Nostalgic and Retro-Aesthetic Constellations in Eastern Europe: The Case of the Daily Life Museums of Communism

This presentation will provide a comparative overview of a common memorialization strategy in several countries in Eastern Europe, that of the daily life museums of communism which testify to an aestheticization of communist visual culture in recent years. These alternative spaces use objects of the daily life during communism to reconstruct an affective, personalized version of the past for the citizens of the ex-communist countries. We will discuss several cases of “nostalgia entrepreneurs” in Romania (The museum of the communist consumer in Timisoara, Ferestroika in Bucharest), the Czech Republic (Museum of Communism), Bulgaria (Retro Museum), and Poland (PRL Museum). The presentation argues there is a transnational memory of communism at work in Eastern Europe which sees the use of a depoliticized approach of the communist past and which focuses on the “retro-aesthetics” of communism, a colorized version of the past. Additionally, contemporary artists in the region have engaged in their artworks with the nostalgic outlook of Eastern European societies as the works by Ciprian Muresan (Romania), Armando Lulaj (Albania), or Nedko Solakov (Bulgaria) show. This nostalgic discourse emphasizes a retro-aesthetics that embraces positive aspects such as modernist architecture, the cleanliness of design. Moreover, communist products have become “vintage” and are acquired by hipsters as valuable products, “cool”, imbued with a pop aesthetic. This can be seen in the sale of communist products by auction houses or in the case of pubs and bars that use vintage communist objects to decorate their venues.