Time and Material Culture

Julie Deschepper is an Assistant Professor in Heritage and Museum Studies at Utrecht University. She specialises in the material culture of socialism, with a focus on Soviet monumental heritage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Antony Kalashnikov is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo. He works on Soviet understandings of futurity. His monograph, Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time, came out in 2023. Federica Rossi is an Assistant Professor in the History of Architecture at Iuav University of Venice, and a Research Associate at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and Università della Svizzera Italiana. She works on Russian and Soviet art, architecture and culture.

Introduction: Soviet Temporal and Material Cultures in Dialogue Part 1: Alternatives, Dissonances, and Disjunctions 1. Chronopolitics: Restoring “Backward” Spaces to Modern Time in Soviet Baku after WWII 2. Soviet Industrial Time and Nonscalable Temporalities: Telling Time with Hydraulic Seas 3. The Golden Age of Soviet Heritage: An Alternative Presentism? 4. Conflicting Temporalities of Socialist Urbanity: Modernisation vis-à-vis Architectural Heritage in the Development of Minsk Part 2: Representations, Imaginations, and Narratives 5. Last Stop, Communism: Time as Space in Early Soviet Political Posters 6. From Survey to Inspiration: Accommodating Pre-Soviet Materiality in Soviet Lviv (1940s-1960s) 7. Immortalising Yurts? The Temporalities of Nomadic Architecture in Stalinist Central Asia 8. Hybrid Temporality Unveiled: Bridging People and State in the Late Soviet Union Through the Amateur Filmmaking Kit Part 3: Bodies, Experiences, and Perceptions 9. Stitches in Time: Maiakovskii’s Overcoat and Temporal Self-Fashioning in the Soviet Union 10. Poets’ “Hand” on Display: Soviet Literary Museums as Curators of Sacral Materiality 11. Socialist Time in Fashion: The Late Soviet Interpretation Conclusion: The Matter of Time