The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory: Remembrance, commemoration, and archiving in crisis 3031345975, 9783031345975

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory

Remembrance, commemoration, and archiving in crisis Edited by Orli Fridman Sarah Gensburger

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Editors

Andrew Hoskins University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK John Sutton Department of Cognitive Science Macquarie University Macquarie, Australia

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

Orli Fridman  •  Sarah Gensburger Editors

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory Remembrance, commemoration, and archiving in crisis

Editors Orli Fridman Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK) School of International Training (SIT) Belgrade, Serbia

Sarah Gensburger French National Centre for Scientific Research - Sciences Po Paris, France

ISSN 2634-6257     ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic) Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ISBN 978-3-031-34596-8    ISBN 978-3-031-34597-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Unlocking Memory Studies: Understanding Collective Remembrance During and of Covid-19  1 Orli Fridman and Sarah Gensburger Part I Can We Speak of a Covid Memory Boom?  21 2 “It  seemed right to keep some sort of history”: Performances of Digital Memory Work by Young Women in London During Covid-19 23 Taylor Annabell 3 Picturing Lockdown in the UK: Memorializing an Ongoing Crisis 43 Tracy Adams and Sara Kopelman 4 #Mémoriascovid19:  Reimagining and Narrating Trauma in the Core of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Brazil 65 Ana Carolina de Moura Delfim Maciel and João Felipe Rufatto Ferreira

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5 The  Danger of a Single Story: Epic-Pandemic Narratologies and Memorials of COVID-19 in Nigeria 87 Ayokunmi Ojebode, Stephen O. Solanke, and Oluwabusayo Okunloye 6 Pandemic  from the Margins: How United-­States-­Based College Students Think the Pandemic Should Be Remembered109 Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan and Jill Strauss Part II Commemorative Events Between Memory Politics and Protests: What Has Changed During the Lockdowns? 131 7 “No  quarantine to workers’ rights”: Recontextualizing Labour Day Commemoration in the Semiotic Landscape of a Pandemic Demonstration133 Roula Kitsiou and Stella Bratimou 8 The  Struggle to Remember Tiananmen Under COVID-19 and the National Security Law in Hong Kong153 Francis L. F. Lee 9 “Memory  Does Not Quarantine”: COVID-­19, Remembering the Coup, and the Struggle for Democracy in Bolsonaro’s Brazil175 Macarena Moraga 10 Human  Rights Day: Grassroots Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic Restrictions in South Africa199 Joseph Mairomola Ngoaketsi

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Part III Memorial Museums and National Days: Did Digital Practices Transform Commemoration in Times of the Pandemic? 219 11 “Le  goût d’un jour de fête”? Commemorating the End of the Second World War on Twitter During the Lockdown: A Comparison Between France and Italy221 Frédéric Clavert and Deborah Paci 12 #Hashtag  Commemoration: A Comparison of Public Engagement with Commemoration Events for Neuengamme, Srebrenica, and Beau Bassin During Covid-19 Lockdowns245 Victoria Grace Walden and Mykola Makhortykh 13 #DigitalMemorial(s):  How COVID-19 Reinforced Holocaust Memorials and Museums’ Shift Toward Social Media Memory267 Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Tom Divon 14 Holocaust  Remembrance on Facebook During the Lockdown: A Turning Point or a Token Gesture?295 Stefania Manca, Martin Rehm, and Susanne Haake 15 Epilogue:  Did the Pandemic Change the Future of Memory?319 Orli Fridman and Sarah Gensburger Index327

Notes on Contributors

Tracy  Adams,  PhD, is a research affiliate at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Her research interests include the intersection of memory, conflict, culture, and politics and how meaning is constructed through interactive processes of negotiation. She has been published in high-ranking journals such as the British Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Review of International Studies, Political Communication, Memory Studies and Media, Culture and Society. Adams is currently working on her first book manuscript titled Memory as Currency. Taylor  Annabell  is a postdoctoral researcher in the multidisciplinary ERC Starting Grant HUMANads project at Utrecht University. She holds a PhD in Culture, Media and Creative Industries from King’s College London and has published in Memory Studies, Narrative Inquiry and Critical Discourse Studies. Her research interests include gendering of digital memory work, contestation of memory in postcolonial settings and platform governance and influencer cultures. Stella Bratimou  is a PhD student of Sociolinguistics at the Department of Language and Intercultural Studies (University of Thessaly). She holds a BA in History and an MA in Intercultural Education. Her research interests involve the intersection of semiotic landscape studies with mobility, social inclusion and belongingness, as well as with history, public pedagogy and memory.

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Frédéric  Clavert is Assistant Professor of European Contemporary History at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH, University of Luxembourg). He is an active member of the digital humanities community and has gradually turned his attention to the study of the relationship between historians and their primary sources in the digital age, on the one hand, and the use of massive data from web platforms in memory studies, on the other. He is in charge of communication and dissemination within the COST Action SlowMemo (CA20105) and managing editor of the Journal of Digital History. Ana  Carolina  de Moura  Delfim  Maciel  is a historian, documentarist and permanent professor and researcher of the Postgraduate Multimeios Departement at UNICAMP/BRAZIL. She coordinates the research centers at COCEN/UNICAMP and #MemóriasCovid19 Platform (UNICAMP/FAPESP), and she is also the President of Refugees Chair “Sérgio Vieira de Mello” (UNICAMP/UNHCR) and International Fellow of the ICM-Paris. She is also former President of Brazilian Oral History Association. Authored the book Yes nós temos bananas. Cinema industrial paulista: a Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz, atrizes de cinema e Eliane Lage. Brasil, anos 1950 as well as several articles and book chapters focusing historiography, audiovisual narratives, refugees, memory and biography. Tom Divon  is a PhD researcher in the field of Digital Media Culture and Communication in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Divon’s research focuses on the evolution of social media platforms, social-political youth cultures on social media, and their potential for education processes. Divon examines memetic TikTok cultures in relation to Holocaust Commemoration and Education and users’ performative combat and negotiation with Antisemitism and Nationalism-driven conflicts. Tobias  Ebbrecht-Hartmann  is Lecturer in Visual Culture, Film and German Studies in the Department of Communication and Journalism and the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin Film Studies and teaches, researches, and publishes on cinematic, digital, and social media memory of the Holocaust. He is the author of a study on cinematic narrations of the Holocaust and published in journals such as Media, Culture & Society; New Media & Society; and Memory Studies. He is also a consortium

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member in the Horizon 2020 project “Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age.” João Felipe Rufatto Ferreira  holds a Bachelor’s degree in Media Studies from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). He has special interest in the fields of visual culture, art theory and memory studies. He works as a cultural producer, editorial and graphic designer and developed research in the project #MemóriasCovid19 under the supervision of Prof. Ana Carolina de Moura Delfim Maciel, with funding from FAPESP. Orli  Fridman  is Associate professor of politics at the Belgrade based Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK). She is also the academic director of the School for International Training (SIT) learning center in Belgrade. She is the author of Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories (Amsterdam University Press, 2022), and numerous peer reviewed articles and book chapters. Her research focuses on critical peace and conflict studies, memory politics and memory activism – digital and on-site. In her current research she addresses the comparative analysis of alternative and disputed commemorative events in the Western Balkans, Israel-Palestine and beyond. Sarah Gensburger  is Full Professor of sociology and political science at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and Sciences Po-Paris. She is the author of Beyond Memory. Can we really learn from the past? (with S.  Lefranc, Palgrave, 2020, also in Arabic, French German and Spanish), Memory on my doorstep. Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood (Paris, 2015-2016) (Leuven University Press, 2019) and the co-editor, with S.D. McQuaid, of Administrations of Memory (Springer, 2022). Her current research interests concern the relationship between neoliberalism, the crisis of the welfare state and the contemporary memory boom as well as the impact assessment of memory policies and the unequal access to participatory archiving. In 2021, she was elected President of the international Memory Studies Association. In 2023, with J. Wüstenberg, she co-edited De-commemoration (Berghahn Books). Susanne  Haake  PhD, is a postdoctoral research assistant in the Media Education and Visualization Group (MEVIS, University of Education Weingarten, Germany). Since 2013, MEVIS has been an interdisciplinary research team focusing on technology-­enhanced learning, games-based learning, visualization and human computer interaction. Within the scope of the IHRA project, her research focuses on the analysis of (audiovisual)

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content in the culture of remembrance in social media. She also worked as a media pedagogue with young people in the context of commemoration for over ten years. Roula Kitsiou  is Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Department of Language and Intercultural Studies (University of Thessaly). She has co-designed and co-developed the curriculum and educational material for the MA “Language Education for Refugees and Migrants” (Hellenic Open University) and is coordinating the project VIA(me)YOU “Spatial repertoires of linguistic and cultural mediation in asylum and social integration processes” (funded by the UTH Research Committee). Her research interests include sociolinguistics of writing, migration, linguistic landscape studies and multimodality. Sara  Kopelman is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a research associate at “The Evolution of Attention in Modern and Contemporary Culture,” interdisciplinary research group at Mandel Scholion Research Center (2021–2024), and a research associate at “The Retention of Media: The Cultural Memory of Photography in the Smartphone Era,” Israeli Science Foundation research (2021–2024). Her research interests include the temporality and cultural significance of the GIF on social media, iconic photographs, visual attention, and collective memory. Her research has been published in Media, Culture & Society. She is also a photographer and curator. [email protected] Francis  L.  F.  Lee is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. His publications include Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era (2018) and Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989–2019 (2021). He is also the chief editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication and an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association. Mykola Makhortykh  is an Alfred Landecker lecturer at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Bern. His research focuses on how the representation of the traumatic past, in particular the Holocaust, is influenced by online platforms and algorithmic systems. He is an editor of the journal Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media and of the book series Transdisciplinary Trauma

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Studies (De Gruyter). His research on the relationship between memory, trauma, and technology recently appeared in journals such as First Monday, Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies, and Visual Communication. Stefania Manca  is the Research Director at the Institute of Educational Technology of the National Research Council of Italy. Her research interests are social media and social network sites in formal and informal learning, teacher education, professional development, digital scholarship, and Student Voice-­ supported participatory practices in schools. She is the project coordinator of the IHRA grant no. 2020-792 “Countering Holocaust distortion on Social Media. Promoting the positive use of Internet social technologies for teaching and learning about the Holocaust,” and she is also working on a three-year research project about the application of social media to Holocaust education from a learning ecologies perspective. Macarena Moraga  holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Florida. Her research focuses on transitional justice, memory of state violence in Brazil and Chile, ethnographies of archives, and the anthropology of the state. She is a Fulbright IIE Scholarship recipient. Joseph Mairomola Ngoaketsi  is an archivist and records management consultant, a lecturer and Co-master’s Degree Program Supervisor in the Department of Information Science, University of South Africa (UNISA), South Africa. He is also a pre-doctoral researcher at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and a Fellowship Holder of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS). His doctoral research thesis examined changes and continuities in the memorialisation and commemoration of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. His research interests include Archives and Records Management, Memory Studies, Oral History, and Decoloniality and Africanisation of Curriculum Discourses. He is the co-author of the book chapters, ‘Memory Institutions as a Citadel of Cultural Heritage: Weaving the Historical Threads in Sharpeville’ in Next Generation Libraries: Emerging Technologies, Community Engagement & Future Librarianship (2020) and ‘Moulding African Personality through Reclaiming Physical and Intellectual Space’ in Breaking the Colonial “Contract”: From Oppression to Autonomous Decolonial Futures (2020). He is a co-editor of the Handbook of Research on Records and Information Management Strategies for Enhanced Knowledge Coordination (2021). In 2022, Ngoaketsi was awarded

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“laureate” status by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Kristin  O’Brassill-Kulfan  is a scholar of early American social history and a public historian. At Rutgers, she is the coordinator of Public History in the History Department, as well as the coordinator of the Graduate Public Humanities Certificate in the School of Arts and Sciences. From 2022 to 2024, she is co-­directing the “Repairing the Past” Seminar at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis with Jochen Hellbeck. She is the editor for the Routledge Series Global Perspectives on Public History. O’Brassill-Kulfan is co-chairing the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Advisory Council on the state’s semi-quincentennial commemoration initiative, Revolution NJ, and is lead scholar for the Community History Program of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Leicester and an MA in Modern History from Queens University Belfast. In 2020, she received the NJ Historical Commission’s Award of Recognition for Outstanding Service to Public Knowledge and Preservation of the History of New Jersey. Ayokunmi  Ojebode  is a lecturer at SOAS University of London and a Fellow in the Institute for Name-Studies (INS), School of English, University of Nottingham, England. His area of expertise is African literature, cultural studies, health humanities and literary onomastics. His chapter “Name as National Archive: Capturing of Yoruba Masculinist Names in Tunde Kelani’s Saworoide” is published in The Cinema of Tunde Kelani: Aesthetics, Theatricalities and Visual Performance, Cambridge Scholars (2021). He also co-authored with the under-­ listed scholars “Wrathful Gods: Ethnography of Religion, Myths and Interpretations of Coronavirus in Nigeria.” Special Issue: “Covid-19 in Africa: (Trans)-National Narratives, Containment and Societal Consequences” Palgrave Macmillan (in press). Oluwabusayo Okunloye  is a doctoral candidate at Texas Tech University College of Media & Communication. Her research areas include information diffusion and participation in politics. Okunloye focuses on social media’s influence on online and offline protests. She is also interested in inclusion and diversity in STEM organisations (e.g., cyber infrastructure, engineering, and medicine).

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Deborah  Paci  is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Her main research interests focus on public and digital history, island studies, and nationalism studies. She is co-founder and director of Diacronie. Studi di storia contemporanea. Martin Rehm  holds a PhD from Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He is working at the Department of Educational Science at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His research interests include informal learning in social media, social opportunity spaces and applying mixed methods to assess the educational value of social media. His recent work includes contributions to the American Journal of Education, Teachers College Record and Plos One. Stephen O. Solanke  PhD is an associate professor in the Department of English, Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo, Oyo State, Nigeria. He has published nationally and internationally. Solanke’s specialisations include creative writing, African literature, post-colonial literature, dramatic literature, and oral literature. Jill  Strauss  PhD, teaches Conflict Resolution and Communications in the Speech, Communications and Theater Arts Department at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). Her research involves restorative practices and the visual interpretation of narrative and difficult histories. She incorporates virtual reality technology in her curriculum so that students can make visible hidden histories by creating monuments in augmented reality. This project has grown into a collaboration with Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. Jill completed her PhD at Ulster University in Northern Ireland in 2010, where she designed an innovative fieldwork project integrating storytelling and visual art for empathy and validation as one way to address a history of mutual humiliation and historical conflict. Jill is co-editor of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) along with other articles and book chapters. Victoria  Grace  Walden  is Senior Lecturer in Media and Director of Learning Enhancement in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex. She leads the award-winning platform Digital Holocaust Memory. She is the author of Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and the

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editor of Digital Holocaust Memory, Education and Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). As well as the forthcoming The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age (eds., REFRAME 2022) and a special edition of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History on Digital Holocaust Memory and Education (eds., online first 2021). She has served in advisory roles for projects by the Imperial War Museums, the UN/UNESCO, and the Claims Conference, and is the primary investigator on the British Academy and Leverhulme funded project Digital Holocaust Memory: Hyperconnective Museums and Archives of the Future.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Instagram story shared by Ava on 18 April 2020 35 BB42/01195 - © Historic England Archive. The facade of the Commercial Union Assurance Office in High Street, showing bomb damage. July 1942 50 HEC01/036/01/044 - © Rory Milner. ‘Quarantine Cut 1’—a man looking at his newly cut hair in a mirror in the back garden during the Covid-19 lockdown. April 2020 52 An empty present is merged with a populated past in UNICAMP’s common spaces. Memory shared by Lais Lourenço (2021). Available at: https://memoriascovid19. unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=246 71 Windows amplify, or frame, an uncertain world. The images of the sky expand frontiers. Memories shared by Maria Madalena Felinto Pinho Ramos (2020) and por Dalton Villa (2020). Available at: https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­ memorie?cod_post=119 and https://memoriascovid19. unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=71 73 Staging and mise-en-scène of the photos submitted to the project. Memory shared by Guarabira Graça Dias (2021). Available at https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­ memorie?cod_post=24378 Images employ a variety of styles and materials. Memory shared by Kahian Scabello (2020). Available at https:// memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=49 79

