The breakdown of Soviet-type communism is usually remembered as a global moment of hopeful change and social improvement. It is less often remembered as a confusing, disorienting and deeply ambiguous time. This paper explores how the Covid 19 pandemic as an unexpected crisis of global scale brings back and reactualizes experiences of the 1989/1991 transitions in Central Eastern Europe and globally, and explores how these memories of post-communist sentiments, experiences and encounters provide powerful material for alternative accounts of the crisis of Europe and global neoliberalism today.
For many years right-wing populism, the crisis of parliamentary democracy and the rise in neo-fascist movements seemed to be a problem of so-called Eastern European countries only. Today, however, it has become obvious that the political and social crisis we are witnessing affects all of Europe. This paper explores how Eastern European realities were revived, remembered, or relived in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic in order to ask what post-communist sites can tell us about the crisis of contemporary Europe today. We explore in particular the relation between post-communist and aesthetic experiences. The paper draws on recent research which highlights that as a liminal state outside of institutionalized structures and ideologies the post-communist experience cannot be remembered, lived or understood through narrative and conceptual accounts and instead requires sensual, artistic and transdisciplinary means to be explored and mobilized for critical thought and research (Pusca, 2015; Cvoro, 2018; Tlostanova, 2018). The paper therefore looks at artworks and aesthetically experienced encounters and events which engage with impressions, objects and sites of the post-1989 transitions and asks what we can know about the crisis of Europe and global neoliberalism if we use and unpack these post-communist sensations and psychosocial constellations in the particular forms in which they were revived and remembered in the context of the pandemic.
