Forum Introduction: Materiality and (In-)Visibility

Abstract The following articles by Anastasia Papushina and Raino Isto are part of the forum “Materiality and (In-)Visibility: Women in Socialist and Post-Socialist Public Spaces” developed by Julie Deschepper, Milica Prokić, and Hana Gründler.1 This forum is derived from the eponymus trans-disciplinary research project they lead together. The project evolved through a series of conversations with scholars working on Ukraine, Albania, the Czech Republic, Yugoslavia, and Russia, a slow conference which ran over the course of 2020 and 2021. Through this broad regional focus, the project explores the multiple presences of women within socialist and post-socialist public spaces, focusing on their representations, monumentalizations, and memorializations. These two articles presented here build on the proceedings of one of the project’s core outcomes, the international workshop “She is Made of Stone—Women in Socialist and Post-Socialist Public Spaces,” which took place in September 2021 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.2