Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses a creative workshop organised for young people, second-generation migrants from Georgia in Moscow, in order to collaboratively explore their experiences of belonging through material memory: their family photographs, images from their Georgian trips, and Georgia-related objects.

Paper Abstract:

The proposed paper focuses on the intergenerational transmission of memories and imaginations of home among Georgian families who moved to Moscow after the collapse of the USSR. As part of my fieldwork, I designed a creative workshop for a group of young Georgians, inviting them to explore their sense of belonging through material memory: their family photographs, images from their Georgian trips, and Georgia-related objects. Family photographs in emigration are often discussed from the perspective of engagement. However, as I show in this paper, while they enact young people’s emotional responses, they also reveal the sense of detachment from their parents’ and grandparents’ narratives of the past.

This workshop was a methodological and existential investigation into second-generation migrants’ perceptions of their parents’ past experiences as these influence their understanding of themselves and their narrations of their personal experiences of growing up in Moscow against the backdrop of the geopolitical tensions between Russia and Georgia. To address these questions, I borrowed a term “postmemory” suggested by Marianne Hirsch for the study of traumatic and difficult pasts internalised by the second generation. However, this concept, although is in many ways productive for the analysis of the relation of young people to their family past, does not encompass the issue of the ongoing conflict. The workshop revealed the similarities and differences of young people’s experiences, the ambiguity of their (dis)connectedness to their homeland and their shared sense of temporality in Moscow that shape their imaginations of the past and expectations from the future.