Papers by Maria-Alina Asavei
Religions, 2024
There is currently a certain pressure from various mnemonic communities, animated by vernacular i... more There is currently a certain pressure from various mnemonic communities, animated by vernacular interests, to canonize new saints within what is regarded as the flawed saints’ cultural-political movement. Among these new, uncanonized saints, whose memory is commemorated unofficially in various cultural-political registers, there is also the football star Diego Armando Maradona, called by his millions of fans “the Hand of God” (La Mano de Dios). The commemorative culture that thrived around Maradona’s persona—materialized in artefacts, shrines, icon-like paintings, prints, graffiti, stencils, and other memorabilia—do not fit the customary narratives of sainthood, nor to the display and content of the recently inaugurated (2023) memorial to the new martyrs of both the 20th and 21st centuries at Saint Bartholomew Basilica in Rome. The article argues that the commemoration of Maradona by his fans in Italy, Argentina, and worldwide is enacted in pop culture formats aimed at addressing different sets of contemporary mnemonic and spiritual needs. The aim is to offer a fresh conceptual engagement with the contemporary cultural-political phenomenon of “flawed saints” commemoration through the lens of contemporary popular culture, taking the culture of commemoration of Diego Maradona as a case study.
Moffitt and Tormey's (2014) political style approach. In a nutshell, while the ideational approac... more Moffitt and Tormey's (2014) political style approach. In a nutshell, while the ideational approach concentrates on the content of populist discourse or ideology, the political style approach urges us to pay equal attention to its form. For example, we want to study populist aesthetics and its emotional appeal. Moffitt and Tormey write: … we define the concept of political style as the repertoires of performance that are used to create political relations. There are a wide range of political styles within the contemporary political landscape, including populist, technocratic, authoritarian and post-representative styles, all of which have their own specific performative repertoires and tropes that create and affect political relations. Key examples of practitioners of these respective political styles are Hugo Chávez, Angela Merkel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Subcomandante Marcos (2014:387). In this approach researchers are asked to focus their attention on the manner in which populist (particularly rightwing) performances (marches, rallies, demonstrations, etc.) are staged and thus can be seen as a specific form of political theatre. Two dimensions of this theatre need to be observed and analysed: the form and content of symbolic displays and performative styles. Another inspiration for WP3 researchers is Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony that 'man is not ruled by force alone, but also by ideas' (Bates, 1975:351). We aim at investigating the ideas and rationales which populist organizations and their promoters (within certain subcultural circles) use to mobilize individuals. We will explore the narrative structure and the key structural notions that chart major 'frames' and cognitive schemes that offer the rationale for political action and/or advocating certain political ideas. However, while we follow the mainstream direction of Gramsci's ideas, we apply them to dramatically changed social circumstances in that the main agents of social and political change are no longer opposing classes but defragmented individuals and subcultural groups that tend to recognize the relevance of a problem only if it is related to their particular (individual and/or subcultural) life experiences. Hence, various discourses of power are identified, and much attention is paid to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, where rules of the cultural-political game are defined by the hegemonic actors. 1.2. Methodological approaches and inspirations Taking into account the diversity of cases in WP3, we can divide them in line with the two basic approaches to studying culture mentioned above and corresponding to its three principal 'locations:' • In the 'heads' of the creator(s) in the form of their attitudes, intentions/plans, etc. • In the public space in the form of texts (signs, symbols, images, performances, etc.) • In 'heads' of receivers, the public, whose attitudes (or predispositions) are formed by the myriad processes of communication that together constitute the whole field of culture. Following this tradition, data will be collected via both methodologies: social-psychological (on attitudes) and semiotic (on texts). Five features of populism Culture: semiotic dimension (images, rhetorical figures, performances, etc.) Culture: socio-psychological dimension Examples Examples Vertical polarization Symbolism of anti-hierarchy. Discourses of 'elevation' vs 'equalization' Rejection of (any) hierarchy and anti-expert attitudes. Anti-science sentiments. Antagonism Discourse(s) (also visual) of enmity/antagonism (refugees as enemies) Attitudinal data on the societal-cultural polarization Manicheism Discourses on the 'divine'/moral legitimation of vertical polarization (Gender ideology, LGBTQ people-and their elite Evidence of strongly moralistic convictions/attitudes underpinning vertical polarization. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. 7 supporters-as an existential threat to the 'moral order') Popular sovereignty Discourses rejecting/mocking 'formalism' of politics (for example the necessity of checks and balances). Anti-democratic attitudes. The rise of authoritarianism (as a personality trait).
