Ruzanna Tsaturyan of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia spent two months with the Borderland Foundation in Sejny and Krasnogruda, Poland, where she discovered a wealth of approaches for supporting diversity in borderland communities.

Have you ever experienced borderland time? On my first Monday morning in Krasnogruda I woke up and looked at my watch: argh! It was 8.30am so I jumped out of bed as I had a meeting at 9. Rushing down to the kitchen I checked my phone… it showed 7.30am. A few days later the same scenario was repeated again, so I got curious and started checking time zones online. Of course! I was in the borderlands, where it seems time is conditional: sometimes Polish, at other times Lithuanian.

The Borderland Foundation, based in the town of Sejny, hosted myself and a number of DisTerrMem project colleagues at the Cheslaw Milosz International Centre for Dialogue in the Polish-Lithuanian border settlement of Krasnogruda. Here, people are all too familiar with ‘the borderlands’ with their conditional time, particular daily routines and challenges, conflicts both obvious and subtle, successive bursts and pauses of history, and endless human stories that make borders either more visible or more invisible.

Entrance gates to the Centre of Dialogue, Krasnogruda

Founded in 1990, the Borderland Foundation is an independent, non-governmental organisation that develops and shares new forms of cultural, educational and artistic practice to support the co-existence of people living with strong cultural, ethnic, generational, ideological and other types of diversity. The range of projects and activities on offer is quite incredible and ranges from ornithology to the social geography of local landscapes, from bridging local stories with ‘big’ histories to giving a voice to alternative writers – and much more. The ethos of the organisation is inspired by the work and ideas of the Polish-American poet, writer, translator and diplomat Cheslaw Milosz, and the Centre in Krasnogruda is the renovated manor house of Milosz’s family.

It was impossible to spend time in the manor house and not feel surrounded by Milosz himself. I wasn’t familiar with his work before my visit and so I took a keen interest in discovering Milosz as a poet, a dissident, a Nobel Prize winner (in literature, 1980), a philanthropist… The Swedish Academy, in its Nobel citation, described Milosz as a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts". I ploughed through a number of biographies and interviews - and even found one interview published in Armenian, conducted by Joseph Brodsky . The interviews seemed to be personal, but political themes were always dominant: borderland life, war, fascism, the holocaust, seeking political asylum, recognition and return from exile. The poet, critic and translator Robert Hass described Milosz as "a poet of great inclusiveness" and said that Milosz's poems can be viewed as "dwelling in contradiction".

The Centre was created by two couples who sought to unearth the diverse memories of the area and to rediscover the histories and cultures of multiple local peoples including Jews, Lithuanians, Russians and Roma people. They began to revitalize lost memories and to build bridges between the past and the present by involving local children and young people, and gradually involving more and more of the local community as a way of seeking to acknowledge and heal a painful past.

Engaging kids in local history through art in Krasnogruda

As a researcher, my stay in the Centre was an excellent opportunity to observe, on a daily basis, how public memory is being transformed and enriched thanks to the activities and projects of the Borderland Foundation. Typically, one researches and analyses social environments from a certain distance, and retrospectively, after the fact. In contrast, this ‘live’ exchange between researchers and civil society practitioners provides a novel approach which, interestingly, bridges the frequently ‘bordered’ communities of academics and practitioners. It meant that I was able to more closely explore the project’s planning process, as well as observing some of the opportunities and challenges faced in project delivery, in situ as they emerged. The experience expanded my understanding of civil society practice, and also enhanced my understanding of cultural practitioners’ roles in communities.

As it turned out, I wasn’t simply an observer of Borderland Foundation’s activities, but also an active participant! I enjoyed my first public reading experiment at the manor house, in an event designed to use place and space to tap into deeper emotions and reflect on a sense of open debate and freedom of expression. I and fellow participants walked in the grounds among the trees and looked to the horizon, seeking to feel into Milosz’s ideas on dialogue a return to community and connection. We read aloud pieces from Milosz’s works in Polish, Russian and Lithuanian, and reflected on how the experience of sharing in multiple languages prompted our sense of memory to expand into new sounds and meanings. It was a fascinating process!

Overall, I spent invaluable time gaining a more detailed understanding of the Borderland Foundation’s diverse educational tools and approaches, combining the use of art, physical space, communities’ histories and memory. I explored tools and techniques for creating interactive museum experiences, for exhibition design, and considered how to create complementary publications, bringing in more critical thinking literature from a wide range of sources. I enjoyed discovering Sejny Chronicles, an ongoing art performance by local residents who are telling the history of the town before World War 2.

All of these activities - and more - helped me to see the many complementary ways in which memory can be constructed, explored and transformed by multiple actors. My observations, along with those of fellow colleagues from the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, were discussed with DisTerrMem project colleagues at the University of Warsaw. We workshopped our findings and sought to relate them to Anna Cento Bull’s theory on agonistic memory.

The exchange was very much a mutual one, in that the Borderland Foundation’s staff members were equally keen to know more about our research interests and work. In a seminar held at Sejny, myself and DisTerrMem project colleagues spoke about memory studies from different perspectives, including theories of memory policies (David Clarke from the University of Bath); public memory formation policy in the Soviet Union (Hranush Kharatyan of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia), and an anthropological case study on ‘food, memory, conflict and politics’ based on Armenian-Azerbaijanian food battles (myself). The ensuing discussion was wide-ranging and thought-provoking.

Ruzanna (left) with Borderland Foundation & DisTerrMem colleagues

Małgorzata Sporek-Czyżewska presents the Borderland Foundation’s publication projects

In conclusion, my secondment with the Borderland Foundation, and the multi-level approach to research and knowledge sharing that it enabled, was invaluable and will no doubt serve as a strong foundation for further explorations on the management of memories in disputed territories. I look forward to further research visits, and to making contact with a wider range of civil society practitioners and local communities, in order to discover more aspects of the social memory transformation process in multicultural post-conflict societies.

Ruzanna Tsaturyan is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. Her main research interests are in cultural heritage, nationalism, gender studies and food anthropology. She is also an expert in educational and gender policy. Discover more at www.disterrmem.eu/national-academy-of-sciences

“Dwelling in contradiction”: witnessing the role of cultural practice in exploring and transforming memory