Authors

Discussion

After forty years of Communist domination and control of collective memory in public space, in the decades since 1989 all post-socialist countries have witnessed intensive institutional efforts to reinterpret and resignify existing monuments and memorials of the recent past. These official projects have exhibited varying degrees of continuity and change in the spatial and gendered constructions of heroism, victimhood and perpetration, as well as notions of national belonging and collective inclusion/exclusion. As space has been used as a major narrative medium of official, national histories of Nazism and Communism, accordingly, spatial creativity has emerged as a corresponding reaction by diverse actors to express alternative versions of the recent past. This contribution analyzes one such example of spatial creativity in the post-socialist landscape of the Czech Republic: the ‘Living Audiodrama Lidice’ (2012). On this case study, the contribution explores spatial creativity as a form of political counterstrategy, collective activism, or method which can serve, in a variety of contexts, as a tool of resistance, communication, adaptation, reconciliation and retroactive empowerment.