IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

How does memory embed in the city? Where do we see it manifest? And, where does it slip into the realms invisibility in the otherwise everyday city, even if still materially present? In addressing these questions and telling a story of embedded memory in the city of Kraków, Poland, we venture into the everyday landscape. This visible and accessible public landscape is the former moat, but now parkland surrounding the Old Town called the Planty. To enter Kraków’s central market square, one pass through the Planty. Embedded in the Planty are sites of memory that reference the Romantic Era, a period of Polish history when the Polish language – as a suppressed vernacular – was a principal avenue for the perpetuation of Polish national and cultural identity. In the Planty, the visibility of cultural representation in the present-day language speaks to past invisibility, but to what effect? Johnson (1995) has suggested that geographers have underutilised public monuments as a vehicle for conceptualising nation building. Following Johnson, I explore how identity narratives have been publicly, and sometimes subliminally, (re)produced and transmitted through the material sites of memory. Reading the Planty’s landscape, I focus on how sites of memory, positioned in central and largely pedestrianised public places, embed messages of resistance such that they also become sites of national identity too. To prod at the effect and affect of such embedded national memories, I also draw on data from an emplaced survey in which I asked Poles, in the Planty, about the references to national and cultural memory therein. The paper then also explores the capacity of visible representations of memory to instil and convey Polish national identity in/to the present too.