Accessing campscapes: inclusive strategies for using European conflicted heritage #3

Considers the genealogies, representations and interpretations of campscapes, as topical for Europe’s political and cultural histories of the last century. As objects of analysis, these sites of memory are both configurations of contemporary social and political events and expressions of the past. In this overlap, the afterlives of the sites and their future as memorials or spaces of commemoration are articulated today through the dynamics of narratives, materiality and personal biographies of witnesses or survivors. The constant rewriting of their historical underpinnings, proper to sites of memory under the constant guise of claims and appropriations, brings to light complex and often divisive and selective remembrance connotations of such spaces practiced today. In order to understand the complex memorial cultures attached to such sites, the team approaches (un)official historical interpretations which operate in relation to them and their connections to memorial paradigms and public usages of history, their particular archaeology, fluctuations in the display of memorials, framings of material traces and divergent negotiations of communities of experience.