Art, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist Romania, 2020
Nationalities Papers, 2022
This article focuses on the privately created commemorative practice of getting the official port... more This article focuses on the privately created commemorative practice of getting the official portraits of three former socialist leaders as a tattoo: Nicolae Ceauşescu, Josip Broz Tito, and Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin). The mnemonic actors who have indulged in this practice after the 1990s contribute to a culture informed by vernacular memorials that conform to neither the official politics of remembrance and its aesthetics nor its content. Correspondingly, this article focuses on the aesthetic, political, and epistemic intricacies of remembering through the inked body. Unlike memorial tattoos that mark the recognition of a group that has suffered the same trauma, the commemorative tattoos analyzed in this article reflect a centrifugal set of identity concerns, ranging from Yugonostalgia to individualized spaces of self-healing and identity affirmation. The argument put forth is that tattoos can act as vernacular commemorations collected into a body archive of nostalgia for the ontological security of the past and "great leadership." Thus, the overarching question is not how and why people materialize memories through their bodies but rather to what ends the inked body accommodates commemorative representations of former political leaders who are usually depicted in public memory as "unworthy" of commemoration.
Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2022
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic co... more This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
While there are a few significant studies on the varieties of populism in post-socialist Romania,... more While there are a few significant studies on the varieties of populism in post-socialist Romania, little scholarly work on populists’ ethos of religious inspiration exists. This article addresses this lacuna from a cultural studies perspective, exploring popular culture’s productions of religious inspiration employed by the radical right populist entrepreneur George Becali, and it argues that the diversity of religiously encumbered cultural productions provide a significant insight into fleshing out the mechanisms of his messianic neo-populism. By employing a critical visual analysis and hermeneutics, this article aims to illuminate how a populist entrepreneur attracts potential supporters by using the rhetoric of nativism and ‘neo-traditional, autochthonous culture and religion’, purporting to reveal a mutual cultural ground between the messianic leader and ‘the people’. His political strategies are oftentimes packaged in cultural formats and discourses emphasising local religious ...
Eidos a Journal of Philosophy of Culture, 2021
This paper starts with a detailed analysis of Jan Assmann's qualitative distinction between cultu... more This paper starts with a detailed analysis of Jan Assmann's qualitative distinction between cultural memory and communicative memory. The purpose of this analysis is to highlight both the strengths and the limitations of this seminal distinction, and to also reflect on what cultural theorists and contemporary artists could learn through Assmann's distinction since artistic production also employs cultural memory formats that do not exclude cultural traditions in their materializations. In line with these considerations, this paper aims to disentangle what "tradition" means to contemporary artists. Following Edward Shils and Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophy of "tradition," the paper argues that cultural tradition does not necessarily have an oppressive character and the rebellion and suspicion against it is at the heart of tradition itself. Thus, the traditional/contemporary binary can be precluded by reconsidering how "tradition" and "traditional" are conceptualized considering philosophy of tradition and artistic memory.
Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality, Brill, 2021
he chapter argues that spiritual arts in Romania approach religious symbols in their own way, dis... more he chapter argues that spiritual arts in Romania approach religious symbols in their own way, disregarding the strict rules of the Byzantine Herminia in an attempt to enhance ‘the spiritual life of humanity’ through recalling ‘a creative Christianity.’ Starting with the end of the 1970s, formerly forbidden borrowings from religious art were accepted by communist cultural hegemony if they backed the official style of communist nationalism and the traditional folk ethos. The artistic production analyzed in this chapter reveals the ways in which open-ended cultural memories can be mixed with new myths and rituals, communicative memories and memories of repression, as well as identity politics.
Memory Studies
Both academic and popular culture discourses are inhabited by statements that “pathologize” the w... more Both academic and popular culture discourses are inhabited by statements that “pathologize” the ways Roma remember the Holocaust and other traumatic events. Against these claims, this article’s main aim is to explore contemporary artistic production from Austria which fosters “Roma will to memory” within an assemblage of political practices and discourses. To this end, I will explore Marika Schmiedt’s body of artistic memory work from 1999 to 2015, relying on a critical visual approach. The impetus for this exploration is Slawomir Kapralski’s assertion that the actual cases of active remembering and commemoration among Roma and Sinti would render the traditional approach to Roma as “people without memory and history” inaccurate. As this case study shows, there is no such a thing as “Roma indifference to recollection,” but rather, the testimony about the traumatic past is silenced or obstructed by the lack of the infrastructure, the bureaucracy of the archives, and the strategic forg...
Résurgences conflictuelles : le travail de mémoire entre art et histoire, 2021
Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2020
This paper lifts the curtain on the cross-fertilization of political resistance and theatre perfo... more This paper lifts the curtain on the cross-fertilization of political resistance and theatre performance in three post-socialist countries – Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary – by focusing on how theatre can function as sites of resistance to right-wing populism from a cross-cultural perspective. The argument is that theatre performance can function as a critical platform that engages strategies from popular culture to reveal the voices of those who are silenced by populist institutions and actors. Although resistance to populism through critical cultural production is very seldom addressed in academic studies dedicated to Central and Eastern Europe, we claim that theatre can illuminate fresh modes of political action and critical knowledge about world politics. The impetus for this study is Angela Marino’s claim that ‘populism is inseparable from the embodied, relational, and material aesthetics of performance.’ Thus, this paper focuses on contemporary theatrical performances that are put to the opposite end, namely to resist the cultural essentialism put forth by the right-wing populist entrepreneurs in Central and Eastern Europe.
Photography and Culture, 2020
This paper focuses on photography of everyday life in late socialist Romania, analyzing the photo... more This paper focuses on photography of everyday life in late socialist Romania, analyzing the photographic production of artists and vernacular photographs from private scrapbooks and collections. On a theoretical level, it disentangles questions concerning the production of ideological images; the political dimension of the act of photographing/documenting everyday life; the relationship between photography and cultural memory; the question of the forbidden gaze and the 'reality' of the visual document. The argument is that realism can be seen as a proclivity of certain kinds of photographs rather than inextricably associated with the medium of photography as such (the so-called 'indexical realism'). Supported by an in-depth analysis of visual sources and semi-structured interviews with visual artists active during those years, this paper highlights the relationship between photography and cultural hegemony and zooms in on the photograph's mnemonic abilities.
European Journal of Women's Studies, 2019
Études Balkaniques, 2018
From 2002 to 2015 a considerable number of large-scale, geopolitical
bannered exhibitions have be... more From 2002 to 2015 a considerable number of large-scale, geopolitical
bannered exhibitions have been dedicated to the ‘the Balkans.’ This article aims to analyze and compare two types of regional, large scale exhibitions from/on the Balkans: contemporary art exhibitions and interpretative (dedicated to historical and ethnographic themes) exhibitions. The pervasiveness of the stereotypical visual representations of ‘the Balkans’ – called by the Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev the ‘Balkan blue’ – as a region of everlasting conflicts and binary oppositions coincides with the birth of contemporary Balkan art. By attempting to overcome the stereotypical images of the Balkans (‘the Balkan ethos’) still prevalent in our days, the travelling exhibition ‘Imagining the Balkans: Identities and Memory in the Long 19th Century’ – opened in Ljubljana (Slovenia) at the National Museum of
Slovenia, in April 2013 and then displayed in other national museums of history from the Balkan region – endeavors to place national histories in a perspective where they interact.