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 9.1

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Frames from the video submitted by Jeane Meire Eufrásio (2020) to the project #MemóriasCovid19. Memory shared by Jeane Meire Eufrásio da Silva. Available at https:// memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=86 A citizen put together several items on the ground inside Victoria Park on June 4, 2020. The candlelight was the only item derived from the symbolic repertoire of Tiananmen commemoration. All others were associated with the AntiELAB Movement, with the two hand gloves signifying the slogan “Five Demands, Not One Less.” (image by the author) A community forum addressing the pandemic on March 1, 2020, in the Yau Ma Tei District. At the back, participants carried flags associated with the Anti-­ELAB movement (e.g., the American flags signified the movement’s attempt to appeal to the U.S. for support). (image by the author) Poster from the “Vigilia Pela Democracia” online event. Created by Joanna Brasileiro. Shared via social media on March 31, 2020, under the hashtags #ditaduranuncamais, #lutonajanela, and #56anosdogolpemilitar. The last of these translates as, “56 years since the military coup.” Used with the author’s permission Walls that talk exhibition advertisement on social media Clique Concepts Facebook page. Facebook post 1 can be accessed on the link below: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_ fbid=pfbid02yMVifDcoofSEv9HQCDB5u6fkZg9KzbrGwFQ StnNRpF6SaDC7Vw6z7LzyvnMGdcKNl&i d=100000020695299&sfnsn=scwspmo&mibextid=iujhyo. Facebook post 2 can be accessed on the link below: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02NH2 DGBwUtNnk1TMiboHaBRXR1ZAKZQdbbc4u7bEUYHkN xRcA28Ew3ZSyauJshSPBl&id=1600410546901231 &mibextid=Nif5oz. Both Facebook posts were published by the Director of Clique Concepts, Semakaleng E. Moeketsi Director of Clique Concepts, Semakaleng Moeketsi among attendees at the ‘Walls That Talk’ exhibition, which illustrated the names of the deceased victims including the history behind the massacre. The exhibition was mounted inside the walls of the old Sharpeville Police Station Cells. Photo courtesy of Nicho Ntema dated 21 March 2020

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  List of Figures 

Fig. 10.3

Fig. 10.4

Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 11.4 Fig. 11.5 Fig. 11.6 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2 Fig. 13.3 Fig. 13.4 Fig. 13.5 Fig. 13.6 Fig. 13.7

Fig. 13.8

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Left to Right: Lamin Ntema, Lerato Mokubung (co-founder of Clique Concepts), Gladys Qabukile Nzimande-Tsolo (widow of Nyakane Tsolo, who led the 21st March 1960 anti-pass laws demonstration in Sharpeville. Despite Gladys being part of the vulnerable group to COVID -19 infections, she defied the imposed restrictions by attending the exhibition), Nicho Ntema (Organiser of exhibition) and Julia Nzimande (daughter of Nyakane Tsolo) with her son Dumiso. Photo courtesy of Nicho Ntema dated 21 March 2020 211 Representation with names of victims on canvas mounted on the inside walls of the old police station cells in Sharpeville, turned into an Exhibition Centre. Photo courtesy of Nicho Ntema dated 21 March 2020 212 Tweets per day, Italian corpus 234 Hierarchical Descending Clustering (HDC), Italian corpus 235 Chronological projection of the Italian corpus’ HDC 236 Tweets per day, French corpus 237 HDC, French corpus 238 Chronological projection of the French corpus’ HDC 239 The online survey covered 32 Holocaust memorials and museums in Europe, North America, and Israel 272 The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Holocaust-related heritage sites based on the average of monthly activities in each area between March and July 2020 276 The application of digital technology in different areas based on the average of monthly activities in each area between March and July 2020 277 Continuation of institutional activities in reaction to the COVID-19 restrictions 280 Online media and digital tools promoted for engaging with Holocaust memory remotely based on the average of monthly activities in each area between March and July 2020 282 Usage of social media platforms and digital communication technology based on the average of monthly activities in each area between March and July 2020 283 Social media platforms and applications used for digital online projects in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data is based on a sample of 45 digital Holocaust memory projects285 Digital formats used for online commemoration and education in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data is based on a sample of 45 digital Holocaust memory projects 288

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List of Figures

Fig. 13.9 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 14.2

Digital online projects increase in response to the pandemic restrictions and in relation to commemoration events Qualitative analysis of 12 institutions’ five top Facebook posts across the three years (percentages) Qualitative analysis of institutions’ Facebook posts across the three years and per country (percentages)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Unlocking Memory Studies: Understanding Collective Remembrance During and of Covid-19 Orli Fridman and Sarah Gensburger

Remembrance of and During Covid-19: A Research Agenda In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic can be described as a global memory event (Hirst, 2020). The global emergence of the crisis confronted the ethics of memory at its very core (Horton, 2020), to such an extent that some researchers spoke of a “disorder of time during the Corona Pandemic” (Kattago, 2021) or a “Covid-19 crisis chronotope” (Parui & Raj, 2021). Indeed, from the very beginning, institutional actors, scholars,

O. Fridman (*) Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK), School of International Training (SIT), Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected] S. Gensburger French National Centre for Scientific Research - Sciences Po, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_1

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and ordinary citizens took steps to make sure this period of global crisis was recorded and will be remembered. They did so by archiving documents, collecting testimonies and experiences through digital tools, in accordance with the digitalization of the world, and thereby further developed pre-pandemic digital practices. The pandemic, and extensive lockdowns across the globe in its early stages, led to an almost instantaneous memorialization and heritagization of the Covid-19 crisis as a “historical event.” Francesco Mazzucchelli and Mario Panico have referred to this widespread “anticipation [and] pre-­ figuration” as “pre-emptive memory” (2021). Commemorative events in the early days of the pandemic reflected the imperative to remember (Fridman & Gensburger, 2023), and, from the start, political discourses and media coverage leaned into analogies with former historical crises. The US public was to draw lessons from 9/11, the Western European public from World War II, and Southeast Europeans from the wars of the 1990s among Yugoslav successor states; remembering and alluding to difficult pasts was a common theme and practice around the world (Bigarré et al., 2021; Sadović, 2020). The pandemic has also generated new discussion on forms of forgetting, whether related to forgotten pandemics in recent years (such as Ebola, the Swine Flu, and SARS) or the absence of an event like the Spanish flu from scientific literature, family history, art, textbooks, and commemorations (Erll, 2020a; Hershberger, 2020; Hoffmann, 2020; Staub et al., 2020). In fact, Covid-19 brought the memory of the Spanish flu to life as one of its main mnemonic agents  (Vinitzky-Seroussi and Maraschin, 2021). Now, comparative research to other pandemics, such as polio (in the 1930s–1950s) and AIDS (in the 1980s), is being carried out (Braksmajer & London, 2021; Catlin, 2021; Rotheram-Borus & Tomlinson, 2020).1 As Christina Simko aptly put it (2021), mourning and memory have been entangled in the age of Covid-19. The difficult issue of commemoration of the dead (Corpuz, 2022; Han et al., 2021; Cordero, 2021), and the erection of memorials, was unavoidable from very early on in the pandemic, as considerable human losses mounted. In France, a first memorial 1  For example, see the work of Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, entitled “What does it take to be remembered? Covid-19 and the Commemoration of Pandemics.” More information available (in Hebrew) at: https://kolhamada.isf.org.il/ ‫מגיפה‬-‫­על‬-‫­ילדות‬-‫זיכרונות‬/ (accessed 5 December 2022).

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was inaugurated in a Parisian church in the sixth arrondissement as early as spring 2021. At the same time in London, on the South Bank of the River Thames, the National Covid Memorial Wall offered people an opportunity to paint pink hearts commemorating their lost loved ones (Lynskey, 2021; Honigsbaum, 2023).2 Activists and artists in the United States created grassroots memorialization projects as well.3 The pandemic did not lead to the erasure of pre-existing events and their commemorations, though. The digitalization of the world has had an impact on the social presence of the past in the present for some time, as commemorative events—those sponsored by state institutions and alternative commemorations—have moved online. While this pre-dated the pandemic, it has only grown more prevalent from the spring of 2020 onward. Clearly, the Covid-19 crisis has been steeped in memory and memorialization. Therefore, this book aims to critically and empirically engage with this abundance of memory to understand both memorialization of the pandemic and commemoration during the pandemic. In light of the pre-pandemic “connective turn” toward the abundance, pervasiveness, and immediacy of digital media (Hoskins, 2018), it seeks to document and make sense of the evolution of online memorialization and commemorative activities during the Covid-19 crisis. In doing so, it traces and examines how the commemoration of other historical events has been transformed by the pandemic. Activists and state officials alike began turning to digital mnemonic practices and online technologies when it was impossible for people to gather physically for annual commemorations due to social distancing regulations. In some cases, existing mnemonic rituals were simply transferred online, but in others, organizers were pushed to explore more innovative forms of commemoration. In this way, social distancing and lockdown restrictions became an unexpected opportunity in the development of additional platforms for commemoration and commemorative events. This blurred the lines between civil society and state actors more than ever in terms of their remembrance activities, their proximity, and their levels of participation. As the contributions in this book demonstrate, the Covid-19 crisis restricted social interaction but unlocked memory. This created a memory  See: https://nationalcovidmemorialwall.org (accessed 5 December 2022).  For example, see: the In America: Remember project, https://www.inamericaflags.org (accessed 5 December 2022); and The Zip Code Memory Project, https://zcmp.org (accessed 5 December 2022). 2 3

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boom. The collection of souvenirs that resulted generated new forms of memory activism, empowering already existing actors as memory activists and enhancing the work of memorial bodies. It especially opened new areas of intervention for existing public institutions, both local and national, such as museums, archives, or libraries. The “historical conditions” of the pandemic made immediate memorialization a social imperative. While in-person events to remember the past became impossible, collecting traces of the present as a way to enable joint remembrance in the future became a popular activity and an indicator of inclusive society. Yet, ongoing public interest in preserving traces of “ordinary memories” related to the pandemic contrasts with a general acknowledgment of the socially differentiated and unequal impacts of the pandemic itself and leads us to wonder if the social stratification that shaped the Covid-19 experience also served as a framework for its grassroots memorialization. So, how can we make sense of this? And what are its implications vis-à-vis the relationship between memory, democratization, and power? Did the pandemic really change commemoration on an ontological and political level? There is no doubt that lockdowns created unprecedented opportunities for counter-memory activists and elevated ordinary memories of the pandemic, but did this memory dynamic lead away from the reproduction of social and spatial inequalities? And how does this memory boom impact the study of commemorations and commemorative practices in the twenty-­ first century? Analyzing memory of the pandemic as well as memory during the pandemic enables a view into the social function of memorialization in neoliberal societies, both as a tool of political emancipation and as a means of political control. This volume was thus born from conversations between the two editors, who approach this topic from two different sub-fields of memory studies. When the pandemic began, Sarah Gensburger had been working for years on grassroots memorialization and collaborative archives (Gensburger, 2019; Gabrysiak & Gensburger, 2022; Gensburger et Severo, 2021), and Orli Fridman had long been researching memory activism and alternative commemorations and calendars from a comparative perspective (Fridman, 2022; Fridman, 2019; Fridman, 2015). In dialogue, they realized the importance of combining their perspectives to study the remembrance of and during Covid-19 as it relates to the democratization of the past. The result is this book, which raises and considers a number of questions: What happened to commemorative practices, events,

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and rituals around the world during the pandemic, and especially during lockdown periods in early 2020? How did remembrance during the pandemic shape and/or reshape commemorative actions and practices from below, as well as state-sponsored commemorative rituals? What will remembering the Covid-19 crisis actually entail, and what will it mean in the future? And, how did the Covid-19 memory boom emerge? Who was behind it, how did it develop, and within which social networks did it evolve?

Memory Studies and the Covid-19 Pandemic The purpose of this book is to offer a broad platform for the analysis of commemorative practices as they were shaped, expanded, and developed during Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and in the years that followed. By presenting a global view of these changes and innovations while also discussing ongoing pre-pandemic practices, contributions in the book enter into dialogue with initial responses to the pandemic and the ways in which Covid-19 has affected memory and commemoration. Nearly three years into this crisis, a plethora of studies and inquiries in the social sciences have already offered valuable insights into ways the pandemic has influenced and transformed societies, policies, and politics. Although most of this research has been in the fields of economics, health, and public policy, memory studies scholars have also engaged with a variety of questions related to the pandemic and lockdowns. Queries such as “What is currently remembered [about Covid-19]?” and “Which collective memories are triggered, and used to frame the pandemic?” (Erll, 2020b) emerged early in the crisis and, hence, were at the forefront of discussions. There was said to be a “duty to document” (Kosciejew, 2011) the pandemic, and some memory studies scholars made early observations regarding the role of collective memory before, during, and even after Covid-19. New social rhythms in the spring of 2020 in the wake of human losses due to the virus, and then extensive lockdowns and eventual large-scale mass vaccination operations, also brought questions of equality and (lack of) solidarity acutely into focus. At the same time, these events triggered discussion about what was remembered and what was forgotten, such as in the case of the Spanish flu. How the pandemic will ultimately be remembered continues to be a key question, as more empirical evidence emerges. For example, memories of Covid-19  in online

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lockdown diaries from people in the city of Wuhan arguably center on the “art of endurance” (Yang, 2021). The existing literature falls roughly into two groups of studies that have not yet intersected. The first group has explored the process of archiving the pandemic, and the second has examined the transformation of pre-­ existing commemorations in the course of the pandemic and due to it. This book is the first to theorize on the memory of and during the Covid-19 crisis from a holistic perspective, by systematically connecting these two sub-fields of inquiry. Moreover, as the texts in this book make this connection, they also consider issues of activism, protest, and power, in relation to commemorations and memorialization during the pandemic. As research beyond memory studies has shown, the pandemic did little to inspire solidarity across borders and did not prompt a globally united response. On the contrary, as the January 2022 special issue of Nationalities Papers illustrates, pandemic nationalism has prevailed. States responded by turning inward, with border closures at the heart of mitigation efforts from early on, and lockdowns were often legitimated and enforced through nationalist and patriotic narratives. Likewise, political rhetoric surrounding the pandemic has been characterized by nationalist overtones, and the fight against the virus has been likened to a war (Mylonas & Whalley, 2022; Rothmüller, 2021).4 It has been argued that the Covid-19 crisis revealed ruptures in democratic polities and politics, and “shook our confidence in the abilities of our governments to make the right decisions” (Olick & Teichler, 2021). Research on the impact of the pandemic in other areas, such as citizenship regimes, has also revealed how the pandemic only enhanced existing vulnerabilities and inequalities (Shaw, 2021). In reaction to these broader trends, and the fact that analogies of war may have contributed to linking memorialization of and during the pandemic to a nationalistic agenda, we gathered essays in this volume from across the globe, shining a light on these issues from North to South and East to West. The 12 chapters that follow are organized according to the three core questions put forward in this book: Can we speak of a Covid-19 memory boom? What is the thread connecting memory, democratization, and power? And has the pandemic transformed commemorative practices?

4

 For an early feminist critique of this, see: Cynthia Enloe, 2020.

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Can We Speak of a Covid-19 Memory Boom? As early as July 2021, we have been asking whether the Covid-19 crisis may have opened “a new memory era” (Gensburger, 2021).  Indeed, a huge global movement for archiving launched in March 2020 and intensified during the progressive implementation of lockdowns around the world. A recurring theme emerged in the literature: “Documenting COVID-19” (Franz & Gudis, 2020), “Collecting Covid-19” (Laurenson et  al., 2020), “curating the contemporary” (Spennemann, 2021), “collecting the crisis” (Hobbins, 2020), and “Covid-19 Collecting” (Sexton, 2021). Thousands of initiatives were aimed at collecting documents and traces of the pandemic in ordinary experiences (Demaria, 2021; Roe, 2020; Neatrour et al., 2020; Noordegraaf et al., 2021; Zumthurm, 2021), in accordance with the “duty to document” (Kosciejew, 2011, 2022). From East Africa (Otieno, 2021) to China (Yang, 2021; Qian, 2021) to Brazil (da Silva, 2021), these initiatives claimed to be preserving documentation that was necessary to build a collective memory of the pandemic for the future and, in doing so, fostered social resilience in the present. Initiated by libraries (Dixon, 2020), museums, universities, archives, and others (Oyelude, 2020), these crowdsourced documentation gathering efforts produced a remarkable diversity of artifacts, including sounds (Manzano et al., 2021; Frohlick et al., 2020), Internet search queries (Orphanou et  al., 2021), images and icons (Sonnevend, 2020), Instagram posts (Lucibello et al., 2021), and oral histories (Kelly, 2020). This reflected the contributions of diverse groups of people, as everyone from children (Vaughan-Lee, 2021; Patterson & Friend, 2021) to health workers (de Serpa et al., 2020) to older people participated. In this environment, the demand for personal memories, testimonies, or diaries was incessant. Hundreds of calls have gone out in many different languages just for diaries of the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, to the point where it is simply impossible for the editors of this book to provide a list of them. And though the most famous pandemic archive may be A Journal of the Plague Year (Craft, 2021; Tebeau, 2021),5 almost every country and locality initiated similar projects (Hall-Lew et al., 2021; Kim et al., 2022; Łukianow et al., 2021). Some of these targeted specific groups based on age, origins, economic situation, or place of residency. Among 5  Arizona State University, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, “A Journal of the Plague Year,” https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive/page/welcome (accessed 4 December 2022).

