This panel examines contemporary artistic and cultural practices that engage critically with the legacies of authoritarian regimes through site-specific, media-based, and performative interventions in public space. Drawing on case studies from Germany, Taiwan, Serbia and its diaspora, and émigré artistic production in Britain, the speakers investigate how memory is not only represented but actively negotiated and reconfigured in the present. Across these diverse contexts, the papers question the notion of historical “breaks”—whether articulated as Stunde Null, democratization, or national renewal—foregrounding instead the persistence of unresolved tensions, affective residues, and structural continuities. Official frameworks of memory, such as denazification processes or institutionalized commemorative sites, are shown to stabilize singular narratives that risk producing passive or constrained modes of engagement. In contrast, the panel highlights practices that unsettle these frameworks by inviting participants to inhabit history as something lived, contested, and ongoing, rather than fixed or monumentalized. By foregrounding the aesthetic strategies artists use to unsettle normative modes of remembering, this panel considers how the arts function not only as vehicles of historical critique but also as vital forms of civic practice—shaping how societies reckon with their pasts in the face of democratic fragility.
Astrid Schmetterling, Goldsmiths, University of London "Denazification – an Incomplete Project: Samuel Fischer Glaser and Angela Stiegler’s 'commemorative walking theatre' Au au au Hi hi hi"
Germany’s capitulation in May 1945 was described as “Stunde Null” (Hour Zero), as a complete break with the Nazi past and a transition to democracy. The occupying Allied Forces implemented a denazification programme which, apart from disbanding Nazi organisations and trying prominent Nazis for war crimes, included issuing questionnaires to ascertain individuals’ level of Nazi involvement and removing any members of the Nazi Party or SS from positions of power. But the sheer number of people with some level of involvement led to the ultimate failure of the process. By the end of the 1940s, many former Nazis were back in their posts.
Samuel Fischer Glaser and Angela Stiegler’s “commemorative walking theatre” Au Au Au Hi Hi Hi (2025) is concerned with the artists whose thriving careers under the Nazi regime continued after the war. Anton Hiller, one of the protagonists of the performance project, became a professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1946, continued winning commissions for public sculptures, many of which are still on view. The other protagonist of the project is Philipp Auerbach, Bavaria’s “State Commissioner for racial, religious and political victims of National Socialism”, whose determined support for reparations for the survivors of the holocaust brought him many enemies. By juxtaposing these two figures in Brechtian style performances in front of Hiller’s sculptures in Munich’s public space, the project posits both the processes of denazification and reparation as unfinished. My paper will explore the effects of the “commemorative walking theatre” on the audience and the meaning of staging such a project at a time when democracy is facing challenges in many parts of the world.
Chuchun Hsu, École nationale supérieure d'architecture et de paysage de Lille - "Redistribution of the sensible: Flâneur Théâtre and the Reanimation of White Terror Memory in Taipei’s Urban Space"
After Taiwan’s nearly four-decade-long White Terror period (1949-1987) ended, the process of democratization prompted the establishment of state-sanctioned sites of memory. While intended for historical preservation, these commemorative infrastructures often consolidate a singular moral narrative where the White Terror is remembered exclusively as a tragedy of wrongful persecution. Such framing produces passive memory, inviting remembrance primarily through static displays of suffering. While the narrative rightly acknowledges the pain of political victims, democratization is frequently articulated through a script of trauma and redemption, leaving limited space for alternative affects, interpretations, or contemporary resonances. Following George Di-di Huberman, this oversaturation of memory risks numbing rather than activating affections toward history. This limited perceptual framework — or what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible” — raises a critical question: is it possible, through artistic intervention, to unsettle this official perception framework and redistribute the sensible?
This article analyzes the theatre works of the Against Again Troupe and their method of Flâneur Théâtre, inspired by Walter Benjamin. The theatrical form involves audience wandering through urban spaces, layering the city’s present with audio, allowing them to simultaneously receive multiple sensory experiences and develop their own interpretation of the narrative. By traversing Taipei while broadcasting letters written by political victims of the White Terror, these walking-based spatial dramaturgies transform the city into a contested terrain of memory. In doing so, Flâneur Théâtre thus demonstrates how art can facilitate an embodied, participatory remembrance, enabling citizens to reinhabit history beyond the monumental narrative of democratization.
Nela Milic "Student protests in Serbia as the site of mobilisation for the UK diaspora" In 2024, the students begun commemorating the victims of the canopy collapse in Novi Sad station by the 15min silence across Serbia. This was the mark of dissatisfaction with the regime’s dodgy deals and the corruption that caused these deaths. Now, this is the largest students’ protest in Europe since 1968 and its peaceful nature earned the students a nomination for the Nobel Peace prize. Diaspora rallies with both – the students and the citizens that arouse against the government. The Serbian diaspora in the UK has been gathering in pockets for decades, at film or music festivals featuring Balkan artists, but unlike other migrant groups in the UK, we never advertised our presence, scared by the role many of our national representatives played and then all of us got in the 90s because of the Balkan wars. The current protests in Serbia against the regime and state corruption changed this. We congregated around our young, reflecting on our contribution to country’s history, worried for friends and family we left behind. We consoled ourselves in the conversations with people we knew in Serbia, followed and offered support online and via campaigns we run in our circles, till an invitation for in-person event arrived on a UK Diaspora For Students WhatsApp group. We gathered a few times in front of the Embassy, then we organised talks, the choir, vigils in front of the Tate Modern, but also in Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh etc. So, after decades of hiding, we became a community. This paper will explore this process through an ethnographic record, marking important events on the way to re-claiming our belonging to the Serbian nation, asserting new memories we had and generated in the UK where we finally dared, thanks to the students back home to become part of a UK diaspora.
Rebecca Harris "Only this fertile garden within..." Resilience and the internal life: on reading the art of Hilde Goldschmidt When first encountering the Lake District, Goldschmidt (1897–1980) was overwhelmed by a melancholy for the mountainous range of Kitzbühel, matched with the desire to draw. Goldschmidt moved to the region in 1942, creating works including Awake and Dreaming – the first artwork the artist recognised as representing “more than a visual experience.” Here, hidden on the Langdale Estate, Goldschmidt painted The Sphinx, 1948, feeling herself perceived as an “unknown quantity”. For Federici, the body is the sphinx, to be “interrogated and acted upon on the path toward social and individual change,” and yet, as she contends, it is an impossible task to articulate a coherent idea of the body. Instead, we might consider the permeability of a generative being (Cixous). For the émigré, to “inhabit space” (Ahmed), is often a negotiation of vulnerability, while the sphinx acts as a presence exposing the vulnerability at the core of all humanity (Kindt), regardless of structures and societal expectation. Goldschmidt felt a deep connection between her being and the universe, in joy and in grief. This awareness provided inner resilience that, as J.P. Hodin describes, “became the nucleus of her art.” In painting we find elements of her teacher Kokoschka’s lyrical brushstrokes, the Dadaist’s celebration of unreasonable order and her friend Schwitter’s romantic attempt at a “oneness with nature”. While, a feminist analysis shifts these “frames of intelligibility”, presenting a multilayered artistic development, negotiating a life ‘in flux’, through art, literature and dance. Thus asking, when defamiliarizing language and meaning making, how might the creative spirit and emotional impulse resonate in the act of artmaking?
