PostModernism Museum presented the international conference From Archive to Arena: Culture, Memory and Resilience — Eastern European Perspectives at Frihamnsdagarna 2026, the Gothenburg democracy festival, held this year under the theme Olika röster – gemensam framtid («Different voices – a common future»).
The conference was organised with the support of the Cantemir Programme 2026 of the Romanian Cultural Institute, in partnership with Space-time Works (Lund) and Radio Romania International, and held in English.
Its question was how historical narratives, images and cultural symbols are weaponised, and how art and visual culture can instead serve as sources of democratic resilience. Four Romanian scholars and practitioners, working at the intersection of geopolitics, history, culture, memory and democratic resilience, examined how totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have constructed, disseminated and recycled cultural narratives, from Cold War propaganda to contemporary digital disinformation.
The panel sat inside a live European policy moment: the November 2025 ministerial Declaration on the Necessity of Culture and Media as a Safeguard for Our European Democracies, the European Democracy Shield and the Culture Compass for Europe adopted the same month, and, in June 2026, the joint declaration Europe for Culture, Culture for Europe, the first time the Parliament, the Council and the Commission have committed jointly to protecting and supporting culture.
The project also drew on primary archival research carried out since 2015 within PMM’s DARE programme — Documentation, Archiving, Re-evaluation, Exhibition — and marking that programme’s first international presentation in the Nordic countries.
Burak Sayin — the frame
Burak Sayin — Cultural strategist and urban innovation expert at Space-time Works Lund, PhD researcher at Lund University and former journalist with Associated Press Television News.
Two parades, one Polish and full of tanks, one Ukrainian with no soldiers and only drones and robots, circulated by David Petraeus from a Dutch AI specialist. The point is not the weapons but the parallel shift: as the instruments of war change, so do the narratives and the way images are constructed. Against this, a personal marker — Euromaidan 2013, when the informational reality changed overnight and images arrived with no traceable origin. The reason for asking Romanian researchers is not regional curiosity but the fact that the region has the longest continuous European experience of living inside manufactured narratives, with the archives and the research to document it. And a European policy layer that makes the question institutional rather than academic: the declaration signed by culture and media ministers of 26 member states placing culture and heritage inside European security policy, the Democracy Shield, and the Culture Compass.
Antonia Colibășanu — the architecture of vulnerability
Antonia Colibășanu — Senior Geopolitical Analyst at Geopolitical Futures and Associate Professor of geopolitics and geoeconomics at SNSPA Bucharest, formerly partner for Europe at Stratfor
Geopolitics operates on three simultaneous levels — political, economic, military — and the same image works on all three at once. Defence today is collective and individual at the same time, because the social network is virtually everywhere and individual perception feeds directly into political stability.
Trust is structured and hierarchical: family, friends, community leaders, some colleagues and not others. A click is not driven by interest but by a problem — an unemployed friend, a colleague who cannot get medication fast enough. That is where the match occurs: the overlap between a real social vulnerability and the strategic interest of an external actor. This is the mechanics of FIMI, foreign influence through disinformation, understood as a form of propaganda that binds the political, economic and military layers together. Foreign actors never arrive on empty ground; they arrive where the grievance already exists.
Romania sits in a double borderland — geographically at the eastern flank where east meets west, and in the borderland of trust, where the operative question is who trusts whom and who exploits that trust. The analytical caveat she supplies is significant: over 60% (65% in the material shown) of monitored attack narratives are unattributed at source, which makes it more plausible that they are domestically and politically motivated first, and instrumentalised by foreign actors second.
Her closing move is a question rather than an answer: what in memory and culture actually defends us, what tells a society that the harm should not be repeated.
Cosmin Popa — the long durée of the method
Cosmin Popa — Historian and senior researcher at the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy, specialist in the history of the USSR and Russia
The parade comparison describes the present, not the future: Russia paraded people without hardware, Ukraine hardware without people — a picture of Ukrainian manpower shortage and Russian shortage of military imagination.
Three long-term historical patterns. First, the Ukrainian factor in imperial Russian thinking since the mid-19th century: no Russian empire and no Russian power without Ukraine, believed sincerely rather than instrumentally. Second, anti-liberal opposition as a permanent political tool, traceable to the Napoleonic wars, hardened after the Crimean defeat, and used by every Russian government regardless of ideological colour. This forces a re-evaluation of the 1990s: the compatriots doctrine was formulated not by Lavrov, then a modest bureaucrat, but by Kozyrev, one of the celebrated Russian democrats; Chubais in 1993 spoke of a Russian liberal imperialism defined as control of energy and transport infrastructure and of the main plants in the former Soviet republics. Russification of those republics went deeper after 1991 than during the USSR, precisely because Soviet ideology had imposed limits on it. Third, Russia missed every technological revolution except the cybernetic one, which it absorbed at Western pace because it recognised a cheap and effective instrument for controlling political processes elsewhere — cheap by comparison with Soviet-era «fraternal aid» to revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America.
