Cultural cross-currents

In Chapters 5 and 6 I investigated the culture industries and the European Union’s Cities of Culture programme, ending by asking what potential existed for cultural work as a means of empowerment. In the next chapter I resume that discussion through a specific case of an arts project in a social housing district of Lisbon. In this chapter I look at the cultural cross-currents produced after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and their manifestations in former East bloc cities. I look at the current situation in Yerevan, Armenia, to identify such currents; and at the role of public monuments when power shifts through the case of Gru¯tas Park (Stalin World) in a forest in Lithuania, to which more than seventy Soviet-era statues were removed in 1999. Being unsure how to read these displaced monuments I compare the positions of Renata Salecl (1999) and Laura Mulvey (1999). Because a context for the shifts of power discussed is the globalisation of capital, communications and culture – reflected in a move towards consumerism which fuelled the collapse of state socialism in the East bloc – I begin by outlining aspects of globalisation relevant to the chapter (though economic globalisation as such is outside my scope). In case studies I quote from a novel by French economist Jeanne Hyvrard (1975);

experimental settlement, Arcosanti in Arizona.