Paper short abstract:

This research surveys urban activism and artistic practices in Berlin that have responded to the challenge to “delink” the city from its Soviet colonial legacy, which, in turn, recognizes Russia’s current neoimperial ambitions as constitutive and consequential of its Soviet colonial past.

Paper long abstract:

In February 2023, Café Moskau temporarily changed its name to Café Kyiv to commemorate the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As a socialist modernist landmark punctuated by a large model of a Sputnik satellite, the renaming marked a conspicuous moment concerning the affective afterlife of Berlin’s socialist heritage; however, this was not the first time Berlin was undergoing a reckoning with its memory landscape, defined by historical erasures, ruination, tracings, and reconstructions. Political debates following German re-unification contended with the intersecting histories of socialism in Germany and the Soviet Union, seeking to stabilize the past by renaming streets, and by memorializing the instruments of socialist state repression and political violence. The past seemed well contained, until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine forced scholars to recognize its neoimperial ambitions as constitutive and consequential of Soviet colonialism. Inspired by decolonial theory, I survey artistic practices of a collective of Central Asian artists; performances by a group resuscitating positive aspects of socialist realism, and an artist's book by a Kyiv-born, Berlin-based artist, to highlight how such interventions can delink both European and Soviet knowledge hierarchies from other ways of being in the world. These artistic practices involve renaming, interventionist art, and subversive affirmation, which have responded to the challenge to “delink” Berlin’s urban landscape from its colonial legacy. I also present my own artistic research, which uses watercolours—an ephemeral, transparent, and fragile medium—to paint cityscapes as a decolonial artistic practice.