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others, these included Asian Americans (Chu, 2020), low-income communities (Rönkkö et al., 2022), young people (Asscheman et al., 2021; Procentese et  al., 2021; Scott et  al., 2021; Sun et  al., 2021, Tateo & Dario, 2020), and even historians and social scientists themselves (Laughlin-Schultz, 2021; Munyikwa, 2020). This Covid-19 memory boom (Fridman & Gensburger, 2023) has taken on a palliative function as well, meant to help counter the traumatic impact of the crisis (Gundogan Ibrisim, 2023). In fact, some studies have already treated these diaries as a therapeutic tool (Chen et al., 2022; Masoud et al., 2021; Ménard et al., 2021; Shaw et  al., 2021; Türkleş et  al., 2021; Wood et  al., 2021; Xia et al., 2021). Though the sociology and history of this memory boom are still to be written, several ambitious research efforts have been launched and have already led to preliminary publications (Gabrysiak & Gensburger, 2022; Gensburger & Severo, 2021; Kosciejew, 2011; Pollen & Lowe, 2021; Spinney, 2018). These have raised important questions: Who has initiated and participated in the Covid-19 memory boom? And to what extent is the immediate memorialization of the pandemic unprecedented in its scope? Calls for participation in this memory boom have been described as intended to build an inclusive collective memory, but this begs several other questions: Have pandemic witnesses been effectively drawn from all parts of society, beyond gender and social differences and other divides? If the whole world is experiencing this archiving movement, what national and regional differences exist within it? And what does this storytelling indicate about how ordinary people view the pandemic, as far as emotional mourning and political dissensus go? The four chapters that constitute the first section of this book offer case studies that engage with and begin to answer some of these questions. By addressing how young women living in London transformed their digital practices on Instagram in order to curate their lived experiences and “memories” of Covid-19, Taylor Annabell presents an original understanding of the way the pandemic has been framed as a historical moment and offers an alternative lens through which to view narratives of the crisis and their preservation for the future. Tracy Adams and Sara Kopelman also contribute a case study based in London to illustrate how a cultural institution triggered the memorialization of an ongoing crisis through the Picturing Lockdown project, which was launched in April 2020 by Historic England (HE) with a call to British citizens to share their experiences of a week in lockdown and help record “this extraordinary moment in

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history.” Moving from Europe to Brazil, Ana Carolina de Moura Delfim Maciel and João Felipe Rufatto Ferreira reflect on their own motivations for launching the #MemóriasCovid19 project, from within the State University of Campinas, to digitally curate testimonies and traces of pandemic experiences in a country where government officials have denied the very existence of the virus. They offer an analysis of the collection and their process, and a portrait of the participants, raising some crucial questions about the social and political nature of immediate memorialization. Relying similarly on pandemic testimonies, Ayokunmi O.  Ojebode, Stephen O. Solanke, and Oluwabusayo Okunloye emphasize the danger of a single narrative of the pandemic by analyzing a collection of testimonies from everyday Nigerian people that highlight the role of pre-existing social frameworks in the construction of memories of the crisis. In the context of defiance of the government and administration, it turns out that religion, socio-economic conditions, and gender are central to grassroots memorialization of the pandemic. Finally, Kristin O’Brassill-­ Kulfan and Jill Strauss explore the relationship between the memory of Covid-19 and politics under Covid-19 by revisiting a social experiment of college students in New York City. While memorials tend to be built with a mission to speak to younger generations, in this case, young people were asked to create their own virtual reality memorials of spring 2020, a process that highlighted a vernacular care for remembrance among these youth and, at the core of their memorialization of the crisis, an imbrication of their personal views, pandemic experiences, cultural symbols, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Commemorative Events Between Memory Politics and Protests: What Changed During Lockdowns? If the Covid-19 pandemic has represented an unprecedented time of instantaneous memorialization and crowdsourced archiving, it has also been a period in which already existing commemorations have been necessarily adapted. Research on this topic can be found as early as July 2020, when Valeria Vegh Weis reflected on the way families of victims of the dictatorship in Argentina had creatively transformed their annual March 24 commemoration in response to the pandemic (2020). Likewise, Orli Fridman has analyzed the transition of the joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony, an alternative commemorative event that went solely online in the spring of 2020, as well as the Srebrenica Memorial

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Center’s use for the first time of online tactics to fight genocide denial through its “Reading for Srebrenica” event (#Č itanjezaSrebrenicu) on the 25th anniversary of the genocide—during which the names of 8372 people killed in Srebrenica in July 1995 were read over the course of more than 11 hours (2020). To tackle the question of how the Covid-19 pandemic transformed commemoration, this book pursues it from two angles. Our first claim is that the study of commemoration during the pandemic should be in dialogue with the analysis of collective mobilizations during the pandemic. Indeed, even if a considerable amount of research has been focused on protest, demonstrations, and mobilizations in this time of crisis (Flesher Fominaya, 2022; Pressman & Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2021), none of it has given attention to the role that evocations of the past and commemorations have played in this process. Some memory studies scholars, such as Ann Rigney, have been researching how people “remember activism” and highlighting the existence of a “cultural memory of protest in Europe” (2021).6 This perspective invited us to consider the way commemoration and protest have perhaps been intertwined during the pandemic and the extent to which political and social control over people has affected how they gather to commemorate. After all, it was also during this period of crisis that memory politics and protest were visible in many urban spaces and in some of the world’s largest cities. Hence, the second section of this book features four contributions addressing this phenomenon, from collective acts of de-commemoration (Gensburger & Wüstenberg, 2023) to a deepening discontent with social (in)justice that led to large-scale protests, as they manifested in various geographies: from Athens in Greece to Hong Kong in China, from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Sharpeville in South Africa. In their chapter on the intersection of protests and class during lockdown periods in Athens, Roula Kitsiou and Stella Bratimou explore the appropriation of the practices of protesters related to the commemoration of Labour Day (in 2020). They identify an unprecedented semiotic landscape of commemoration that emerged as the result of commemorative demonstrations in a biopolitical context, analyzing its transformative effect on the experience of memorialization. Francis L.F. Lee examines another site of mnemonic struggles in his analysis of the efforts of people in Hong 6  See: Utrecht University, “Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe, https://rememberingactivism.eu (accessed 5 December 2022).

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Kong to continue to commemorate the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square even after the establishment of the prohibitive National Security Law in 2020, which coincided with the Covid-19 crisis. Lee traces the ban on the July 4 commemoration from 2020 through 2022 and shows that, despite much self-censorship, many in Hong Kong have continued to fight for the right to commemorate events in Tiananmen by engaging in improvisatory, individualized, and digitalized actions. Examining memory activism as it relates to legacies of the 1964–1985 dictatorship in Brazil, Macarena Moraga tells the story of how Rio de Janeiro-based memory activists mobilized a sense of constant crisis to bring attention not only to Bolsonaro’s politics of institutional dismantling but also to the continuities of state violence and structural conditions that have produced their constant vulnerability, providing an ethnographic account that shows how the pandemic inflected a commemorative event and transformed it into a pro-democracy protest. And in his analysis of 60th anniversary commemorations of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, Joseph Mairomola Ngoaketsi describes how Covid-19 restrictions in South Africa re-configured commemorations of the massacre. Ngoaketsi shows how traditional memory practices were mediatized using digital technologies, and the 60th anniversary of the massacre was marked by the launch of numerous grassroots commemorative activities, ranging from exhibitions, to interviews with survivors, to memorial site tours, to documentary screenings. Memorial Museums and National Days: Did Digital Practices Transform Commemoration During the Pandemic? It is clear that the Covid-19 crisis has also led to the digitalization of commemoration. The pandemic, and more specifically periods of lockdown, was in fact seen from the beginning as something of an experiment in the final digitalization of social interactions (Amankwah-Amoah et al., 2021) and of memory work. However, no comparative and cumulative empirical case study has yet been conducted to assess this prediction. In the third part of this book, four chapters thus offer an in-depth look at the continuing growth of mediated practices of commemoration during the lockdown period in the spring of 2020 and beyond. Throughout the world, public and private events, museum visits and trips, collective anniversaries, and large commemorative gatherings were all canceled, and in some cases reinvented, and commemorations were similarly impacted. As we have previously argued (Fridman & Gensburger, 2023), the digital turn in a changing

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and developing global commemoration landscape has simply continued evolving, as many state-sponsored gatherings went on almost without disruption after they were transformed from live to online events. In the aftermath of the pandemic, a number of these online commemorative practices are now here to stay, as they had the effect of reaching and attracting larger audiences and, in some ways, offer a more inclusive and participatory platform for remembrance. As spring 2020 commemorations marking the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of various concentration camps overlapped with the spread of the pandemic into Europe and the Middle East, early observations of these changes scrutinized the practices of mnemonic institutions and the Israeli state in marking Yom HaShoah in April of that year. There was a significant growth in the numbers of those who attended and participated in online platforms for remembrance and grieving, such as the joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day ceremony mentioned above (Fridman, 2021; Fridman & Gensburger, 2023). Other acts of commemoration in Israel also went online, as with the Shovrim Shtika/ Breaking the Silence commemoration of the Goldstein massacre and the cleansing of the old city of Hebron (attended by Orli Fridman on 24 February 2021) and the 2021 Nakba Day commemoration, which offered a virtual tour of the destroyed Palestinian village of Lifta (at the entrance to Jerusalem) and its relics.7 Virtual tours remain as a legacy of that time, and have continued to evolve, and engagement both with #hashtag #memoryactivism as a mnemonic tactic and with online commemoration (Fridman, 2022) has become more widespread and more apparent in many commemorative actions and campaigns worldwide. Of course, a rise in the use of social media memory and the use of social media platforms and #hashtag #memoryactivism in online commemoration pre-dates the Covid-19 pandemic (ibid.). As previous research has shown, some activists, as in the case of those who created White Armband Day (Dan Bijelih Traka) to commemorate crimes committed in the town of Prijedor in Bosnia and Herzegovina, have turned to online commemorative actions as a response to local bans on gatherings by state authorities, utilizing hashtags and social media platforms to mobilize transnational, 7  See: American Friends of the Parents Circle – Families Forum, ‘Recording Available: Visit the Palestinian Village of Lifta,” 11 May 2021, https://parentscirclefriends.org/lifta/?fbclid=IwAR0GXGJoNk7UiQH34TJ1G66FHMVXK8vKC93lxYApsRuGJYM0TKw7oTfe MqA (accessed 5 December 2022).

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regional, and local engagement and mnemonic claims (Fridman & Ristić, 2020). As contributions in this book allow us to see, such actions and further developments that have grown out of Covid-19 lockdown periods in 2020 may mark a new normal, characterized by digital commemorative actions and the digitalization of memory. While these trends began long before the pandemic, we argue that they were given a serious push forward by the imposition of social distancing regulations. However, we ask: Was this change really that radical? The four chapters we gathered to answer this question do so through the study of prominent hashtags that emerged and were utilized during the Covid-19 crisis in the context of commemorating events related to World War II, offering additional perspective on the interaction between institutional actors and ordinary people. Mobilizing various methodologies, these contributions deepen our insights into the practices of memorial museums and the commemoration of national days in early 2020. They also address our overarching question of whether the pandemic transformed commemorative practices. Using innovative data collected on Twitter, Frédéric Clavert and Deborah Paci compare and contrast online commemoration of the end of World War II in France and Italy, demonstrating that both countries commemorated this history during their lockdowns but that their respective national institutions implemented two very different policies regarding digital commemoration due to differences in the status of these commemorations in the two societies. Victoria Grace Walden and Mykola Makhortykh advance their reflections on digital memories (2021) by taking a critical stance toward institutional commemorative practices and public engagement with commemorative events during Covid-19. They assert that memory politics and media forms established in pre-digital contexts continued to prevail online during the pandemic, refuting some expectations of a distinct post-pandemic shift in memorialization. Analyzing the effects of the pandemic on global Holocaust memory, Tobias EbbrechtHartmann and Tom Divon develop their ongoing work on this topic (Ebbrecht-­Hartmann, 2021) and present results from an online survey conducted with key institutions in the field of Holocaust commemoration. Having identified a significant increase in the use of social media and digital tools, they argue that institutions have implemented elements of participatory memory culture that have helped establish like-minded and co-creative commemoration communities. Finally, in their chapter

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analyzing the Holocaust Remembrance activities of a number of Holocaust museums and memorials on Facebook during the lockdown, Stefania Manca, Martin Rehm, and Susanne Haake map out modifications and adjustments to the way Facebook was used by Holocaust institutions in terms of the volume and type of content and approaches to interaction, but they contend that Covid-19 lockdowns did not trigger radical change in the social media strategies of these institutions.

Bibliography8 Amankwah-Amoah, J., Khan, Z., Wood, G., & Knight, G. (2021). COVID-19 and digitalization: The great acceleration. Journal of Business Research, 136, 602–611. Asscheman, J. S., Zanolie, K., Bexkens, A., & Bos, M. G. N. (2021). Mood variability among early adolescents in times of social constraints: A daily diary study during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 722494. Bigarré, I., Landon, C., Boyer, P., & Dupouy, J. (2021). Reactivated world war two traumatic memories in COVID-19 lockdown period. Clinical Case Reports, 9(2), 609–611. Braksmajer, A., & London, A. S. (2021). ‘It’s history in the making all around us’: Examining COVID-19 through the lenses of HIV and epidemic history. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 23(11), 1500–1515. Catlin, J. (2021). When does an epidemic become a ‘crisis’? Analogies between Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS in American public memory. Memory Studies, 14(6), 1445–1474. Chen, H., Ying, W., & Zengmei, L. (2022). The experiences of frontline nurses in Wuhan: A qualitative analysis of nurse online diaries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 31(17–18), 2465–2475. Chu, K. (2020). Collecting and Archiving Asia-American Stories during Covid. Museum & Society, 18(3), 341–344. Cordero, D. A. (2021). In loving memory of ‘Us’: Facing grief during the time of COVID-19 through redirecting perception of life’s realities. Journal of Public Health, 43(2), 299–300. Corpuz, J. C. G. (2022). Commemoration of the dead in the time of COVID-19. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 16(5), 1706–1707.

8  Sections of the literature review in this chapter have been made possible by the funding of the French National Research Agency, in the framework of the ArchiCOVID research project (ANR-21-COVR-0045-01) of which Sarah Gensburger is the principal investigator.

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PART I

Can We Speak of a Covid Memory Boom?

CHAPTER 2

“It seemed right to keep some sort of history”: Performances of Digital Memory Work by Young Women in London During Covid-19 Taylor Annabell

Introduction As the global pandemic of Covid-19 unfolded, cultural institutes and organisations across the world sought to capture and archive ordinary peoples’ experiences of the time. A Covid memory boom (Craps & Gilbert, 2021) is indicated by 450 Covid-19 story-collecting initiatives across the world (Made by Us, 2020). Within the United Kingdom, for example, Historic England collected submitted images from the first week of lockdown in ‘Picturing Lockdown’ (Historic England, n.d.; see Adams and Kopelman in this volume), the Museum of London collected physical and digital objects and first-hand experiences of Covid-19 in London for ‘#CollectingCOVID’ (Museum for London, 2020) and the Official

T. Annabell (*) Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_2

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Archive for Northern Ireland asked individuals to contribute their own documentation of their life during Covid, like diaries and photographs in ‘Stay Home Memories’ (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 2020). These calls, especially given their prevalence, contribute to social constructions of Covid-19 as historically significant and worth documenting and entrench cultural expectations that memorialisation is a necessary response to crises and events. It is within this social context that my participants, young women aged 18–21 years old living in London, shared on their Instagram accounts during Covid-19. As I demonstrate in this chapter, these discourses are drawn upon and reconfigured within their performances of digital memory work on platforms and reflections on their practices during interviews. Digital memory work refers to the practices of producing, re-engaging with and reflecting on the past (digital traces) by memory actors. This analytical framework recognises a distribution of agency among human and non-human actors without assuming the value produced by their mnemonic labour is analogous. Situating digital memory work at the intersection of personal expectations and value systems, I examine how the mnemonic conditions of the postfeminist regime and social media platforms shape performances. I propose there is a dialectical relationship between experiences of Covid-19 and digital memory work. While the pandemic shaped how digital memory work was performed, sharing and remembering on platforms was also part of how Covid-19 was experienced and managed. Practices on social media platforms make visible how Covid-19 was experienced as a disruption and departure from normative experiences of space and time. Parui and Simi Raj (2021) argue that the transformation of familiar spaces into sites of crisis and suspension of familiar time produces disorientation and defamiliarisation at the experiential level, which in turn affects how experiences and events are remembered. By examining performances and experiences of digital memory work, this research offers an empirical response to this theorisation. It resonates with Gensburger’s (2019) approach to examining how traumatic events are embedded in everyday memory in her in-depth analysis of memorialisation processes following the 2015 terrorist attacks in her neighbourhood in Paris. Through thematic and narrative analysis of practices and perspectives on digital memory work, I demonstrate how young women reconfigured assertions of worth, the value of constructing happy memories and platforms as a space for making memories during Covid-19.

