Book as Archive

After 2020, Belarus experienced a new rupture in collective memory. Mass repression and forced emigration were accompanied by the systematic restriction of access to independent media, cultural resources, archives, and other sources documenting contemporary Belarusian life. At the same time, people increasingly delete or hide their own digital traces, as political expression can lead to imprisonment. As a result, new gaps are emerging in the historical record not because events did not happen, but because preserving evidence has become dangerous.

This is not entirely new. Belarusian history has been shaped by war, occupation, political repression, censorship, and competing regimes that controlled public historical narratives, often leaving little space for personal experience and everyday life. Yet memory survives through quiet practices: photographs, testimonies, personal archives, cultural projects, and books.

The Book as Archive explores how a new wave of Belarusian books can become archival documents of a disappearing present. Using works by Lesia Pcholka and Julia Cimafiejeva, alongside the VEHA archive, we will discuss different forms of preserving memory and everyday history an everyday life that has itself become deeply political. The conversation asks how scattered personal fragments can preserve a history that official narratives attempt to erase.

In Belarusian / English.

Venue:
UQ-BAR-A-BA project space 
Schwedenstraße 16
13357 Berlin