Objectivity In The Gulag

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After the World War II, the testimonies of the recent tragic events played an important role in the war crimes trials that followed. It is largely owing to this fact that at one point the notion of complete objectivity of such evidence and, in particular, its relevance to the conviction assumed a universal character. Accounts of witnesses seemed not only to provide detailed reports of historical events but also to make us, as it were, eyewitnesses ourselves. However, a witness's objectivity can easily be questioned. One needs only to point out the infamous human factor: individual memory aberrations, post-traumatic effects, self-interest and other manifestations of personal emotions. In view of this, different mechanisms of justification of…show more content…
However, over the past few decades, their function has been ceaselessly criticized due mostly to a radical shift in the political climate that caused the revision of one's identity (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of Yugoslavia, armed conflicts etc.). The question that is especially pressing today is that of the relevance of such monumental art forms and the representation of related political narratives in the contemporary public…show more content…
The visual appeal of a landscape inevitably results in the aesthetic pleasure produced by the contemplation of nature; its 'intactness' and remoteness immediately exoticize the process of making sense of the territory itself. On the other hand, the use of statistics, mapping and the proliferation of infographics bring about the generalization of knowledge and turn the spatial representation of camps into a construction that paralyzes further critical and cultural understanding of the territory and history. In fact, the landscape is never stable, natural and neutral—it is always a site of production of history and contemporaneity by agents of influence in the political, ecological and economic spheres. Today, against a backdrop of climate change, camps are put at the service of commercial exploitation, tourism, new infrastructure, and a new use of natural resources. Is this representation of the territory in landscapes and statistics not a trick aimed at oblivion—an attempt to cover up the historical by the natural? Is this not an evidence of societal and cultural erasure of events from landscapes? And if so, what are the proper artistic and cultural strategies to adopt in this

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