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Performing Memory in a Postfeminist, Digital Context The understanding that sociocultural context influences the construction of memory is central to the field of memory studies. Halbwachs (1992) refers to social frameworks in his work on collective memory, emphasising how society provides the means for the individual to reconstruct memories. Put another way, remembering is a social and cultural practice embedded in environments (Brockmeier, 2015), involving the “interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts” (Erll, 2008, p. 2). The performance of memory is tied to spaces in which they are articulated and shaped by resources available, relational dynamics and circumstances of the person remembering. Building on the body of literature mobilising the concept of memory work (Chidgey, 2013; Kuhn, 2002; Lohmeier & Pentzold, 2014; Merrill et al., 2020; Smit, 2020; Smit et al., 2018), I approach the performance of memory on platforms as digital memory work to foreground the processual and continuous nature of engagement with the past in the present underpinned by the labour of memory agents. The subfield of digital memory studies foregrounds how digital technology is part of the sociocultural setting in which memory is performed. Scholars argue that digital media, platforms and technologies (re)configure memory (Garde-Hansen et al., 2009; Hoskins, 2011, 2018; Reading, 2011, 2016; Schwarz, 2014; van Dijck, 2005, 2017). One way that this is seen is at an infrastructural level where the mobility of digital traces has been identified as consequential for memory. The algorithmic intervention into the past ushers in new entanglements of human and non-human agency. Algorithms also shape the production of temporality on social media platforms in which ‘the now’ is continually reproduced. According to Kaun and Stiernstedt (2014), these affordances constrain engagement with memory, which is reinforced by Georgakopoulou (2017), who argues that the dominant mode of storytelling is sharing life-in-the-moment, privileging the narratorial position of the narrator as experiencer rather than reflector. Within this context, individuals, groups and organisations attribute meanings to the past for personal, social and political purposes by producing, (re)engaging with and reflecting on digital traces. This is examined empirically within studies addressing specific cultural and collective memories in online interactions (Armour, 2018; Birkner & Donk, 2018; Kaun & Stiernstedt, 2014; Khlevnyuk, 2018; Smit, 2020; Smit et al., 2018). My focus on how participants constructed their experiences

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of Covid-19 through their sharing continues to grapple with performances of digital memory work within the affordances of platforms. However, due to my interest in how remembering is enfolded in sharing in-the-­ moment and everyday practices on platforms, I situate the performance of digital memory work during Covid-19 in context. Inspired by Reading’s (2016, p. 2) work that examines “the gendering of memory” in connection to digital technologies and cultures, I consider how performances of digital memory work are shaped by gendered subjectivities. Reading examines intersections of memory, digital technologies and gender across the domains of home, body and public sphere, demonstrating how the use of digital technologies by women is “double-edged” (p. 189), enabling memories of gendered experiences to be circulated in new ways that both reaffirm and reconfigure gendered identities and roles. Being attentive to gender in this way provides a way to locate memory in a “specific context rather than subsumed into monolithic and essentialist categories” (Hirsch & Smith, 2002, p. 6), and feminist scholars have indicated that gender as a structural framework shapes the construction and mediate of memories (Hirsch & Smith, 2002; Keightley, 2011; Paletschek, 2009; Pető & Phoenix, 2019; Reading, 2016). As Fivush and Grysman (2022) assert narratives, among which those that involve remembering the past, and gender are mutually constituted meaning-making systems. Narrating is a gendered activity and “gendered ways of narrating then construct, define and reify gendered ways of being in the world”. This chapter endeavours to respond to Pető and Phoenix’s (2019) concern that the everyday experiences of women in changing social and cultural settings are often omitted and silenced at the level of the collective. By empirically analysing how young women remembered their lives and experiences during Covid-19 through their digital memory work, I take seriously their labour and perspectives as memory agents. Such an intervention seeks to challenge the theorisation of sharing as obsessive and cultivating a compulsion of connectivity within digital memory studies. I identify postfeminism as an aspect of contemporary Western life that has implications for how young women perform digital memory work on platforms, given that young women are positioned as the ideal subjects of postfeminism. I follow the approach of Gill (2007) in understanding postfeminism as a sensibility. By this, she refers to how postfeminism is characterised by distinctive, interconnected themes and features, which shape subjectivity and the articulation of gender. Echoing Chidgey (2018), I argue that the “mnemonic conditions of a postfeminist regime” have been

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overlooked in memory studies. Through her affirmative approach, in her research Chidgey (2018) engages with how memory assemblages travel across and are informed by these “horizons of memory formations” (p.44). For example, in her case study on the Rosie the Riveter ‘We Can Do It!’ assemblage, she demonstrates how the figure becomes constructed and mobilised as a feminist icon and comes to resonate with neoliberal values. Extending this analysis of memory work in the discursive conditions of postfeminist culture, I focus on postfeminist ‘feeling rules’ that shape expectations for how narratives of the self should be articulated. Confidence, resilience and a positive mental attitude are the ‘right’ types of dispositions to display while negative experiences should be reframed in a positive, upbeat manner (Gill, 2017; Gill & Orgad, 2015; Kanai, 2019). This chapter also empirically responds to early work by memory studies scholars addressing the use of digital and social media in relation to memory and Covid-19. Hoskins argues Covid-19 showcases a “new velocity to the forging of and contestation over what the memory of an event will be or look like before the event has ended” (Hoskins & Halstead, 2021, p. 681). The memorialisation of the crisis whilst it is still ongoing is also picked up by Adams and Kopelman (2021, p. 1) in their assessment of the mnemonic landscape during Covid-19. Critically, Hoskins draws attention to the way that the moral imperative to remember, emerging from twentieth-­century mass warfare, is hegemonic and questions whether we should “take every, means to document every single part of the pandemic and our experiences of it” (p. 681). Yet, his position that “contemporary obsession and desire to document and remember” afford a false sense of security and will negatively affect future remembrance requires grounding I propose is reliant on assumptions about how people engage in practices of sharing and remembering with platforms and the value this holds for them over time. Erll (2020, p.  867) also comments on the abundance of “instant history-­making” in which “every second of pandemic time seems to be recorded on digital media, distributed, and shared via social network” (p. 876) as she argues that Covid-19 is the first global “digitally witnessed pandemic”. Yet, her discussion of what will be remembered after Covid-19 implies research should be oriented towards dominant memory discourses and the implications for memory at the collective and social levels. While this is in keeping with her focus on cultural memory in sketching out how memory studies as a field could offer insight into Covid-19, the role of memory before, during and after the pandemic in the lives of people could

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nevertheless provide insight into the dynamics of memory at another scale. Addressing how the experience of a pandemic triggered cultural memories of World War 2 and colonialism as articulated by leaders and journalists (or, as she describes them, “professional ‘meaning makers’ ”) reinforces a recurring analytical focus in memory studies in which the practices and perspectives of ordinary people are overlooked.

Methods This chapter draws on fieldwork on how young women performed digital memory work, which began prior to Covid-19. I conducted semi-­ structured interviews, which included the scroll back method (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) with 16 young women aged 18–21 years living in London. Each interview was followed by a six-month observation period in which I observed digital traces shared on Instagram and Facebook. Participants were also invited to take part in follow-up interviews and two focus groups. In tracing performances of digital memory work by participants over time, I am guided by what memories emerge as significant through their practices. I interviewed half of the participants before March 2020, which further enables me to situate Covid-19 within their articulations of digital memory work on platforms prior to the experience of disruption and change, and the other half between April and May 2020 on Zoom. Within the following thematic and narrative analysis of performances of digital memory work related to Covid-19, I examine how the memorialisation of Covid-19 is embedded within and shaped by postfeminist digital culture. I seek to connect individual performances of memory to the local, immediate environment at the micro-level and cultural systems at the macro-level (Keightley et al., 2019). Combining the analysis of interviews with digital traces exemplifies Kansteiner’s (2002) hermeneutical triangulation of memory construction, representation and reception but seeks to go beyond limiting perspectives of participants to reactive responses to media texts. Following the tradition in feminist research of studying women from the perspectives of their own experiences and lives (Harding, 1987; Hesse-Biber, 2013), I focus on how participants reflected on their change in practices. In the analysis, I use examples from four participants, Jada, Chloe, Ade and Indiana, to illustrate the diversity of experiences among the sample.

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Approaching Covid-19 as Worth Remembering Like many, the UK government responded to the global pandemic of Covid-19 by adopting social distancing restrictions and enforcing lockdowns to reduce social interaction between people. Attempting to limit the transmission of the contagious disease in this way altered the everyday rhythms of interacting, working, studying, socialising and living. Understanding Covid-19 as a disruption is evident in how participants reflected on the absence of sharing as exemplified by Indiana: Because normally on Instagram I’ll go out like two or three times a week and have like two posts or at least one thing to post or share about life, whereas quarantine’s been like nothing. (Indiana, 20 years, 23 July 2020)

The shared view that there was “nothing” to post during Covid-19 illuminates the interplay of personal and social formed expectations of sharing and the assumption that there is a correlation between lived experiences and Instagram sharing. Indiana identifies that ‘going out’ is integral to her sharing practices, which in turn indicates that experiences of working, studying and being at home fall outside of moments that are classified as worth remembering. As she expresses later in the interview, “nothings good enough to post on Instagram at the moment”, indicating how her experiences of social media sharing premediate the experience of Covid-19 and are reliant on ongoing processes of evaluation. It speaks to Kattago’s (2021, p. 1410) proposition that Covid-19 was experienced a “surreal monotony of an endless now” in which there is an absence of “meaningful chronological time”. Participants in their reflection on Covid-19 sharing suggest that their social media profiles reveal this dynamic because of the expectation for meaningful moments to populate the digital traces. In other words, sharing on platforms reflects how Covid-19 disrupted the normative experiences offline. Alongside a shared assertion that there was “nothing to post” during Covid-19 was the positioning of Covid-19 as worth sharing due to its historic significance. This emerges in how Jada describes her use of Instagram: I think it’s such a bizarre, once-in-a-lifetime – hopefully – experience, that it seemed right to sort of keep some sort of history of what’s been going on and how we’ve been using this time. Yeah, I’m not sure. It just seemed like

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the right sort of thing to do to look back on because I don’t necessarily keep like a written diary so it’s sort of like a visual diary. (Jada, 19 years, 13 May 2020)

Jada echoes the public framing of Covid-19 (Kelly, 2020, p. 240) in describing Covid-19 as a “once in a lifetime” experience, which contributes to the rationale to record the experience as it unfolds. In this short extract, she asserts twice that sharing “seemed like the right sort of thing to do” indicating a sense of obligation towards documenting the experience, drawing on the “moral imperative to remember” discourse (Hoskins & Halstead, 2021, p. 681). This is further entrenched by the language she uses to speak about her use of Instagram. By referring to keeping history and showing what’s been going on, she shifts register from the first interview (7 February 2020) in which digital traces were “nice memories to look back on” stored on a “platform for memories”. Although in the excerpt above, she anticipates engaging in this practice of looking back and continues to approach Instagram as a platform for safeguarding and preserving the past, she also foregrounds the public over the personal. Although not responding to a specific story-collecting call, Jada takes on the responsibility to capture and archive her experience of Covid-19 as it unfolds, aligning with public memory initiatives (Adams & Kopelman, 2021; Kosciejew, 2021). Her selection of Instagram as the medium for keeping a history of Covid-19 indicates the perceived value of the platform. Furthermore, sharing is positioned as an appropriate and recommended response to living through the pandemic. Jada creates an Instagram Stories Highlight,1 labelled Corona Diaries. She selectively adds Stories to this Highlight, which offers insight into what moments she wishes to make visible. This includes a sequence of videos depicting her journey from London to her family home in Jersey. She regularly shares images of her bedroom, especially in the first two weeks of being home, one of which uses written text to reinforce how this is related to Covid-19: “waiting for iso to be finally over”. There are multiple Stories of coffee making, baking, working and FaceTiming her boyfriend from home. Over time, there is a spatial shift as she shares images of getting takeaway coffee and trips to the beach in which her parents and boyfriend are visually distanced from her. In one Story, she reinforces this 1  Highlights allow users to display on their profile themed Story segments beyond the 24-hour limit.

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imagery by adding the written text “perfect sunny (socially distant) walk”. The visual imagery in these Stories signals how social distancing and lockdown restrictions affected Jada’s life and became entangled in everyday experiences. She approaches memorialising in the present by visually showing the experiences of Covid-19. This mode of storytelling aligns with Georgakopoulou’s (2017) argument that there is a shift from telling the moment to showing the moment. While interspersed with digital traces in which she uses written language to “tell” her followers how the depicted moment is an experience of Covid-19 conditions, it indicates a shared cultural context between Jada and her followers that this visual imagery is recognised. Living under social distancing restrictions is a reoccurring theme across participants’ representation of Covid-19. At the beginning of the first lockdown, participants shared images of London’s iconic landmarks, public transport and grocery shelves without people. The emptiness of social spaces was presented as novel. Similarly, the presence of groups of people in streets or parks was captured to highlight a lack of compliance with social distancing restrictions. Participants also shared digital traces that explicitly affirm the novelty of returning to experiences like going on the tube or being in the pub bearing witness to the return to normality. These images of lockdown can be situated within cultural motifs and imagery representing Covid-19 as identified by Adams and Kopelman (2021) in their analysis of submissions to Historic England’s Picturing Lockdown (see Adams and Kopelman’s chapter in this book). For participants such as Jada, sharing experiences of Covid-19 necessitated an expansion in their digital memory work. Jada indicates how reimagining her digital memory work as historically significant and necessary, drawing on the duty to remember discourse, facilitates a shift in practices as she captures and shares experiences during Covid-19. There is a categorisation of Covid-19 as distinctive through the separation of digital traces from those previously shared. This is exemplified by Jada’s use of the Highlight feature as well as Indiana’s creation of a finsta during lockdown. A finsta is a secondary Instagram account that is followed by a small group of users and is expected to portray a less curated version of daily life (Duffy & Chan, 2019). As I have argued elsewhere, (Annabell, forthcoming), Jada uses this practice to share different performances of the self and overcome the issue of representations of Covid-19 disrupting the narrative of life curated on her main profile. She mobilises the term memories within the binary she constructs between the two profiles:

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My Instagram is very much like my memories with friends or like my memories of my family whereas this is just like dumb stuff that I do that I’m like that is kind of funny. And like maybe like subconsciously, it’s a place where I want to remember these things. I hadn’t really thought about it. But it really just feels like an in-the-moment like wild thing. (Indiana, 20 years, 23 July 2020)

As Indiana describes the profiles, she is reflexive about the extent to which her digital traces (or as she puts it “memories”) are moments that she wishes to remember. She alludes to a shared belief amongst young women that the act of sharing is interpreted as an anticipation of what should be remembered. In other words, it identifies a moment as worth remembering. Not only does Covid-19 disrupt her established pattern of sharing memories with friends and family, but it also functions as an opportunity for re-evaluation of the value of remembering moments that fall outside of this narrow conceptualisation. She contemplates in this extract the possibility of returning to the moments represented in the digital traces of her finsta and finding value in engaging in remembering. This marks a potential shift in looking back over experiences that do not necessarily elicit positive memories and feelings. In this way, there is a transformation of how experiences and events are remembered due to the departure from the normative model (Parui & Simi Raj, 2021) although this for Indiana is contained within a separate profile. The disruption is recognised as worth remembering albeit in a separate digital space.