The Romanian crisis, by contrast, has almost nothing to do with Russia at origin: a crisis of democratic parties, of institutional credibility, and of the credibility of professional expertise, overlaid on a crisis of the education system — the weaker the education system, the deeper the political crisis. The Romanian specificity is the diaspora and decades of state mismanagement of it. Communist-era political émigrés integrated well into host societies; post-1989 migrants are largely marginal economically and socially and, through technology, live inside a Romanian cultural bubble — physically abroad, mentally and emotionally at home, voting and exerting continuous pressure on Bucharest. Russia understood this and, despite the language barrier that historically blocked such influence, has built an anti-Romanian, anti-Western, anti-liberal and anti-capitalist Romania inside the diaspora, culturally reprogrammed around 19th-century «traditional values».
Later in the discussion he sharpens the diagnosis: this is not a debate with opponents of democracy who might be persuaded, but with people who consider themselves illuminated and in possession of ultimate truth — there can be no trust between heaven and hell. The grievance is real, but the message built on top of it is engineered to produce despair about democracy as a functioning system and to pull societies into a real frenzy of civil ideological war. And the deeper substrate is a crisis of cognitive capacity, not merely of knowledge: millions who do not know Europe is a continent or that Sweden was once an empire — a vacuum where propaganda now functions as education, delivered on TikTok, offering not a traumatic past but a bright one with Russia and its dictators at the centre.
Adrian Cioflâncă — memory as unstable ground
Adrian Cioflâncă — Researcher at the “A. D. Xenopol” Institute of History in Iași and director of the “Wilhelm Filderman” Centre for the Study of the History of Jews in Romania
The starting image is the Yahad-In Unum map: thousands of marked and unmarked mass killing sites across Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Moldova and Poland — Snyder’s bloodlands. Romania had 51 years of dictatorship in the 20th century: three versions of fascist dictatorship between 1938 and 1944, then two versions of communist regime, with 1938–1965 exceptionally violent in ethnic cleansing and political repression. Hence Tony Judt’s archipelago of memories, and the two concepts that organise his argument: memory tribes — political groupings with incompatible memories and ideologies of the past — and the civil war of memories they can produce.
The Romanian answer to this was institutional and dual: the 2004 International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania chaired by Elie Wiesel, followed two years later by the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship chaired by Vladimir Tismăneanu. Both produced reports, books and official state acknowledgement, and both generated real change in research, memorialisation and education, plus a political taboo that held for two decades: no politician could deny the Holocaust or rehabilitate Ceaușescu. That golden period of open archives and new curricula is now perceptibly ending.
The structural flaw in the Romanian solution was separation. Unlike Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance or the Baltic and Ukrainian institutions, which treat the two dictatorships together because both were experienced as occupation, Romania sent the two fields down separate highways. This bought social peace — the two academic camps do not fight, they ignore each other — at the cost of the connections between them, which are numerous and consequential for present-day debate.
A second structural problem is the archives themselves: destroyed, or removed. In 1944 the Soviets sent teams to locate the trains carrying archives and took them to Odessa, Chișinău and Cernăuți, together with parts of Romania’s own holdings. Studying mass killings committed in Romania now requires Moscow, where parts of the Antonescu archive are held and are no longer accessible; and Ukrainians studying their own past must come to Romania. The conclusion is practical: regional cooperation is needed not only in military and economic terms but between historians and archives.
In the discussion he adds the counter-narrative problem: the counter-narrative is often produced by the same person. Because Romania passed through so many dictatorial versions, the archives contain three, four, five, six versions of the same person’s autobiography, each rewritten under political and cultural pressure. One person forced to tell many stories about himself creates an identity problem — and the same holds for the country, whose canonical version of its own recent past has changed repeatedly in fifty years. A single official history is not desirable, but some minimal agreement on general facts is.
His final theme is the collapse of the interlocutor. To the multiplicity of voices produced by social media and the internet — the hyper-democratisation of society — must be added virtual voices and anonymous voices. Bot traffic recently exceeded human traffic on the internet for the first time, and is expected to multiply; his own centre’s summer school posts were selected as a bot target and flooded with fake messages, from which one would then draw conclusions about society. With artificial intelligence there are now anonymous voices in knowledge and in social interaction, in the social-media version of it. Because we deal with so many personas, fake identities and fake voices, it becomes very difficult to organise proper dialogue in the old classic model of democracy. The unanswered question is procedural and fundamental: whom are we talking to, and who is the «us» that is supposed to be represented.
Cosmin Nasui — the human cost and the limits of art history
Cosmin Nasui — Art historian, critic and curator, coordinator of the DARE programme at PostModernism Museum and founder of modernism.ro
Careers in art in this part of Europe were built in two parts, one civilian and one non-civilian, because everything in the second half of the 20th century was entangled with propaganda, ideology and the security apparatus. What is taught as Romanian art history is the official record — history mixed with propaganda and with Securitate involvement, part of how Romania fought the Cold War, preceded by the war of images in the Second World War.
