10.10.2019   h.11:00 – 12:30

Collaboration with Re-Connect / Re-Collect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods

Lead by Zsuzsa Millei and Nelli Piattoeva from Tampere University

The project entails an international collaboration between researchers and artists to connect the public across geopolitical, historical, and sociocultural divides through memories of childhood. It addresses concerns related to the rise of new walls and divisions in Europe and the world. Exactly thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, rising nationalism, right-wing populism, and legacies of the Cold War ideology continue to partition the world, heightening tensions and halting dialogues. As our previous research on childhood memories in the era of state-socialisms demonstrated, everyday experiences of childhood, while being shaped by the existing geopolitical divisions, still managed to cross these divides and thus escaped imposed boundaries. Childhood experiences (re)told in memory stories reveal connections among different societies in everyday life.