Prioritisation of Happy “memories” During Covid-19 For some participants, the value of remembering experiences of Covid-19 is shaped by the performance of the ‘right feelings’. I argue that there is an intensification of the intersection between postfeminist feeling rules in which happiness is expected to be felt and expressed by young women and performances of digital memory work. To return to the earlier example of Jada’s ‘Corona Diaries’ Highlight, she explains in the interview that assessment of value is part of determining what is shared about Covid-19: Sort of just saving the sort of highs and I don’t know if there are any lows on there but sort of the key moments for me of the lockdown. (Jada, 19 years, 13 May 2020)

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This avoidance of “lows” can be situated within affective neoliberalism in which certain feelings are rendered toxic for women (Gill & Kanai, 2018) to the extent that even during Covid-19 Jada will only make visible the “highs”. This indicates how a time of social change does not disrupt gendered norms of sharing. Like all mnemonic texts, profiles are curated and constructed, but Jada indicates the extent to which her “history” of Covid-19 is guided by the ‘right feelings’. The selective performance of digital memory work holds value for Jada beyond the moment of sharing: I’ve reviewed it quite a few times particularly when I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with the lockdown and I think being able to see all the fun and good moments within it always puts me in a better mood. And I think it’s sort of looking for the good in what’s been going on has been really nice. (Jada, 19 years, 13 May 2020)

Jada presumes the visibility of happiness in digital traces will facilitate future performances of happy remembering when scrolling back. She presents a logical sequence of remembering and feeling, which echoes the affective environment embedded within the infrastructure of the platform (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018). Her orientation towards her curated Covid-19 past rather than representations of life prior to the pandemic, I propose, is because these digital traces act as mnemonic evidence of happiness that offer proof of living well through Covid-19. Thus, the abundance of digital witnessing during the pandemic at the level of the individual may be meaningful in managing stress and uncertainty. What also emerges in this extract is how the act of sharing is not only about capturing good moments during Covid-19 but also becomes a way of looking at and approaching the experience of Covid-19 in the first place. The labour of experiencing and sharing happy “memories” positively disrupts the experience of Covid-19 as Jada exemplifies in her reflection on returning home: Coming back home, I sort of, it was quite a stressful experience. So, I think having small stories of being in the taxi on the way to the airport and stuff was quite a fun bit of relief to make the story but also, for the people who I hadn’t had a chance to tell one to one. It was a quick way of letting them know that I wouldn’t be in London for the lockdown. (Jada, 19 years, 13 May 2020)

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As Jada indicates, the labour of preparing digital traces to meet the aesthetic standards of platform culture was a useful form of distraction. On the one hand, this exemplifies Hoskins’ claim that Covid-19 recording is “memory of the present for the present” (Hoskins & Halstead, 2021, p.  682). Yet, it also repositions the assumption that this is driven by a “false sense of security afforded through the ease and routinisation of our capturing of present experience” (p. 681). The familiarity of transforming experiences into memories brings a sense of comfort and affords a sense of agency during the time of uncertainty. Perhaps this contributes to why Jada increased the quantity of sharing despite Covid-19 being perceived as a time in which “there is nothing to post”. Jada also suggests that Stories act as a form of broadcast to her networks of friends and followers allowing her to share the labour of updating people with the platform. Sharing on Instagram is beneficial in the management of Covid-19 in the overlapping functions: networked communication, distraction in-the-moment and catalyst for happy remembering. Recording the present in the ‘right’ way provides a sense of security for the future as young women know they can return to their profiles to engage with this mnemonic evidence. It is not only that young women present mnemonic evidence of happy experiences of Covid-19 but how this at times involves a re-evaluation of what constitutes such moments. An example of this is the Story shared by Ava in which she explicitly connects being happy with being alone at home through her location tag (see Fig. 2.1). Instead of associating being at home with the ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) in which an individual—commonly a young person—feels anxiety or apprehension that others are having positive experiences that they are absent from, Ava asserts a feeling of happiness. This is reinforced by the smiling selfie as well as the expressions of the figures in the polaroid photos on the wall, mirror, and phone case. Although Ava is only the person physically in the space, these images make visible the performance of friendships. It also plays with the Covid-19 slogan of ‘stay home’, which was mobilised by other participants within their shared digital traces as well as the location of many of the images shared during lockdown. That is not to say that all participants restricted their sharing to constructing happy memories of Covid-19. For example, Chloe situates her intention to maintain a positive, encouraging outlook alongside sharing about the challenges of Covid-19:

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Fig. 2.1  Instagram story shared by Ava on 18 April 2020

There is a lot of seriousness going on in the world and in my own life, there has been a lot of loss so I think that it has changed maybe. Like, in some ways, I have been trying to like keep it positive and keep it encouraging. And in some ways, it has also been just a way for me to kind of process stuff and share my kind of real thoughts and feelings during this time with the world of Instagram. (Chloe, 21 years, 30 April 2020)

The labour and effort involved in expressing the ‘right feelings’ when sharing are hinted at in this excerpt. The verbs “trying” and “keep” allude to Chloe’s endeavours to continue to engage in displaying moments during Covid-19 that are positive and encouraging. Chloe attributes her change in the use of the platform to share “real thoughts and feelings” to the seriousness of life within the Covid-19 context. Unlike the “sad girls” of Instagram which generate a visible, public archive of female pain,

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sadness, images, and feelings through disrupting gendered expectations for sharing (Holowka, 2018; Mooney, 2018), Chloe does not critique the postfeminist affective climate. Rather the experience of loss and disruption through Covid-19 becomes an opportunity for Chloe to momentarily break from the gendered norms of sharing the self as happy. In doing so, the performance of digital memory work on platforms by Chloe during Covid-19 involves reflection on the pain and loss of loved ones as well as representing positive moments. Her use of the word “real” underscores the performative nature of constructing happy mnemonic evidence and the ongoing negotiation of authenticity on platforms.

Expression of Gratitude Towards Platforms The performance of digital memory work during Covid-19 also showcased the role of platforms and digital technologies in the lives of young women. Ade’s reflection in her follow-up interview on her use of platforms indicates how she anticipates that digitally facilitated interactions will be what she remembers about Covid-19: I’ll definitely remember and appreciate, you know, in 20 years’ time when I’m like 40 and I’m speaking to my friends and I’m like ‘do you remember when we were all locked in our houses for 6 weeks, but we were playing all sorts of ridiculous games on House Party and challenging each other to run 5k’. It’s such like a- I definitely think that social media has made memories in these times. Obviously, it’s documented them too but a lot of the memories that I’ve made in the past 6 weeks have been because of social media. (Ade, 21 years, 5 May 2020)

Ade identifies how social media experiences are a distinctive part of lockdown including participating in the challenge to support the NHS.  Platforms are not merely facilitators of interactions, connections and experiences, but Ade attributes agency to platforms as she outlines how this goes beyond the documentation of memories. Platforms are positioned as central to the memory-making process during Covid-19, which contributes to Ade’s expression of appreciation towards them. Although in interviews prior to Covid-19 participants praised platforms for their mnemonic purposes, Covid-19 marks an intensification of positive feelings towards platforms. This potentially further entrenches an interdependence and attachment to platforms, which is financially

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beneficial for commercially driven platforms like Instagram, which operate within the regime of surveillance capitalism. Participants also publicly expressed their gratitude for digital technologies and specific apps during Covid-19. For example, Jada shares a Story during the first UK lockdown in which she writes “so thankful for facetime”. By capturing the video call with her boyfriend playing the guitar, Jada transforms a private digitally mediated interaction into a public one. This act coupled with the bedroom location and expression of gratitude for FaceTime situates this Story within lockdown conditions. The lack of explanation addressing why she is thankful for this app or why this interaction is occurring through FaceTime rather than in-person highlights the shared sociocultural setting with her followers, in which it is unnecessary to contextualise this moment. This Story also exemplifies a shift in practices over Covid-19  in how friendship and relationships were represented. Not only did participants adapt their methods of socialising in response to Covid-19 conditions but how these social experiences were captured to be shared online. Participants produced mnemonic evidence of their ongoing friendships through screenshots and photos of FaceTime, Zoom and other digital interfaces like the earlier example. Jaynes (2019) identified how the potential for content to be screenshotted had a regulatory influence on how young women shared. In the Covid-19 context, however, screenshots become mnemonic proof of spending time together rather than a resource used to avoid or create conflict. This is connected to the circulation of these digital traces on platforms publicly as a celebration of friendships and relationships. In instances in which friends are smiling and posing, screenshotting is not performed covertly or outside of the gaze of those who are part of the interaction. It is instead a means to secure a sense of belonging within friendship groups and continue to perform friendships.

Conclusion The social obligation to remember Covid-19 as it unfolds is evident not only through public memory initiatives but also in the performances of digital memory work by young women on social media platforms. The internalisation of the moral imperative to record experiences of crisis and social change is manifest in their public sharing of experiences of Covid-19. I have argued in this chapter that the sociocultural setting, including the postfeminist, neoliberal environment, cultures of sharing and platform

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affordances along with the values of individuals, reconfigures how this duty to remember Covid-19 is enacted by young women. Participants reinforced the construction of Covid-19 as disruptive by representing the novel, distinctive aspects of life under Covid-19 conditions such as empty public spaces and staying home as well as through their organisation of these digital traces. Containing Covid-19 moments within specific Highlights and finstas can be seen as an attempt to balance the need to record history with the expectations to curate happy memories of everyday life. Another strategy adopted by participants was to limit sharing to digital traces that represented positive moments during Covid-19, which indicates how the ‘right feelings’ shape performances of memory even during times of crisis. For others, Covid-19 was an opportunity to move beyond the boundaries of gendered performances to make visible experiences of pain, suffering and grief. While there was a multiplicity of responses by participants, the experience of Covid-19 involved (re) evaluations of what is worth remembering due to the suspension of regular patterns of living. Covid-19 also illuminated how young women attribute value to their digital traces on platforms and the labour involved in sharing and remembering. The ability to look back on mnemonic evidence is, I argue, a way for individuals to manage the experience of change as well as express agency in circumstances in which there is a sense of loss of control. Although platforms are celebrated for their facilitation of connections and role in memory-making in times of crisis, in performing digital memory work young women also labour to remember their lives for the financial benefit of commercial platforms, and so digital traces of Covid-19 are entangled with surveillance capitalism and monetary worth as well as mnemonic.

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CHAPTER 3

Picturing Lockdown in the UK: Memorializing an Ongoing Crisis Tracy Adams and Sara Kopelman

Introduction In different countries across the world, various public memory initiatives attempted to memorialize the current COVID-19 crisis, to ‘remember’ the pandemic, while it is still ongoing. Such initiatives raise the compelling question of how this worldwide crisis will be remembered in the future. They also embody within them pressing issues of dynamics of archiving and memorialization practices. Accordingly, this research set out to explore how is a historical ongoing event in-the-making memorialized and archived, and what is the relationship between memory initiatives of the past and memory initiatives of the present?

T. Adams (*) Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Kopelman Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_3

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As a first step in answering these questions, we analyzed a specific case study: the Picturing Lockdown collection. This collection was instituted in April 2020—the first lockdown in England—by Historic England (HE), the UK’s statutory adviser on historic environment and heritage assets. In a public call-out, HE turned to English citizens to help record “this extraordinary moment in history” (HE, 2020a) by sharing their photographed experiences of a week in lockdown. The call-out positioned the Second World War as a reference point, explicitly stating that this was “the first time the public have been asked to capture photographs for the HE Archive (HEA) since the Second World War” (HE, 2020a). In referring to HE’s National Buildings Record (NBR)1 in the Second World War, the call-out uniquely created a parallel in terms of the enormity of the crisis and the practice through which to achieve this effort. By invoking the war as a reference point, the collection also demonstrates how memorialization efforts of the global pandemic are embedded in the English culture of commemoration and the historical past that influences its narrative. This research first compared archiving practices and content of the Picturing Lockdown collection, as it appears on HE’s official website, and the HE National Buildings Record (NBR) in the Second World War. Second, we analyzed and compared the official Picturing Lockdown collection and the Instagram collection, via #PicturingLockdown, as parallel collections of the current crisis. Combining visual and textual analysis with in-depth interviews, findings demonstrate the connection between the memorialization of a global experience and local efforts to represent it. Two major issues arise: the first regards the agents of memory (Vinitzky-­ Seroussi, 2002)—no longer only political and institutional actors, but also the public at large. This change accentuates a shift in memory dynamics and with it the growing possibility for publics to assume the power of collective story-telling. The second issue concerns the process through which an unfolding event is archived, specifically how, through social media, this resonates with the shift from photo-archive as a representation of the past to documentation that represents the liveness of the present. Differing from typical archival collections that are collected and assembled only after an event is over, the Picturing Lockdown initiative on social media 1  Historic England was first established in 1984 and until 2015 was commonly known as English Heritage. The National Buildings Record was initiated in 1941 to collect records of buildings and sites at risk during and after the Second World War.

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illuminates the present and how an ongoing event can be commemorated, thus linking to the interconnectedness of temporal negotiations between past, present, and future.

Material Commemoration and Archiving Efforts Collective memory is a social construction, conveying structure and constituting a framework for societies. Through memories, collectives can construe a narrative of the past, in the process also shaping the present. As collective memory is first and foremost linked to the creation of a community, it was previously imagined as national identity (Anderson, 1991), memory “from above” (Sierp, 2014, p.  30), public (Bodnar, 1992), or official memory (Olick, 1998). All these conceptualizations allude to the dominant version of collective memory that is constructed and reconstructed through an active and selective process by key agents of memory. ‘Top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ kinds of memory also come into being through commemoration practices – material and non-material – through rituals, memorials and museums, textbooks, and photo-archives. With the rise of networked technologies and social media, memorialization practices are transforming, and novel memory-making practices are becoming prevalent, transcending “established boundaries of space, time and social experience” (Keightley & Schlesinger, 2014, p. 747). Research has shown how interactive digital media technologies and social networks affect traditional processes of production, distribution, and consumption of memory (Benzaquen, 2014; Hoskins, 2011; Huyssen, 2000; Reading, 2003). Through digital memorials (Hess, 2007), grassroots utilization of Web 2.0 technologies (Liew et  al., 2014), and social media (Ebbrecht-­ Hartmann, 2021), individuals are enabled to more fully participate in archiving practices, sharing memories, and opening up spaces for interactives forms of remembrance. Social media is thus both an archive and a public sphere (Mylonas, 2017; see also Cook, 2013; Zhao et al., 2013). Traditional material commemoration reflects the power relations of societies, since it underlines which version of the past receives validation at a certain point in time. In contrast, the unique form of ‘connective memory’ suggests a transformation, perhaps even a revolution, in human communication and memory practices, since it gives rise to a surfeit of vernacular memories. In such a ‘culture of connectivity’ (Van Dijck, 2013), digital memories (Garde-Hansen et al., 2009) can cross over and between borders, demonstrating how memories can travel (Erll, 2011)

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and become ‘globital’ (Reading, 2012). Thus, if traditional material commemoration came into being through an internal political-negotiation process (Doss, 2010; Gensburger & Lefranc, 2020) to mediate national-­ societal messages (Simko et  al., 2022), digitally mediated practices of memory-making emphasize communal and vernacular discourse of a more active society. Moreover, whereas traditional commemoration happens after an event has been memorialized and is firmly secured in the past (Adams & Edy, 2021), we argue that digitally mediated practices of memory-­making also transcend temporalities. An event no longer needs to be ‘over’ to be memorialized, but rather archiving efforts can take place while an event is still very much ongoing (Adams & Kopelman, 2021; Gensburger, 2019). This is the case with COVID-19. Various institutions worldwide are actively engaging the public to collect materials that, in their claims, will be used in future commemorations. In what follows we demonstrate the continuation of this shift in memorialization and archiving of a historical event in-the-making (see, e.g., Arvanitis, 2019; Gensburger, 2019; Santino, 2006), using the Picturing Lockdown initiative as a case study.

