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This article investigates unofficial memory projects that have arisen in Australia in response to the institutional abuse of children. While the role of activists in pushing for the enactment of state responses is beginning to be understood, activist demands for recognition have taken a multitude of forms beyond this. Unofficial memory projects are indicative of this, exemplified by a diverse range of publicly situated cultural forms that re-present abuse to wider audiences. Focusing on two examples that have arisen in Australia in recent years – the grassroots phenomenon known as Loud Fence that grew out of the Victorian town of Ballarat, and the Australian Orphanage Museum that was established by Care leavers in 2023 – I examine these as examples of memory activism which generate counter-archives of institutional violence against children. Loud Fence does so upon institutional fences at the level of the streetscape, while the AOM does so by curating a museum space that honours the experiences of childhood 'Care'. Seeking to decentre the state from this analysis, I demonstrate how such examples enliven the fast and slow violence of child abuse and neglect, and the role of non-state actors when it comes to the recalibration of collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the memory activism of three survivors of the Auschwitz resistance and explores the ways in which they linked fascism and genocide to economic exploitation. By doing so, our paper excavates a leftist-antifascist paradigm of postwar memory that waned with the advent of contemporary Holocaust culture. We analyse the memoirs of Oszkár Betlen, Bruno Baum, and Hermann Langbein, members of the international communist movement before, during, and after the Second World War. For these authors, calls to remember Auschwitz were inseparable from a struggle for social change in the present, and their memory practice was never restricted to writing. Therefore, our paper places their memoirs into the wider context of their political-organizational work, and shows that their efforts to commemorate Auschwitz responded to some pressing issues of their time, including the re-militarization and NATO-membership of the Federal Republic, reparations, amnesty and reintegration of former Nazis, and war crimes trials. Importantly, all these issues were intertwined with what they regarded as capitalist restoration and a looming resurgence of fascism. Our paper argues that the so-called economic case was central to their postwar campaigning because they believed that economic exploitation was central to fascism and had wide-ranging implications for postwar societies as well. Furthermore, we challenge the prevailing view on antifascism by demonstrating that for these authors the economic aspect of fascism did not eclipse the genocidal character of fascism and the specifically Jewish experience of it. In contrast to some Marxist historians, they did not see genocidal policies as merely derivative or secondary either. Rather, these leftist-antifascists commemorated Auschwitz in ways which regarded economic exploitation and genocide as interrelated and constitutive aspects of fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 documentary film They Call Me Babu utilises historical film footage including the home movies of one Dutch family with a voiceover in Bahasa Indonesia to narrate the fictionalised experiences of a former female domestic worker in the colonial Netherlands East Indies in the closing decades of Dutch colonial rule from 1939 to 1949. By centring the experiences of 'babu', women who worked as nannies and nursemaids for families holding European status, the Dutch-Indonesian director Sarah Beerends endeavours to make these women visible and to narrate their viewpoints. In this paper we argue, however, that the director's aspiration to centre the women's stories is haunted by the spectres of the colonial matrix of power. This leads to the unintended replication of nostalgic images of, and tropes about, the colony that has characterised earlier Dutch memory work. The film does not offer a critical engagement with colonial violence and the colonial structures of power are instead positioned as contributing to the nanny's gendered emancipation. Furthermore, we reflect on why, in the context of recent vociferous debates about colonial violence, a film which serves to soften images of Dutch colonialism, was generally well received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The afterlives of a monstrous colonial monument are being contested in the heart of Belgium. Engaging in a visual analysis of the PeoPL happening, facilitated by artivist Laura Nsengiyumva, I will argue that this visual proposition is witness to a renewed wave of revolt, altering a still very present colonial order, its vibrant properties of space and possibilities of time. By melting down an ice-reproduction of the equestrian statue of Leopold II, Nsengiyumva renders visible the lingering possibility to restructure the shared division of the sensible proper to the colonial present of Belgium and beyond. This wave of revolt opened a discursive space that altered the conditions through which difference was historically thematised. From (failed) multiculturalism, diversity, superdiversity and the present turn in securitisation through the misnomer of radicalisation, processes of inclusion/exclusion are for the first time in history being discussed on the conditions of the primary concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research essay contributes to the special issue "Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces" by examining memory activist art projects focused on three heritage sites in Warsaw from the perspective of the "decolonial option" as conceived by Madina Tlostanova. The essay's theoretical framework draws from memory studies and critical heritage studies by applying the notions of memory activism, heritage repression, reframing and re-emergence, and communities of implication. The empirical cases involve The Józef Rotblat Institute for Disarmament of Culture and Abolition of War (by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jarosław Kozakiewicz, 2016); The Próżna Project (curated by Krystyna Piotrowska, 2005–12); The Footbridge Was There (by Adam X, 2007); (...) Ellipsis (by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant, 2009); A Footbridge of Memory (by Tomasz Lec and Krzysztof Pasternak, 2011); and photographic interventions Palace LX (by Błażej Pindor, 2014) and PKiN (by Jacek Fota, 2015). In all those critical artistic projects the essay identifies a characteristic duality: not only do they address the legacies of foreign dependencies, but in addition, and with an eye on the future, seek to destabilize nation-oriented essentialist interpretations of those dependencies. The essay claims that such a dual decolonial approach constitutes a relevant critical heuristic tool for studying other cases in which the nationalistic framing of heritage and memory is the strongest decolonial response to the fall of empires and to their aftermaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Timor-Leste and Aceh, Indonesia, as case studies, this article examines the spaces that are imagined and created by activist-led commemorations of conflict-related violence. Focusing on recent commemorations of the Liquica Church Massacre in Timor-Leste and Simpang KKA in Aceh, it uncovers how these memory spaces are shaped and constrained by the interplay between the globally circulating discourse of transitional justice and the power dynamics resulting from the respective peace settlements. At the same time, it posits that these examples of memory activism contain creative possibilities for encouraging public debate and democratic participation, and for locally grounded forms of mourning. This is due to the multiple, dynamic, relational, spaces that emerge from the embodied encounters of those present at the commemorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]