The City And The Archive - Historical Interventions In The Public Record
Vera And Donald Blinken Open Society Archives
Budapest, Hungary
The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) at CEU actively collects, preserves, and makes openly accessible documents related to recent history and human rights. It also experiments with new ways to contextualize primary sources, developing innovative tools to explore, represent, or bridge traditional archival collections in a digital environment.In a five-week internship as part of my M.A. program, I got acquainted with a critical toolkit that will allow me to deal with historical falsifications in the public sphere, from the urban landscape to archival corpora. The city of Budapest provides an opportunity for a concrete exploration of political strategies of deception, belonging to the dictatorial regimes of the 20th century up to the populist autocracies of current times. The internship included lectures, guided walks in Budapest, and archival workshops. As part of the program, together with two other students I produced a twelve-minute documentary about Hungarian memory politics as they relate to the 1956 revolution, using the sites of Corvin köz and János Pal Pápa tér (Köztársaság tér)as a case study of places of (non)-memory. This internship trained me in the methodology of producing video pieces based on archival documents, and helped me to address the problems associated with archival (re-)use, and acquire notions about memory politics and Central European historical issues.