Method This research affords an analysis of archiving efforts during times of crisis. HE’s attempt to create a national memory-making endeavor links between the idea to create a historical-cultural narrative of what is anticipated to be a major collective memory in the future, and an intriguing method of recruitment: reaching out to the public through crowd-sourcing. To be sure, there are quite a number of memory-making initiatives that encourage the assembly and documentation of life during the COVID-19 epidemic. Prominent examples include UNESCO’s Memory of the World (MoW) Programme documentary heritage project and blog, Austria’s Wien Museum’s ‘Corona in Vienna,’ and the New York Historical Society Museum & Library’s History Responds project. While differing in content, form, and practices of collection, all of these memory initiatives present the pandemic as a momentous event and an unparalleled historical moment, one that necessitates public participation in the processes of documentation and archiving. The Picturing Lockdown initiative, however, recruits the historical memory of the Second World War, using the past as a reference point and as a framework through which to guide the archival effort. In so doing,

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the global pandemic is embedded in the English culture of commemoration and the historical past that continues to influence its narrative. Evoking the Second World War thus consists of tapping into the spirit of commonality with which English people can once more work together to overcome the current hardship. In addition, the initiative evokes the National Buildings Record (NBR), HEA’s previous attempt to create a historical and national archive during a crisis, that was also partially achieved through crowd-sourcing. The link, then, between the past and the present is created not only through the attempt to anchor the past in the present, but also in terms of the necessary practice through which an archive of the present (crisis) can be achieved. Finally, the Picturing Lockdown initiative asked the public to submit their photographed experiences of lockdown to both HE’s official website and via social media (HE, 2020b). The result is intriguing since it presents two digital collections that are substantially different from each other in terms of the contributing people, the content (the images), and the symbolic attributions that can be made by the image-text relations. We combined different qualitative methods. First, we compared archiving practices of the Picturing Lockdown collection and the HE National Buildings Record (NBR). The analysis involved visual and textual investigation of the materials, including past call-outs, photographs, and newspaper clippings. Specifically, we examined the process through which the institution recruited the public to help in the recording and assembly of archive-worth materials. Within this context, we conducted in-depth interviews with Ms. Tamsin Silvey, the cultural program curator of the Public Engagement Department at HE, and Mr. Gary Winter, the exhibitions and images officer at HE. This was done in order to complete our understanding of the decision-making process involved in the creation and curation of the photo-archive collections. Second, we analyzed the Picturing Lockdown collection on the website and on Instagram using a qualitative method for visual and textual analysis that applies a combination of iconography (Panofsky, 1972) and a social semiotic approach to visual communication (Barthes, 1977; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2020). Beginning with the HEA website, we analyzed all photographs according to the different types of submission (public, commissioned artists, and HE photographers), also determining whether the photograph is part of a series. The visual analysis focused on the composition of the photographs and their signifiers, distinguishing between indoor and outdoor, wide shot or close-up, with people or without, day or night,

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and composition. Major themes were also identified across the different types of submissions. We then turned to examine the accompanying captions, keywords, and descriptions, focusing on the relationship between the texts and the images. A similar analysis was conducted on the #PicturingLockdown collection on Instagram. This decision to focus on Instagram is due to its richness as a research site, including ample visual materials and textual labeling (i.e., hashtags), which we found to be crucial for providing a framework for memory-work. To this extent, although Facebook and Twitter were also available for submissions, this research decided to focus solely on the submission on Instagram. We examined all the results from #PicturingLockdown, and we paid special attention to those photographs from the official collection that appeared also on Instagram. Due to this identification, we compared these two public archives, carefully addressing the contextual differences in the appearance of the collection (i.e., the titles, descriptions, keywords, and hashtags). Third, we participated in the Museums in Wartime Webinar hosted by the University of London on 02 July 2020, in which, among other projects, the collections were presented and discussed. This helped with the comprehensive in-depth exploration of the Picturing Lockdown memory project initiative, in terms of realizing the significance attributed to public engagement when archiving events during times of crisis.

Comparing Archiving Practices and Content: The NBR and the Picturing Lockdown Collection Despite its focus on personal experiences of lockdown, the HE call-out was inspired by the National Buildings Record (NBR) public call-out during the Second World War. During the war, incendiary bombs proved to be the greatest threat to life and property, primarily the destruction of cultural artifacts such as historical buildings. The record, initiated in 1941, thus aimed to document and archive culture under attack,2 its primary mission focused on the documentation of architecture of buildings and landscapes. Insofar as the collection arose out of the imminent threat of destruction, pressure of time (as well as financial constraints) resulted in a 2  Culture Under Attack is an exhibition at Imperial War Museum London, curated in partnership with Historic England, exploring how war threatens not only human lives but also culture and heritage.

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dynamic process in which the public was called upon to help contribute to these national efforts. Specifically, the NBR wanted to create a record of the nation’s important historic buildings before they were potentially destroyed by aerial bombing and disappear from the English collective memory. Asking for voluntary help, NBR (nowadays Historic England) used the public’s contributions to establish an official record of the nation’s heritage under threat. One such example can be found in the following 1941 call-out “Your ‘Snap’ May Become a National Record” (The Yorkshire Observer, 19 March 1941). However, following the relatively meager response of the public, combined with the realization that not many have the required expertise or even the needed equipment to comply, the NBR soon realized it was more efficient and practical to use a small number of people with professional knowledge in documenting and archiving practices such as photographers, architectures, and artists than to try and organize many local volunteers. There were three approaches for the acquisition of new photography: by commissioning professional architectural photographers, by commissioning ‘amateurs and semi-amateurs,’ and by employing a full-time NBR photographer. Indeed, it appears as though the NBR preferred to rely on a small pool of competent photographers who would work through prepared lists and who could be relied upon to produce good results (Winter, personal communication, November, 2020). The NBR collection consists of black-and-white photos of historical buildings, monuments, and sculptures, some semi-destroyed, while others wholly intact. The collection focused solely on buildings as national heritage sites, and human presence is notably scarce. Some of the photos are of the facades of the buildings, while others are of the interior; some photos are in wide shot, while others are in close-up, focusing on decorative or architectural details. The accompanying texts of the collection (captions, descriptions, and keywords) are typically informative, containing key facts regarding the architectural structure and the period within which the statues, monuments, or buildings were erected. The keywords include the names of the buildings but also their use, and at times a descriptive reference to the state or condition of the structure (e.g., ‘Victorian Commercial Office,’ ‘Chapel,’ ‘Nave,’ ‘Medieval Church,’ ‘Bomb Damage,’ ‘Derelict or Ruin’) (e.g., see Fig. 3.1). All in all, this large collection is distinctly dedicated to English culture as was perceived at the time. The historic collection, in this respect, does not necessarily represent

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Fig. 3.1  BB42/01195  - © Historic England Archive. The facade of the Commercial Union Assurance Office in High Street, showing bomb damage. July 1942

what contemporary audiences are primarily interested in nowadays, that is, social interactions; rather it is focused on what was deemed important at the time, that is, buildings (Gary Winter, personal communication, November, 2020). This is evident through its focus on public buildings and the clear labeling of a culture that is under destruction. Stating that this was “the first time the public have been asked to capture photographs for the HE Archive (HEA) since the Second World War” (HE, 2020b), HE turned to the public again, almost 80 years later, to encourage them to be part of the national response to a time of crisis and uncertainty. In April 2020, Historic England (HE) called out to English citizens to partake in creating the Picturing Lockdown collection. By sharing their personal photographed experiences of Lockdown, the public were asked to “help us shape what we remember about this time” (HE, 2020b).

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In the official collection, submissions could be made directly on the website, and through social media (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). Out of 2984 public submissions, a team of HEA curators chose 100 photographs that were “most evocative, informative and inspiring” (HE, 2020a). Alongside the public’s submissions, 50 commissioned works by 10 contemporary local artists and 50 more from 5 HE photographers (a total of 200 photographs) were added. The final official collection included 200 photographs that aimed to visually capture the current crisis, documenting personal experiences of lockdown. Capturing the shared experience of restricted life at an unprecedented time, the collection adheres to its title: Picturing Lockdown. Broadly, the collection depicts scenes that have become part of the “recognisable visual culture of COVID-19” (Pollen & Lowe, 2021, p.  10). These include images of deserted urban public spaces, glorified nature (i.e., gardens, natural parks, and wildlife), sanitation and hygiene measures such as disposable gloves and face masks, and a variety of rainbows (that have become synonymous with NHS support). To the extent that photos were taken by individuals during lockdown (and thus do not exhibit hospitals, emergency rooms, or COVID-19 patients), the collection as a whole portrays an experience that is not as overtly negative as would perhaps be expected in such a time of crisis and uncertainty and as was represented in various media around the world. Broadly, what is conveyed is a sense of solitude. This is perhaps unsurprising, since the photographs were taken during lockdown. In this sense, many of the photographs focus on how isolation is experienced, capturing boredom, weariness, and the nature of life during the lockdown. Everyday activities were restricted or entirely halted, resulting in a lack of activity. Time seemed to slow down, and people were induced to reinvent everyday banal activities (see Fig.  3.2). Undoubtedly, these images convey individual experiences of lockdown that are widely shared (Adams & Kopelman, 2021; Sonnevend, 2020), yet they are primarily “represented through a symbolic, poetic, and metaphorical lens” (Adams & Kopelman, 2021, p. 280). Examining the curation and labeling processes in the official Picturing Lockdown collection demonstrates how the archive is institutional-led. The entire collection is categorized as a health-related issue. This is achieved by the use of the keywords ‘health and welfare’ in every photograph. The decision to bind the experience of lockdown under the framework of health and welfare (and not, for instance, ‘crisis,’ ‘lockdown,’ ‘pandemic,’

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Fig. 3.2  HEC01/036/01/044 - © Rory Milner. ‘Quarantine Cut 1’—a man looking at his newly cut hair in a mirror in the back garden during the Covid-19 lockdown. April 2020

or any other possible paradigm) is undoubtedly a selective one and follows the institutional perception of how such a crisis should be remembered. To be sure, the content in the two collections—NBR and the official Picturing Lockdown collection—is different. While the NBR focused on buildings and architecture as a representation of the public culture, the Picturing Lockdown collection focused on individual experiences of lockdown. The contributors who took part in the documentation also differ, since although the NBR turned to the public, the final collection was created with the help of professional photographers who were appointed to document the sites of memory (Winter, personal communication, November, 2020). Indeed, it can be said that these professionals were called upon to use their expertise to serve their country in a time of need. In contrast, in the Picturing Lockdown collection, the public was called on to participate in the documentation process (alongside the artists and HE photographers), and the final collection is the combination of both the public and the professionals’ contributions. Furthermore, although HE

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professional photographers also took part in this effort, they were asked to do so by expressing their private experiences as individuals in lockdown, to “turn(ed) their cameras on their homes and local areas to document their personal experiences of lockdown” (HE, 2020a). Although the content and the contributors of the two collections differ, in terms of curation, that is, categorizing the photographs and designing the virtual space wherein the photographs can be seen by the public, these two archives are quite similar and both adhere to the institutional considerations of HE. It is quite notable in this respect that the two archives are official public accounts of what constitutes an English collective memory, tightly bound to institutional understanding of what should be remembered and in what manner this memory should be presented. On account of this similarity, we turned to examine the ‘public’ or ‘alternative’ archive on social media via #PicturingLockdown.

Between the Official and the Alternative: How Social Media Impacts Archiving Efforts Whereas the official Picturing Lockdown collection consists of a total of 200 photographs (from both public and professional contributions), the #PicturingLockdown collection on Instagram includes 3485 photographs.3 To clarify, any image that is posted on Instagram and includes #PicturingLockdown becomes automatically part of this collection, even if unrelated to HE’s call-out. As such, one can find photographs posted online portraying non-April 2020 lockdown experiences, from different times, or different countries, or even not at all related to lockdown. On social media, people from all over the world can take part in this endeavor, becoming part of an archive simply by tagging their images in a certain way. In so doing, and in contrast to the official collection on HE’s website, the Instagram collection is ‘live,’ ever-growing and changing and taking on a life of its own. In essence, any image that receives the hashtag ‘Picturing Lockdown’ instantly becomes part of the #PicturingLockdown “archive,” even if it is not related to or posted in response to HE’s efforts, or even portrays an English experience. Moreover, since Instagram is an open archive and 3  This number refers to the total of #PicturingLockdown pictures posted at the time of writing this chapter. Needless to mention, this is an ‘open’ archive that continuously grows and changes.

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there isn’t a deadline to upload the images or any kind of top-down selection process, the collection continues to grow and expand, transforming in content and meaning. However, going beyond the content of the images in the archives, when comparing the exact same photographs on the two digital archives, an additional difference can be discerned. Insofar as the official Picturing Lockdown collection is heavily oriented toward institutional considerations (as can be seen, for instance, by the labeling of all photographs ‘health and welfare’), the Instagram #Picturing Lockdown collection, in contrast, was created by inherently different memory agents and represents considerably different motivations. The Instagram users are the curators of this social media archive since they are in charge of the images they decide to upload and how to ‘label’ their uploaded content. As such, the multiple hashtags—which are in essence keywords for categorization and labeling—open up possibilities for a multitude of frameworks. For instance, to label a photograph with #PicturingLockdown means to become part of the collection even if there was no such intention, and even if the image is not from England, and does not depict an English experience of COVID-19.  To add #Covid19 to a #PicturingLockdown image is to transform the image into a global experience, one that can be shared worldwide. To add #London, #Manchester, or even #Pakistan to a #PicturingLockdown image means to position oneself in space, as a local entity that is sharing a local experience. Labeling processes on social media demonstrate how individuals take part in creating alternative vernacular collective memories (Fridman & Ristić, 2020). These contributing individuals do not necessarily take on themselves the role of ‘memory activists,’ since they do not provide an alternative narrative or provide a reckoning with the present through the past; rather, they are individuals that partake in the larger effort of memory-­ making of the present. This may be unintentional. They may not realize when tagging their images #Picturing Lockdown that they are contributing to an actual archive. Nevertheless, even if not doing so in the conventional manner (i.e., through the HE submission process) or perhaps doing so in both conventional and alternative manners (i.e., using their HE-approved submissions to also participate in the Instagram collection), these individuals manage to create a substantial interactive archive of an ongoing crisis. The Picturing Lockdown collection as a whole is thus an example of a hybrid collection, one that combines institutional recruitment of personal

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practices of documentation with individual contributions that are distinct or go beyond the institutional call-out. For both archives, the official collection and the Instagram one, the private citizen is responsible for documentation. However, for the first they are transformed into potential field agents that adhere to institutional considerations and through their submissions encapsulate a conversation between national and personal perspectives, whereas for the latter, they attend solely to private motivation of creating an archive that can truly represent a shared experience and commonality since it has no institutional mediating factors.

Agents of (Their Own) Memory Since the inception of collective memory, national archiving projects have been created and led by key agents of memory: political leaders, public figures, and media-related agents such as journalists. Simultaneously, under the larger umbrella term ‘memory activism’ (e.g., Daphi & Zamponi, 2019; Gutman, 2017; Rigney, 2018), various actors also “struggle to produce cultural memory and to steer future remembrance” (Rigney, 2018, p. 372). These vernacular efforts attempt to partake in the construction of public memory by creating alternative narratives that “acknowledge conflicting histories and ideas while also promoting self-­ criticism of national narratives and of fixed identities” (Gutman, 2011, p. 63; also, Adams & Guttel-Klein, 2022; Challand, 2011; Fridman, 2020). The NBR collection and the official collection of Picturing Lockdown are composed of individual materials yet led by institutional considerations. With the NBR collection, soon after turning to the public, the realization hit that professionals are needed. Thus, although initially the attempt was to recruit the public to help record and document the present, the final archive collection is in fact an institutional archive that represents the institution’s perspective and point of view. With Picturing Lockdown, using crowd-sourcing, HE recruited the public to help archive an ongoing crisis, thus enabling a variety of voices to represent the English population at large. At the same time, the selection, curation, and presentation of these individual contributions are guided by the archiving team at HE. In the Picturing Lockdown collection, the HE team was responsible for deciding upon the criteria according to which they would select the images (primarily equal and inclusive representation) and the selection of images

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(a total of 200 out of almost 3000). The decision to supplement the public’s submissions with additional photographs by ten professional artists and five HE photographers further demonstrates how the collection is driven by institutional considerations. To be sure, the artists and HE photographers were similarly instructed to express personal experiences, yet, in reaching out to various artists and professional photographers, institutional power comes into play, and the final representation of how English society experiences lockdown is no longer solely represented by individuals in society. This is further substantiated by how the commissioned artists and HE photographers submitted series of five to seven photographs and ten respectively (whereas the individuals participating in the call-out could submit only one single photograph). This enabled the artists and professional photographers to submit series around a central theme. Notably, even though some did present personal expressions, this framework—that is very much identified with photographic work—helped them retrieve their ‘role definition,’ namely, that their creations are done within the framework of their professional role and interests. Finally, the decision to tag the images under ‘health and welfare’ and to supplement the same description across all photographs also attest to how institutional considerations guided this endeavor. The Instagram collection is inherently different. It is created by individuals and for individuals. While both digital archives demonstrate what different individuals believe would be the best representation of lockdown (see Pollen & Lowe, 2021), the Instagram archive also includes images that may diverse from such beliefs. Put differently, the images on the official website portray a collective understanding of what is expected when participating in a photographic competition, whereas the Instagram collection portrays an expectation of what kind of images would receive recognition (what would be liked and further shared). The Instagram users are thus a different kind of memory of agent. They are not, as previously stated, memory activists, yet, at the same time, they are not led by institutional concerns. They embody an interesting mix of considerations and motivations, and the archive that is consequently produced demonstrates a new kind of agent of memory: one that is simultaneously a part of a larger collective—individuals that experience lockdown and an ongoing crisis, and social media users who abide by social media rules and guidelines.