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230.2019.1565704, 2019
This paper addresses the role of artistic memory in processes of redressing political violence an... more This paper addresses the role of artistic memory in processes of redressing political violence and historical injustices. Combining philosophical reflection, insights from memory studies and examples of artistic practices, it focuses on how memory and imagination coalesce in problematising mass violence against women and resisting its ‘official’ oblivion. The argument is that artistic memory work can foster collective memories of the painful past in ways that overcome both individual and national representations. To this end, this paper
aims to explore various contemporary art productions as new models of
memorialization, which deal with the representation of violence against
women in armed conflicts and under political repression. The academic literature on the role of art in processes of dealing with the past tends to examine literature, film, theatre, painting and other more traditional artistic media of commemorating the victims of mass violence. In contrast, this paper explores the political potentialities of new artistic models of memorialization, namely participatory and collaborative artistic practices. Unlike the traditional media, they can commemorate victims performatively and collaboratively, simultaneously catalysing transnational solidarity and new forms of politics ‘from
below.’
Textile: Cloth and Culture https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14759756.2018., 2019
This paper explores the means and ends to which textiles are employed by contemporary Romanian ar... more This paper explores the means and ends to which textiles are employed by contemporary Romanian artists in their intermedial practices. The history of textile arts in Romania’s cultural-political sphere has received little academic attention in studies dedicated to recent history. The argument put forth is that tapestry, rugs, and other textiles associated in the past with undervalued housework or folk art—and ranked as a lower form of artistry in the artistic hierarchy—are reinvested with political, critical, and mnemonic meanings. The first section addresses the convoluted relationship between textile arts and Romania’s communist era during Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime by highlighting the ways in which the authoritarian state supervised and controlled the production of so-called folk textile art to political ends. The next sections elaborate on the artistic production of Geta Brătescu, Ana Lupaş, and Ion Grigorescu, all of whom produced contemporary textile art—often derogatorily called “applied art”—whose meanings and purposes eluded the official requirements of national folk art. In the last section the paper scrutinizes the political, critical, and artistic comeback of textile arts as cultural memory since the fall of the communist regime in 1989.
Both academic and popular culture discourses are inhabited by statements that " pathologize " the... more Both academic and popular culture discourses are inhabited by statements that " pathologize " the ways Roma remember the Holocaust and other traumatic events. Against these claims, this article's main aim is to explore contemporary artistic production from Austria which fosters " Roma will to memory " within an assemblage of political practices and discourses. To this end, I will explore Marika Schmiedt's body of artistic memory work from 1999 to 2015, relying on a critical visual approach. The impetus for this exploration is Slawomir Kapralski's assertion that the actual cases of active remembering and commemoration among Roma and Sinti would render the traditional approach to Roma as " people without memory and history " inaccurate. As this case study shows, there is no such a thing as " Roma indifference to recollection, " but rather, the testimony about the traumatic past is silenced or obstructed by the lack of the infrastructure, the bureaucracy of the archives, and the strategic forgetting politics.
