Papers

Trauma, Memory, and Counter-Culture: Borders and Border Transgressions in (Post-)Communist Europe

June 1-2, 2023

Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS)
University of Oslo (UiO), Norway

Submission Deadline: Dec. 23, 2022

Borders are central to our understanding of societies that are either affected by unfreedom of speech or traumatized by repressions and war experience. In the context of the Eastern Bloc, for example, their effects shaped several levels of society and culture and led, among other things, to individuals and groups not being able to act or articulate themselves freely. Given that marginalized groups, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, are often unable to actively participate in social and political life, they remain invisible also in public space and public discourse. In response to imposed constraints, subversive efforts to overcome, destabilize, and problematize them often go hand in hand – thus turning members of the respective societies into border crossers. With the collapse of the Communist Bloc, many borders may have fallen in territorial and consequently also in symbolical terms. Yet, they have remained highly topical on the levels of memory and trauma, as they are an integral part of coming to terms with experiences of terror, repression, or war.

In the more than 30 years since the disintegration of the Communist Bloc, culture and society in its respective parts have generated widespread interest in various fields of the humanities. The multi­layered, often overlapping traumas resulting from as well as the memories of the communist era (e.g. Hundorova; Jones; Kratochvil; Lachmann; Sandomirskaja; Sorvari, etc.) and the Yugoslav wars (e.g. Beronja/Vervaet; Jelača; Lugarić/Car, etc.) have therefore become just as much the subject of research as counter practices which had formed in response to unfreedom of speech, censorship, and the doctrine of Socialist Realism (e.g. Giustino et al.; Kliems; Komaromi; Lipovetsky et al.; Zitzewitz, etc.). These studies do not only contribute to a better understanding of culture and society under repressive conditions; they also participate in bringing out of a notorious invisibility those spheres that were particularly affected by the impossibility of individual articulation and the lack of social participation.

* * *

This two-day conference at the University of Oslo aims to highlight the specific relevance of Border Studies for better understanding literature, arts, and everyday culture in repressive, transformative and post-war societies. It explores borders and border transgressions in the context of trauma, memory, and counter-culture (in the sense of unofficial culture) and thus on the premise of both simultaneity and posteriority. In this regard, both state-imposed limitations which are consciously drawn and borders triggered in retrospect or by the subconscious are of interest. Unfreedom of speech, invisibility and stigmatization are just a few examples of state-imposed, “simultaneous” constraints which, in turn, on the unconscious level show equivalents in the incapability of expression, in blind spots, and in psychological repression.
We want to look at boundaries primarily, but not only, in terms of border aesthetics (Gómez-Peña; Rosello; Schimanski; Wolfe) and are especially interested in borders in the fields of literature, arts, and everyday culture in their sensual, their aesthetic, and their social dimensions. Borders are therefore conceived beyond their geographical dimension, so that, for example, symbolical, cultural, societal, epistemological, generational, semiotic, lingual, temporal, spatial, or medial dimensions are of particular interest.

Given our interdisciplinary scope, we are interested in paper proposals from literature studies, the arts and cultural studies, as well as from related fields. We particularly welcome case studies on often still understudied areas of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe, as for example Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and the Baltic States.

Paper proposals can, for example, address the following thematic fields:

How are borders negotiated and how are border crossings produced, represented, or perceived in literary, visual and everyday cultures that arise from a context of repression, unfreedom of speech, and war experience?

Which approaches and methods towards border and border transgression can be productively employed with regard to repressive and transformative societies and the relating traumata, memories, and counter-culture and implemented in the sense of an interdisciplinary entanglement?

Which divergences, analogies and particularities can be identified in terms of border crossings in literary, visual and everyday cultures in terms of production, materiality, representation, and perception?

Case studies dealing with borders and border crossings from the regions in question.

* * *

The conference will be framed by a public lecture on “The Weapons of the Weak. Silent Protest in Russia” by Vera Dubina (Public History, Berlin), a keynote on “Border Semiotics and Empire” by Susanne Frank (Eastern Slavic Literature and Culture, Berlin) and a keynote by Tuulikki Kurki (Cultural Studies, Joensuu) introducing a roundtable discussion.