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Shifting Archiving Practices Archival work in institutions such as museums oftentimes relies on contributions made by individuals. These personal objects and documents are typically displayed as part of a public collection and, in the process, also infuse the public with biographical perspectives and recollections. When assembling a collection, or creating an archive, the materials from which the archive is made are typically collected only after an event is over and its meaning consolidated and established. The NBR and the Picturing Lockdown collections, however, differ from typical archival collections since they both, in varying degrees, used the submitted photographs not to enhance an existing collection but rather as its very foundation. Furthermore, both the NBR and the Picturing Lockdown collections allow “the public to create a unique time capsule for the future” (HE, 2020a). Both recruited materials from an event that was (and is) unfolding. The NBR collection was produced during the Blitz when the aerial bombing of England’s towns and cities threatened the country’s architectural heritage. The war was very much ongoing. The same can be said with regard to the Picturing Lockdown collection, since at the time of the call-­ out, England was in its first lockdown (between late March and June 2020). Almost two years later, COVID-19 is still ongoing, with confirmed cases rising once again, despite a vast majority of people having their first dose of vaccination.4 In this manner, archiving efforts in the present are guided by the realization of how the present will be an event that will be remembered in the future. The Instagram collection embodies this dynamic. As a social media archive, #PicturingLockdown is fluid and open, its content, categorization method, and ever-increasing size adhering to the unboundedness of the present. Thus, whereas the photographs of the two official collections (the NBR and Picturing Lockdown) capture the present for the sake of the future, they do so in a limited way. Although the crisis is still ongoing (and, at the time the NBR was created, the Second World War was not yet close to reaching its conclusion), the collections themselves are limited in number and capture a certain moment in time. Since the Picturing Lockdown official collection’s ‘selected entries will be permanently catalogued as part of our archive’ (HE Twitter, 2020), they are limited, not 4  According to The BBC Visual and Data Journalism Team: https://www.bbc.com/ news/uk-51768274; accessed March 28, 2022.

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only in the number of photographs that constitute the archive, but, indeed, in the range of experiences that are represented. As such, although the collections attempt to document the present for the sake of the future, they only manage to do so in a limited manner. In contrast, the Instagram collection, as a social media archive, continues to ‘live’ (Frosh, 2019), since it grows not only with every additional photograph that is uploaded but also through the highly interactive mode of operation, namely the likes, comments, and shares that each image receives. Since multiple hashtags are undeniably one of the prominent tactics of exposure on social media (Manovich, 2016), any image with the hashtag #PicturingLockdown is ‘accepted’ to the collection, to be further shared and circulated, in a constant engagement with the present (Frosh, 2019; Jurgenson, 2019). The Instagram archive is unbounded, both temporally and spatially. Fundamentally, it is an archive that “captures our lives in an endless present” (Adams & Kopelman, 2021, p. 277). Any image that is uploaded to Instagram represents the individual’s experiences of the present wherever they may physically be. In this respect, the Instagram collection is a less biased representation of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, since it is similarly ‘restless’ (Wagner-Pacific, 2017). It is a public informal space (Mylonas, 2017) wherein “citizens have a new agency and a new voice” (Cook, 2013, p.  97). This is not the case with the Picturing Lockdown official collection—here, COVID-19 is represented as over and done with; it is securely in the past (Adams & Edy, 2021).

Concluding Remarks At times of risk and uncertainty, when attempting to grapple with current exigencies, the past is typically called upon to provide guidance and consolation (Khong, 1992; Schuman & Rieger, 1992; Simko, 2015). When searching for meaning, historical analogies are often brought up and past events are evoked as a kind of ‘lesson of history’ (Edy, 1999; Kornprobst, 2007; Zerubavel, 2003). In the English case, social and political actors found the Second World War to be an apt framework for understanding COVID-19 and, in particular, the restrictions that were imposed to overcome it. Setting aside for the moment the question why British politicians and media commonly turned to the war as the go-to frame (McCormick, 2020), in this chapter we focus on the archiving practices of an ongoing crisis in comparison and contrast to past attempts. Utilizing two cases wherein the same institution (HE) used the same method

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(crowd-­sourcing) to memorialize an event that is still ongoing (the Second World War and COVID-19 respectively), we illuminate how the public at large has also become a prominent agent of memory and how shifts in archiving practices enable new ways of memorialization. We argue that the combination of COVID-19, a unique worldwide crisis that transcends cultural specificities and space, set in an age of social media wherein any individual can contribute to archiving practices, is what further strengthened the current shift in memorialization practices. COVID-19—a present ongoing event—is publicly memorialized with a clear objective to be remembered in the future. This claim receives further backing when contrasted with the NBR attempt to recruit the public to partake in the documentation of an ongoing crisis. In contrast to the low public participation during the Second World War, the current HE call-out managed to attract more attention, recruiting more people to contribute to memory-making efforts. This is even more pronounced if one takes into consideration the public submissions made through social media. Calling out to the public to take part in archiving a crisis is only the first step in creating a ‘new’ agent of memory. In recruiting the public, the archive that is created remains an institutional one since it adheres to the criteria and considerations of institutional actors. However, in calling out to the public to contribute also through social media a startling phenomenon occurs: one that no longer enables individuals to contribute to a larger national attempt of memorialization but rather completely relies on those individuals to create an archive. On social media any individual can contribute, not only those that were chosen or accepted by the institution. When uploading an image and tagging it as #PicturingLockdown any contribution is included, even if uploaded from another country or portraying an unrelated and non-lockdown experience. These new agents of memory do not need to adhere to the objectives of the institution, but rather they need to play according to the social media rules. Individuals choose what image to upload and how to label it; they choose which image to respond to and how. Since the public is the actor that creates the archive, images can appear more as an ongoing story and less concise or iconic, an image that must adhere to what is expected from an embodiment of a collective memory. This ‘ongoingness,’ that is also afforded through the ‘liveness’ of the archive on social media, makes the images seem as though they are more a product of the ‘present.’ Combining these two aspects—the ability to upload images even after the deadline is over and the content itself of images that portray a moment in time, one of

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many other moments—is what creates an archive that can openly and explicitly memorialize an ongoing present crisis. The Picturing Lockdown collection is not unique. In its official undertaking, it is a national effort that adheres to local and institutional expectations, and as thus it is space-bound (Lohmeier & Pentzold, 2014). The experiences that are presented on the website are bound to specific landscapes and sites of memory; their meaning is also constructed through a cultural lens that very much relies on common and acceptable paradigms, that is, the Second World War. As a case study, then, these archiving efforts are generalizable to other efforts elsewhere. Although COVID-19 has a global impact, various memorialization efforts primarily remain national. Institutional efforts to archive the present crisis, in this respect, seem to have failed what is “a test case for the making of global memory” (Erll, 2020, p.  867). In the Instagram collection, however, memorialization efforts are more varied. The collection continues to expand and transform, including images and experiences of individuals from various parts of the world. Archiving practices are indeed shifting, in so doing, creating new ways of memorialization.

References Adams, T., & Edy, J. A. (2021). How the past becomes the past: The temporal positioning of collective memory. British Journal of Sociology, 72(5), 1415–1429. Adams, T., & Guttel-Klein, Y. (2022). Make it till you break it: Toward a typology of de-commemoration. Sociological Forum, 37(2), 603–625. Adams, T., & Kopelman, S. (2021). Remembering COVID-19: Memory, crisis, and social media. Media, Culture & Society, 44(2), 266–285. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso books. Arvanitis, K. (2019). The ‘Manchester Together Archive’: Researching and developing a museum practice of spontaneous memorials. Museum and Society, 17(3), 510–532. Barthes, R. (1977). Image-music-text. Fontana. Benzaquen, S. (2014). Looking at the Tuol Sleng museum of genocidal crimes, Cambodia, on Flickr and YouTube. Media, Culture & Society, 36(6), 790–809. Bodnar, J. (1992). Remaking America: Public memory, commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century. Princeton University Press. Challand, B. (2011). Coming too Late? The EU’s mixed approaches to transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through civil society. In N. Tocci (Ed.), The European union, civil society and conflict (pp. 96–125). Routledge.

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Cook, T. (2013). Evidence, memory, identity, and community: Four shifting archival paradigms. Archival Science, 13(2), 95–120. Daphi, P., & Zamponi, L. (2019). Exploring the movement-memory nexus: Insights and ways forward. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 24(4), 399–417. Doss, E. (2010). Memorial mania: Public feeling in America. University of Chicago Press. Ebbrecht-Hartmann, T. (2021). Commemorating from a distance: The digital transformation of Holocaust memory in times of COVID-19. Media, Culture & Society, 43(6), 1095–1112. Edy, J. A. (1999). Journalistic uses of collective memory. Journal of Communication, 49(2), 71–85. Erll, A. (2011). Travelling memory. Parallax, 17(4), 4–18. Erll, A. (2020). Afterword: Memory worlds in times of Corona. Memory Studies, 13(5), 861–874. Fridman, O. (2020). Peace formation from below: The “mirëdita, dobar dan!” festival as an alternative to everyday nationalism. Nations and Nationalism, 26(2), 447–460. Fridman, O., & Ristić, K. (2020). Online transnational memory activism and commemorations. In J. Wüstenberg & A. Sierp (Eds.), Agency in transnational memory politics (pp. 68–91). Berghahn Books. Frosh, P. (2019). The poetics of digital media. Polity Press. Garde-Hansen, J., Hoskins, A., & Reading, A. (Eds.). (2009). Save as… Digital memories. Palgrave Macmillan. Gensburger, S. (2019). Memory on my doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan neighborhood, Paris 2015-2016. Leuven University Press. Gensburger, S., & Lefranc, S. (2020). Beyond memory: Can we really learn from the past? Springer Nature. Gutman, Y. (2011). Transcultural memory in conflict. Parallax, 17(4), 61–74. Gutman, Y. (2017). Memory activism: Reimagining the past for the future in Israel-­ Palestine. Vanderbilt University Press. Hess, A. (2007). In digital remembrance: Vernacular memory and the rhetorical construction of web memorials. Media, Culture & Society, 29(5), 812–830. Historic England. (2020a). Picturing lockdown collection. Retrieved December 15, 2020, from https://historicengland.org.uk/images-­books/archive/collections/photographs/picturing-­lockdown/ Historic England. (2020b). Public asked to help record a week in  lockdown. (29 April). Retrieved December 15, 2020, from https://historicengland.org.uk/ whats-­new/news/public-­asked-­to-­help-­record-­lockdown/ Hoskins, A. (2011). Media, memory, metaphor: Remembering and the connective turn. Parallax, 17, 19–31.

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Huyssen, A. (2000). Present pasts: Media, politics, Amnesia. Public Culture, 12(1), 21–38. Jurgenson, N. (2019). The social photo: On photography and social media. Verso. Keightley, E., & Schlesinger, P. (2014). Digital media–social memory: Remembering in digitally networked times. Media, Culture & Society, 36(6), 745–747. Khong, Y. F. (1992). Analogies at war: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam decisions of 1965. Princeton University Press. Kornprobst, M. (2007). Comparing apples and oranges? Leading and misleading uses of historical analogies. Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 36(1), 29–49. Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2020). Reading images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge. Liew, K. K., Pang, N., & Chan, B. (2014). Industrial railroad to digital memory routes: Remembering the last railway in Singapore. Media, Culture & Society, 36(6), 761–775. Lohmeier, C., & Pentzold, C. (2014). Making mediated memory work: Cuban-­ Americans, miami media and the doings of diaspora memories. Media, Culture & Society, 36(6), 776–789. Manovich, L. (2016). Instagram and contemporary image. manovich.net. McCormick, L. (2020). Marking time in lockdown: Heroization and ritualization in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 8(3), 324–351. Mylonas, Y. (2017). Witnessing absences: Social media as archives and public spheres. Social Identities, 23(3), 271–288. Olick, J. K. (1998). What does it mean to normalize the past? Official memory in German politics since 1989. Social Science History, 22(4), 547–571. Panofsky, E. (1972). Studies in iconology: Humanistic themes in the art of the renaissance. Icon. Pollen, A., & Lowe, P. (2021). Picturing lockdown or feeling lockdown? Historic England Research, 18, 6–15. https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-­new/ research/back-­issues/picturing-­lockdown-­or-­feeling-­lockdown/ Reading, A. (2003). Digital interactivity in public memory institutions: The uses of new technologies in Holocaust museums. Media, Culture & Society, 25(1), 67–85. Reading, A. (2012). Globital time: Time in the digital globalised age. In E.  Keightley (Ed.), Time, media and modernity (pp.  143–162). Palgrave Macmillan. Rigney, A. (2018). Remembering hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic. Memory Studies, 11(3), 368–380. Santino, J. (Ed.). (2006). Spontaneous shrines and the public memorialization of death. Palgrave Macmillan.

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CHAPTER 4

#Mémoriascovid19: Reimagining and Narrating Trauma in the Core of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Brazil Ana Carolina de Moura Delfim Maciel and João Felipe Rufatto Ferreira

The diversity of historical testimonies is almost infinite. Everything men say or write, everything they make, everything they touch, can and should inform about them. Marc Bloch (2002, p. 61)

Introduction The second half of the twentieth century faced a profound redefinition in the fields of history and social memory through the emergence of new record technologies and methodologies, such as oral history practices. From the use of portable cameras and recorders in the 1950s to the

A. C. de Moura Delfim Maciel (*) • J. F. R. Ferreira UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_4

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current dissemination of smartphones, such tools contributed to the democratization of production processes—and access to information—by expanding the use of memorial sources in academic studies, museums, and archival institutions. However, this redefinition was not restricted to the historiographic level only; it has also impacted the ways in which individuals experience memory in their daily lives. The new possibilities of information sharing generated by the emergent media contributed to blurring the boundaries between the spheres of public and private, thus redefining the relations we established with the intimacy of others (See also Annabell text in this book). The last years of the twentieth century were marked by such intense connections between the public and private spheres that intimacy assumes and is configured through media visibility. It is common to point out that the meaning of what is public has changed in a world permeated by communication technologies and network information dissemination, where individuals can interact with others and observe people and events without even being in the same space-time environment. The expansion of the Internet on a global scale was, probably, the main element of this new regime of intimacy. As stated by Sacramento, “the sociability practices promoted by the internet allowed forms of self-­ publishing, based on a new subjective organization”1 (2018, p.  135), which also contributed to the expansion of the concepts of trauma and survival that have always defined the political function of testimonies as narratives of a limit-experience. In the context of the Covid-19 health crisis, we recognize this expansion in the numerous projects that were created in early 2020, aiming to preserve memories of the pandemic. The project #MemóriasCovid19 (Platform #MemóriasCovid19, n.d.) is among those initiatives. Through the implementation of a curated digital platform, our main goal was, since the beginning, to gather a series of expressions (textual, visual, and audiovisual) digitally conceived and mostly disperse in social networks—which became an important mechanism for comprehending and expressing emotions related to Covid-19 pandemic— and to build a space where experiences could be shared, allowing for the preservation of traces and images that would possibly be lost in the volatility inherent to digital media. Therefore, the present chapter will return to this initiative aiming to (1) describe possible gazes towards the traumatic experiences generated by the pandemic, expressed in the plurality of 1  All the quotations of Sacramento (2018) have been translated from Portuguese by the authors.

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supports and materials submitted in the platform; (2) propose and reflect on the concept we denominate real-time memory, which expresses the acceleration of remembering and collecting practices in the digital environment  and some of its consequences to the constitution of a social memory of the pandemic. As it is well known, the practice of collecting and preserving historical testimonies was intensified by the Holocaust experience and the dedicated scholarship that has emerged since. According to Wieviorka (2006), the catastrophes’ history would be tagged by the importance attributed to witnesses’ words. However, the possibility of gathering a diverse range of testimonies in the main core of a traumatic event is something that would be almost inconceivable in a world previous to the World Wide Web. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, technology has reduced the temporal distance between living through a historic event and the act of narrating it to a point where, according to Regine Robin (2016), it seems impossible to distinguish between the event, its apprehension, and even its universal reception. Concerning recent catastrophes, the responses to the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, constitute a turning point on digital archiving practices perspectives: “The explosion of online collecting following September 11 was part of a larger change in Internet culture that the attacks precipitated. As the Pew Internet and American Life Project has shown, more and more people turned to the Internet as a “commons” after September 11; it became a place to communicate and comment rather than just surf for news. […] an unprecedented number of people used the Internet to share their feelings and perspectives on the tragedies. For example, nearly 20 million Americans used email to rekindle old friendships after September 11” (Cohen & Rosenzweig, 2011, p.  149). The September 11th Digital Archive (n.d.)2 was born as an “effort sought to collect directly from their owners those digital materials not available on the public Web: artifacts like e-mail, digital photographs, word processing documents, and personal narratives” (Cohen & Rosenzweig, 2011, p. 148). Three years after it was established, it had already collected more than 150,000 digital artifacts relating to the terrorist attacks. This is a representative example of how the Internet allows historians to “push beyond the selectivity of paper collections to create more comprehensive archives with multiple viewpoints and multiple formats (including audio and video as well as text)” (Cohen & 2

 See the project’s website https://911digitalarchive.org.