Analize: Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies, 2017
This paper addresses a lacuna in the history and memory of (post-) communist women's labour. It a... more This paper addresses a lacuna in the history and memory of (post-) communist women's labour. It aims to investigate how and to what ends the artistic production from Romania and the former Czechoslovakia illuminate " forgotten " histories of women's labour, reclaiming at the same time a public sphere where " Her-stories " and labour-related memories can be materialized for critical-political ends. In the cultural memory of the transition from communism to democracy and capitalism, certain lieux de mémoire (places of memory) have been preserved and materialized in official cultural formats, whereas other places of memory (both physical and mental) are disregarded and condemned to become lieux d'oubli (sites of forgetting). More often than not, both in the Romanian and the former Czechoslovakian context, the histories and memories of women's labour are deemed " unworthy " of remembrance and tend to be obscured from the official cultures of remembrance and their institutions. As this paper argues, although the official narratives of various work environments from Eastern European regions tend to conceal the presence of women and lack a comprehensive historiography on women and gender some artistic productions enact " feminist counter-narratives " and counter-memories for political ends. We claim that the political dimension of these artistic productions should not be underestimated. These feminist artworks attempt to combine a politics of memory, activism, a history from below, and artistry to reach political ambitions. At a theoretical level, this paper is informed by Amy Mullin's considerations on feminist artistic production and the political imagination. In feminist art, which attempts to revive the memory of women's labour, the political imagination plays a crucial role in fostering community knowledge and experiential knowledge through simultaneously envisioning more equitable futures (economical, political, social) for both men and women.
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Papers by Maria-Alina Asavei
bannered exhibitions have been dedicated to the ‘the Balkans.’ This article aims to analyze and compare two types of regional, large scale exhibitions from/on the Balkans: contemporary art exhibitions and interpretative (dedicated to historical and ethnographic themes) exhibitions. The pervasiveness of the stereotypical visual representations of ‘the Balkans’ – called by the Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev the ‘Balkan blue’ – as a region of everlasting conflicts and binary oppositions coincides with the birth of contemporary Balkan art. By attempting to overcome the stereotypical images of the Balkans (‘the Balkan ethos’) still prevalent in our days, the travelling exhibition ‘Imagining the Balkans: Identities and Memory in the Long 19th Century’ – opened in Ljubljana (Slovenia) at the National Museum of
Slovenia, in April 2013 and then displayed in other national museums of history from the Balkan region – endeavors to place national histories in a perspective where they interact.
aims to explore various contemporary art productions as new models of
memorialization, which deal with the representation of violence against
women in armed conflicts and under political repression. The academic literature on the role of art in processes of dealing with the past tends to examine literature, film, theatre, painting and other more traditional artistic media of commemorating the victims of mass violence. In contrast, this paper explores the political potentialities of new artistic models of memorialization, namely participatory and collaborative artistic practices. Unlike the traditional media, they can commemorate victims performatively and collaboratively, simultaneously catalysing transnational solidarity and new forms of politics ‘from
below.’
bannered exhibitions have been dedicated to the ‘the Balkans.’ This article aims to analyze and compare two types of regional, large scale exhibitions from/on the Balkans: contemporary art exhibitions and interpretative (dedicated to historical and ethnographic themes) exhibitions. The pervasiveness of the stereotypical visual representations of ‘the Balkans’ – called by the Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev the ‘Balkan blue’ – as a region of everlasting conflicts and binary oppositions coincides with the birth of contemporary Balkan art. By attempting to overcome the stereotypical images of the Balkans (‘the Balkan ethos’) still prevalent in our days, the travelling exhibition ‘Imagining the Balkans: Identities and Memory in the Long 19th Century’ – opened in Ljubljana (Slovenia) at the National Museum of
Slovenia, in April 2013 and then displayed in other national museums of history from the Balkan region – endeavors to place national histories in a perspective where they interact.
aims to explore various contemporary art productions as new models of
memorialization, which deal with the representation of violence against
women in armed conflicts and under political repression. The academic literature on the role of art in processes of dealing with the past tends to examine literature, film, theatre, painting and other more traditional artistic media of commemorating the victims of mass violence. In contrast, this paper explores the political potentialities of new artistic models of memorialization, namely participatory and collaborative artistic practices. Unlike the traditional media, they can commemorate victims performatively and collaboratively, simultaneously catalysing transnational solidarity and new forms of politics ‘from
below.’