The conference language is English. We ask participants to cover their travel costs. In case of successful additional funding, parts may be reimbursed. If you wish to apply for reimbursement, please indicate this in your proposal.

Please submit your abstract (300 words) including paper title, your name, your affiliation, and a short CV (up to 200 words) by December 23, 2022 to Vera Faber:
vera.faber@ilos.uio.no.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by January 12, 2023.

* * *

The conference builds on the MSCA-project “Soviet Ellipses. Omissions as Techniques of Border Trans­gression in Photography, Literature, and Everyday Life” (SOVEL) at UiO.

Organizers: Vera Faber, “Soviet Ellipses” at UiO; in cooperation with Johan Schimanski, Border Readings research group at UiO.

Public Lecture

Vera Dubina: The Weapons of the Weak. Silent Protest in Russia

Contemporary Russian society does not visibly oppose the invasion of Ukraine. There are no barricades or protesters in the streets, and even the military mobilisation has not triggered an open clash between the public and the authorities. But does this silence mean consent and support for the war?

Time and place: June 2, 2023 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM, Sophus Lies Auditorium, UiO

Since the start of the war we have seen individual acts of “disobedience” and condemnation of military actions – writings on fences, substitution of price tags in shops with information about civilian casualties in Ukraine, coded “no war” writings on social networks and other “public” spaces. For these individual actions, both fines and prison sentences are also imposed. However, these methods of “disobedience” have not ceased, but have only intensified. To see them as political protest requires broadening our conception of what we understand as ‘politics’, extending this beyond political parties and political institutions and linking it to the myriad microsocial interactions that take effect in people's everyday lives.

In my lecture, I’m going to examine the various forms of protest – focusing on the less visible, and consequently requiring closer examination, ‘silent’ forms of resistance to the regime in contemporary Russia. Since these ‘everyday forms of resistance’ were theorized by James C. Scott, they have been given different names, including ‘non-violent’, ‘unarmed’, ‘peaceful’ or ‘passive’, depending on the aspects that were emphasized at each particular time. This kind of protest refers to small acts of dissent that were generally individual, spontaneous and unarmed and that took place in spaces of everyday socialisation. What they do is no more than words or symbols, but are not insignificant, because they demonstrate disaccord with the powers that be.

Moderator: Vera Faber

About Vera Dubina

Vera Dubina (Bremen / Berlin) is a Research Associate (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Institute for East European History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, where her position is financed by the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung München. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Samara, Russia. She was university teacher at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Studies (Shaninka), Russia, and at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Vera Dubina was fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute for History.

She left Russia immediately after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in protest and was then a Researcher at Risk of the Humboldt Foundation at the Research Center for Eastern European Studies  Bremen. She publicly protests both the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and the Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories.

Her research areas are public history, memory cultures, everyday history, and theory of history.

Literature

Vera Dubina and Alexandra Arkhipova: “No Wobble”: Silent Protest in Contemporary Russia, in: Hidden Resistance to the Russian-Ukrainian War Inside Russia. ETH Zürich. Russian analytical digest, No. 291 (2.1.2023), p. 8-11.

Workshops

Historical Diversity Workshop (IFIKK)
UiO, April 28-29, 2023

Protest and Experiment in Ukraine and Russia: Intellectual and Artistic Strategies,
University of Belgrade, Serbia, September 29, 2023.

Guest Lectures

• "Gegen(-)Realismus“. Grenzüberschreitungen in der ukrainischen nonkonformistischen Photographie der 1970er- und 1980er-Jahre." (uris.ch), 12.12 2023, University of Basel.
• "Zur Transgressivität der ukrainischen Avantgarde(n): Kultur – Sprache – Medien“ (uris.ch), 14.12.2023, University of Basel.
• "Crossing Boundaries, Challenging Constraints – On Perspectives in Artistic and Curatorial Work." (uap.edu.pl), 8.1.2024, University of Arts, Poznan.

Outreach

Article about the project: In Soviet society, freedom of speech was never on offer

Collaborators

• Prof. Dr. Johan Schimanski (UiO)
• Prof. Dr. Susanne Frank (HU Berlin)
• Dr. Vera Dubina (HU Berlin)

Duration

01.11.2021 to 8.12.2024

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101024131.