The opening of the archives after the two commissions makes the scale visible. The Syndicate of Romanian Artists, the single professional body, had around 600 members in the early 1950s; more than 200 passed through the detention system — prisons, labour camps, other forms of detention — in successive waves in 1952, 1956 and after. That is roughly a third of the artistic community. Most of them do not appear in art history at all after the moment of arrest; those who reappear are largely the ones recruited by the Securitate and thereby able to recover professional status. The rest were erased, excluded from academic research, removed from official records, absent from the artists’ dictionary, or listed as minor. Some were detained under the far-right Antonescu regime, some under communism, some under both.
Methodologically, standard art history fails on these cases. Artists who worked after detention often stopped signing and dating their works; the trauma transfers into the aesthetic object, but reading it psychologically or as art therapy is not legitimate, because there is no clinical status and no family record to support it, and anonymising the names to do so is not a solution.
Each biography exists in competing versions, following the three-way scheme attributed to interwar intelligence chief Moruzov: what the prisoner says under investigation, now in the penal files of the former secret archive; what the prisoner told cellmates, surviving in others’ memoirs; and what the prisoner kept for himself — the third being what tended to survive after 1989. For those recruited, there is a fourth: the record of how they worked for the regime, the transformation from tortured to supporter, plus the post-detention control files. In the case of Lena Constante, comparing the penal file with her own three books and with others’ memoirs produces no matches — dates, people and situations conflict. Writing art history from any single one of these narratives means losing the larger picture and the meaning of what happened. This makes heroic or martyrological framing as inadequate as blanket condemnation: context changes the person, and the person reacts in order to survive.
The same problem reappears in the museum. Visitors respond aesthetically to works whose authorship carries a criminal or collaborationist history they are not told about; without the link to the larger history rather than the history of aesthetics, they simply miss what they are looking at. The Caravaggio comparison makes the general point — knowing that his saints were painted from prostitutes and that he was pursued for his crimes changes what the image is.
On truth, the crucial idea: the solution adopted in the 1990s and 2000s for finding a common truth in culture was to abandon the single version of history, literature or art in favour of micro-histories for everything. But micro-histories do not assemble like a puzzle. Each represents the truth of a community, and they enter into conflict with one another, so no larger picture emerges. Truth cannot be national or imperial — but it also cannot be purely local or regional, because then nothing coheres and everyone ends up representing only themselves.
His most unsettling observation concerns propaganda’s afterlife. Communist-era grievances are no longer registered as grievances; young people with no experience of the system are nostalgic for it, and the artworks of that period now read as cool and vintage. The aesthetics may date — socialist realism is out of fashion — but the propaganda content does not expire. It was designed for future generations, and it still works, differently, today. Works removed from museum display continue to live in the storage rooms: propaganda behaves like a virus.
On Europe, he is the least optimistic on definitions and infrastructure: what «culture» means in Romania is still assumed to be high culture and elites, when it now lives in food, fashion, street lifestyle and subcultures; and there is no infrastructure to connect meanings and concepts to audiences. The image he uses is a bicycle rather than a train — you have to keep moving to stay upright.
The closing exchange
The moderator’s question — can Europe provide the structure, at ground, mezzo and meta level — goes first to Cosmin Nasui, and produces four answers rather than three.
Nasui answers on definitions and infrastructure, and is the most sceptical of the four. The obstacle is that we are working with definitions that no longer hold: in Romania, «culture» is still assumed by most to mean high culture and the elites of society, when in fact it has turned upside down — culture is in food, in fashion, in street lifestyle, in subcultures. So the first task is definitional: what we expect from culture and what we need from it, and how it operates in domestic life rather than at the museum, the opera house or a glossy cultural event. The second is infrastructural, and here the deficit is plain: there is no infrastructure for connecting meanings and concepts to audiences. Because everything is in motion, the effort resembles running after a moving train — or, more precisely, staying on a bicycle: you cannot hang on and stand still, you have to keep moving.
Cioflâncă follows: Europe is the only thing available. Romania’s best period coincided with European and American normative power, and for historians the tangible effect was the acquis historique alongside the acquis communautaire — a term he attributes in the captions to Konrad H. Jarausch — a political agreement on a version of history that accepts the difficult past, with consequences in legislation and institutions. That has been the operating framework for twenty years, and there is no alternative.
Popa then argues that the war in Ukraine is, politically, a chance for Europe, tragic as it is. He supports Europe not because of the acquis, historical or communautaire, which means little to the ordinary person, but because Europe is prevailing in the security field — over half the military aid to Ukraine and a respectable volume of intelligence used effectively against Russian targets. Even so, the coming ideological civil war in Europe cannot be avoided, and the shape of Europe will only be legible once the war ends. His final point: this is the first war launched directly against the European idea, legible from the 2013 events and the EU’s involvement, and it concerns not only the states bordering Ukraine but old, internal Europe.
Colibășanu closes: Ukraine is also a chance for defining what comes next. The whole continent, not only the EU, suffers from the same disease — polarisation, elites against the rest, classes that do not come together, an ideological civil war fuelled by Europe’s enemies. Europe has enemies precisely because it is a formidable project; the surrounding hostile narratives are evidence of a good life and of the longest period in European history without a war fought between European countries. In that sense the societal and ideological argument has been won. The open question is operational: how to build together and sustain that resilience politically, militarily and economically over the long term.
More about the project, here