May was a busy month for our team. In the mid of the month, our PI Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska and researcher Karina Hoření attended the conference “Postcolonial, Decolonial, Postimperial, Deimperial” organised by the ERC CoG “Revenant—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation”, affiliated at the University of Rijeka.
In their presentation titled “Industrial Specters Interwoven with a Carpet: a Story of Post-Imperial Nostalgia in Northern Bohemia”, Karina and Karolina presented a case study of a carpet produced in Vratislavice/Maffersdorf in the 1920s, that was lost after World War II but recently found. Currently, it is displayed in the new local library. They argued that the story of the carpet, seen as a ghost of the past, could be interpreted as a story of forgetting and remembering not only the Austro-Hungarian, but also German heritage in Central Europe. They pointed out both physical patterns on the carpet and its meanings but also the patterns of remembering the carpet and its producers, showing how the stories of success and missing glory, comprised with this object, are entangled with one another.
The conference hosted many acclaimed scholars who shared our interest in the entangled history of European empires and their material remnants. You can watch keynote speeches on the YouTube channel of Center for Advanced Studies of University of Rijeka.
Our team members participated in lively discussions after each presentation. You can browse presentation summaries (including ours) in the booklet available here.
