Past discontinuous. Restoration fragments

With the loss of faith in the future and the growth of uncertainty in the present, the political significance and social value of the past increase. Along with two trunk discourses - history and memory - there is another form of transmission and the existence of the past in the present. Irina Sandomirskaya offers for this category the concept of restoration. Her book explores restoration as a field of practical and strategic action associated with manipulations over the materiality and value of specific artifacts of the past, as well as the enrichment of their symbolic and material value in the present. What role do the imagination and practice of restoration play in the creation of national and imperial ideologies of history, mass movements of the protection of monuments and commercialization of cultural heritage? What strategies for recreating the desired past did, in particular, the Soviet restoration used? And what are the insoluble contradictions between the protective desires of a person of modernity - the subject of the era of total destruction - and the past constantly eluding the past? Irina Sandomirskaya - professor at the University of Suderman, specialist in Soviet culture, candidate of philological sciences. Laureate of the prize Andrei Bely for the book "Blockade in the Word. Essays on the critical theory and biopolitics of the language. "