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Rosenzweig, 2011, p. 150). Collections natively created and made available in digital environments, are different from the classical ones which are primarily  “tridimensional”, usually constituted with textual documents and objects, and are built after the event has taken place. In the context of digital archiving initiatives, as well in the case of the pandemic, the collection is largely built on real time, relying on collecting and preserving strategies focused on natively digital traces of the event. As a result, most of these digital collections face the challenge of dealing with uncertain proveniences and “tend to be less organized and more capricious in what they cover” (Cohen & Rosenzweig, 2011, p. 127). As such, new archiving challenges emerge: if analogical archives depended exclusively on “sealed spaces and temperature control”, now this dependence is extended to issues related to “updates, synchronization, software compatibility and energy flows” (Bloom, 2007, p.  13), which exposes digital archives to other vulnerabilities demanding for other preservation strategies. In this movement, the very status of what “should” be preserved—as much of what is considered a document—is expanded. Aleida Assman (2011, p. 421) points out that “between cultural garbage and cultural archives passes the mobile and non-fixable frontier of value and non-value.”3 This is relevant particularly to online platforms and their potential to preserve large amounts of data, but also to their imminent obsolescence and transactional structure. Even though the Internet has redefined the ways in which individuals can write about themselves and become witnesses of a changing world, the main part of the registers shared in the network is not the focus of any self-preservation impulse. Photographs, videos, illustrations, gifs, poems, and other types of material shared daily throughout blogs and social media are left adrift. They constitute a massive amount of humanity’s digital garbage, and because we do not grant them any cultural or historical value, they are simply ignored until the platforms in which they are kept cease to exist. Such records, largely coming from ordinary individuals whose memories would hardly enter conventional memory spaces—namely, “brick and cement” museums and archives—, result in inspiring material. As “fragments” of experiences, they contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of a given historical phenomenon through the individual perspectives of those who experienced different aspects of  such 3  All the quotations of Assman (2011) have been translated from Portuguese by the authors.

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phenomenon. Submission system of #MemóriasCovid19 project, accessible to anyone wishing to share their point of view on the pandemic, allowed us to have a broader spectrum, converging on innovative sources that would otherwise get lost, for example, in the volatility of social networks. Our aim in this chapter is to analyze how testimonial practices and, consequently, the production of memorial artifacts have been employed by individuals as a mechanism for addressing the traumatic experiences caused by the coronavirus pandemic. To achieve that, we will consider the material submitted to project #MemoriasCovid19, as well as interviews given by two participants of the project. Our goal, since the launching of this memorial initiative, has been to delineate the ways in which such memories may allow us to comprehend a diverse range of experiences and the impact of the virus in ordinary individuals’ daily life, expressed subjectively in the texts and images brought together in the present chapter. In this matter, this chapter is located at the crossing of Covid-19 memory and trauma studies (Gundogan Ibrisim, 2023).

Project #MemóriasCovid19 The project #MemóriasCovid19 is headquartered at the State University of Campinas (Universidade Estadual de Campinas—UNICAMP) and gathers four university bodies: COCEN (Coordination of Interdisciplinary Research Centers and Centers), CLE (Center for Logic, Epistemology and History of Science), IA (Institute of Arts), and PROEC (Pro-Rectory of Extension and Culture). It is funded through UNICAMP’s Public Notice of Support for Extension Projects and the São Paulo Research Aid  Foundation (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo-FAPESP), within the scope of the Thematic Project “Collect, Identify, Process, Disseminate: The curatorial cycle and the production of knowledge”.4 It is important to note that UNICAMP was the first Brazilian university to interrupt in-person activities due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, precisely on March 13, 2020, preserving only the functioning of essential activities, including hospital and biology laboratory complexes and some administrative fronts. All other activities 4  Collect, identify, process, disseminate: The curatorial cycle and the production of knowledge (n° 17/07366-1); Modality Project: Thematic; Principal investigator: Ana Gonçalves Magalhães; Investment: R $ 3,598,403.24.

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were turned on a teleworking system, instituting a new way of working mediated by computer screens. We were then at the beginning of the pandemic, and we were thinking how we would gather forces from various fields of knowledge in favor of a memorial space. Making the situation even worse than it was, we didn’t receive any orientations from the federal government on actions to mitigate the spreading of the virus: lockdowns were not decreed, leaving it up to local governments, citizens, companies, universities, and schools to limit the transit of people. We were frequently bombarded by speeches given by President Jair Bolsonaro that denied the importance of pandemic, minimizing the effects of the virus, qualifying it as a “little flu”, and deliberately delaying access to the vaccines. And as if the drama of the situation was not enough, we were adrift: in some places, people were dying due to the lack of oxygen, the lack of hospital beds, and access to immunizers, while other countries in the world were already in advanced processes of immunization. In that context, in our view, a memorial archive initiative could work as a tool to connect those who were fighting to survive besides the main denialist discourse. It would represent a possibility to comprehend—in real time—the fear and the emotional consequences of the isolation caused by a virus invisible to naked eyes. The mechanism that seemed more adequate, considering the background of the project coordinator in the field of life trajectories, oral history, and audiovisual history, would be a digital platform aiming to collect fragments (mostly visual) of living experiences and taking advantage of the digital environment’s  agility to collect and display those memories pari passu to the pandemic’s large-scale spread (Fig. 4.1). With the support of UNICAMP’s dean office and students, the project’s initial structures were quickly implemented, and the invitation was made to the researchers who are part of our Curatorial Committee, encompassing institutions in Brazil and abroad.5 #MemóriasCovid19 was set in motion on May 21, 2020, as we began to receive the first submissions. The project’s official website was launched some months later, in 5  The researchers that make up the Curatorial Committee and their respective institutions are Ana Magalhães (USP); Andrea Casa Nova Maia (UFRJ); Benito Bisso Schmidt (UFRGS); Cecília Helena Lorenzini de Salle Oliveira (USP); Charles Monteiro (USP); Elena Brugioni (UNICAMP); Heloísa Buarque de Almeida (USP); Kátia Couto (UFAM); Keila Knobel (USP); Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (USP); Raquel Rato (FCSH NOVA Lisboa); Mônica Raisa Schpun (EHESS - Paris); and Pedro Guimarães (UNICAMP).

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Fig. 4.1  An empty present is merged with a populated past in UNICAMP’s common spaces. Memory shared by Lais Lourenço (2021). Available at: https:// memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=246

September, at the Ars Electronica International Festival, based in Linz/ Austria. At the festival, we also released a documentary outlining the main objectives and prospects of the platform.6 #MemóriasCovid19 aimed to build a comprehensive and dynamic process of collecting “viewpoints” about the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to build what we have called from the beginning “memories for the future”. Relying on crowdsourcing, the project set up a web platform where the general public was invited to submit their grassroot memories in a form through which they could attach files from various media, such as photographs, videos, audios, pictures, and/or text files. Participants also had the option to make their submission anonymously, thus preserving their identity if they so wished. In a subsequent stage, the submissions underwent a qualification process, in which questions of authenticity were assessed and those considered 6

 Available at: https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/video-documentary.

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qualified were then sent for evaluation by the Curatorial Committee. Finally, the approved submissions were displayed on the platform’s home page, completing what we address as the project’s curatorial cycle. The idea to implement a curatorial process to evaluate the submissions is aligned to the subjectivity involved in the collecting process itself: the platform would not be a “time capsule” and shouldn’t be considered an exempt tool; it is, rather, a selection of memories in consonance to the curators’ analysis and to the policy that oriented what we intended to share with a wider public. The submissions that were not accepted have also gone through a cataloging process and will be available for consultation in the historical archive of CLE/UNICAMP, a partner of the project #MemóriasCovid19. The dynamics of the collection-display process of memories meets another objective advocated by the initiative: the amplitude of the collected memories. In this sense, there was no restriction on the proponents and no delimitation of a specific group or community that could participate. Also, no specific media format or textual structure were mandatory. #MemóriasCovid19 is a university extension project in which all members of society were invited to collaborate. Despite the diversity and breadth of images and texts received, it is interesting to note the points of convergence between submissions. Covid-19 pandemic approximates personal experiences by subjecting them to an experience of collective trauma. The assumed perspective is that of the present time. A time that is long, but that is still strange, uncertain, and reckless. An aura of uncertainty, contemplation, immobility, and impotence permeates several reports (Fig. 4.2). Following two years of operation, we decided to close the submission process on December 31, 2022, exactly three years after the first notification by the World Health Organization (WHO) concerning the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan market. We have received more than 340 submissions, of which approximately 240 are accessible on the website, covering all regions of Brazil, as well as other countries, such as France, United States, Ecuador, and Canada, even if in far smaller quantity.7 The gathering of these memories confers a diverse spectrum of meanings around the “pandemic” motto, not only due to the different perspectives they convey, but also due to the diversity of formats used in their production, resulting in a kaleidoscope of videos, photographs, drawings, audios, prose texts, 7  Some of these submissions came from Brazilians living abroad. However, we also received memories from people of other nationalities.

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Fig. 4.2  Windows amplify, or frame, an uncertain world. The images of the sky expand frontiers. Memories shared by Maria Madalena Felinto Pinho Ramos (2020) and por Dalton Villa  (2020). Available at: https://memoriascovid19.unicamp. br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=119 and https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ unity-­memorie?cod_post=71

and poems. The prevalence of images in the submissions received is something to be considered. According to a survey carried out on August 20, 2022, out of the 236 approved submissions, 159 included images—including digital photographs, collages, illustrations, and print screens—while only 77 included texts. Additional data concerning the participants help us to delineate the main public of the project. According to a survey carried in November 2022, over 53% of the submissions received were sent by individuals who identify as female, while 46.3% identify as male. The scholarity of the participants also gives a relevant analytical perspective, since almost 60% of the submissions came from people with higher education levels and over 41% declared postgraduate degrees. This proves that, despite #MemóriasCovid19 proposes to be an unrestricted extension project, it is mostly disseminated in academic circles. This analysis is also underpinned by the occupation data provided by the participants who declared to be students (over 37%), teachers (over 8%), and researchers (almost 2%). Other occupational groups that are relevant to be pointed out are doctors (1.8%); housewives (2%), and artists, who make up 6.1% of the participants, making it the sixth largest occupational group in the project. In this matter, #MemóriasCovid19 invites the researchers to look beyond the assumed relationship between digital platforms use for collecting grassroots memories and the actual diversification and inclusivity of remembrance. In this case, and of course without any intention on our part, some of the Brazilian social inequalities do still serve as a social framework for the expression, and collection, of people’s memory of Covid.

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Trauma’s Testimony Between Word and Image While referring to psychoanalyst Hélene Piralian’s work, Márcio Seligmann-Silva highlights the role played by symbolization in the resumption of traumatic experiences in order to bring about the “(re)construction of a symbolic life space”8 (Piralian, 2000 apud Seligmann-Silva, 2008, p. 68). According to him, through narrative, the repressed event “returns […] to the flow of the other’s life events” in a way that “instead of the flattened and trampled image resulting from the traumatic shock, the symbolized scene acquires three-dimensionality. The narrative linearity, its repetitions, and the elaboration of metaphors all work towards giving a new dimension to the once before buried facts” (Seligmann-Silva, 2008, p. 68). Thus, the testimony should not be understood as “factual” because it is through imagination that the survivor is capable to face “reality’s black hole” and finally to deal with the traumatic experience (Seligmann-­ Silva, 2008, p.  70). Human narration, as stated by Jerome Bruner, is directly linked to the construction of identity, through which we “build, reconstruct, and somehow reinvent the past and the future”9 (2008, p. 13). We approach and analyze the data collected through the platform #MemóriasCovid19, given the symbolic function they acquire in the face of traumatic experiences at different levels. These texts and images are immersed in the subjectivities that produced them, helping the individuals to give meaning to the changes and losses caused by the pandemic. This is the case, for instance, of Luis Felipe Leopoldino’s post: “Death is like water that falls upon the written paper: it dissolves its fragile texture and breaks it into fragments with a few sentences. Thus, each little piece is a remembrance that is kept in the memory of those who were part of existence. And, that fragment memory may inspire and even transform the world of that individual who can still hear the echo of our passing.”10 This text was written in response to a friend’s death at the beginning of the pandemic and expresses the author’s commitment to the memory of 8  All the quotations of Seligmann-Silva (2008) have been translated from Portuguese by the authors. 9  All the quotations of Bruner (2008) have been translated from Portuguese by the authors. 10   Extract from the text submitted by Luis Felipe Félix Leopoldino  (2021) to #MemóriasCovid19. Luis is an autonomous professional from the city of São João da Boa Vista in the State of São Paulo/Brazil; his age range is between 26 and 35 years. His Submission is available at: https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-memorie?cod_ post=284.

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the ones who are gone; however, it also addresses the inevitable passing of time and the imminent dissipation of memories themselves, as he continues, “nonetheless, inevitably, the life of that person that possesses such fragment will also dissipate with time, since the water falls over everyone.” Luiz’s reflection expresses the grief experienced by millions of people worldwide because of the lethal virus. Besides that, the Covid-19 pandemic imposed changes in everyday life. Flight attendant Luzimar Soares, for example, reported the experience of interrupting a life in transit, as she went back to live with her parents during the initial social distancing periods. In an interview (Luzimar Soares, n.d.) she narrated how such changes impacted her routine: “it was transforming the life of someone who had no regular schedule into one of getting up day after day at the same time. I wouldn’t necessarily go to bed at the same time as my parents did, but I needed to silence the house so that they could sleep”. Luzimar then commented on the process of writing her own testimony and the difficulties to face the frailty of life: “my testimony’s writing process was extremely painful, because I could notice daily hardships, efforts from those who were already of a certain age. When you do it in a human way, facing the possibility of the finitude of your beloved ones’ lives, it is very painful.” She went on to say: “I felt the need to externalize my emotions, of turning this public memory into something that could connect to more people, because I don’t think I was the only one going through the same process. So writing, posting, and making other people see themselves on the same boat, I think this is a way we can humanize and collect memories, affects, and other people’s needs.” Such drive to externalize emotions and connect experiences—through the sharing of individual memories for a wider public—materializes, in a way, the dialogical condition inherent in the act of giving an account of oneself. According to Elizabeth Jelin, the testimonial act depends on “a relationship with another person who can help, through a dialogue based on alterity, to construct a meaningful social narrative” (2003, p. 89). The same perspective can be seen in the reflections of Seligmann-Silva, when he states that “without our desire to listen, without the desire to carry on the testimony that is heard, there is no testimony” (2008, p. 72). Going back to the traumatic experience through narration presupposes, thus, the very reception of the testimony. Indeed, the setup and implementation of the #MemóriasCovid19 project always assumed, from the very beginning, the establishment of an environment that is conducive to listening—without setting restrictions for the submissions—and, at the same time, the

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definition of strategies for disseminating the reports and records collected.11 According to Jèrome Bruner, giving an account of oneself is something that happens “both from outside in and inside out. When circumstances prepare us for change, we get support from those who have gone through them, we open up for new directions and ways of seeing ourselves in the world” (2008, p. 94). However, as previously stated, images prevailed in the submissions to #MemóriasCovid19. Therefore, one must update the concept of narration as described by Bruner toward approaching other means of representation that include visual forms in the remembering process. What are the specifics of imagetic records when compared to oral and textual records? Would it be possible to “read”, in the images submitted to the project, the same testimonial content that we perceive in textual reports? In his essay, “The Intolerable Image”, Jacques Rancière takes up a critical stand in relation to discourses that insist on the impossibility of visual representability for certain events, attributing to the verbal testimony the exclusive responsibility of communicating traumatic experiences. As opposed to that, Rancière proposes the reappropriation of a concept of representation that does not divide words and images, but which comprehends both of these representation models as intertwined: Representation is not the act of producing a visible form; it is the act of providing an equivalent, something the word can do as much as the photography. The image is the double of anything. It is a complex game of relationships between the visible and the invisible, the visible and the word, what is spoken and unspoken. It is not the mere reproduction of what was in front of the photographer or filmmaker. It is always an alteration placed in a chain of images that alters it in its turn. The voice is not the manifestation of the invisible as opposed to the visible form of the image. It is also part of the image construction. It is the voice of a body that transforms a sensitive event into another one, making an effort to make us ‘see’ what one has seen, by making us see what was said.12 (2012, p. 92)

11  Among propagation strategies, one can mention publicizing the project and its collection through the press (2); website maintenance and improvement, in which memories are reproduced in “real-time”; the presentation of the project in various academic forums; the participation, in December 2021, at the inauguration of the Covid-19 Memorial, organized by the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in which images and texts from the project’s collection were projected at the facades of a hospital facility located at our campus. 12  Authors’ translation.

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Images, and words equally, are subject to the discursive context in which they occur. It is only through the relationship that they establish among themselves – and with other visual and textual artifacts – that they can produce meaning. They are also the expression of a subject, the “voice” that wants to tell us something. They visually translate the experience that is sensitive to a body, and they provide the testimony of a given experience. The Covid-19 memory is, by and large, an imagetic one. It is the photos that, as evident in the data collected by the #MemóriasCovid19 project, express more poignantly the numerous changes imposed by the virus in people’s everyday lives. These images are almost always followed by a brief comment in which the participants describe what is being presented while taking up an active role as producers of such visual artifacts. On the one hand, these photos register the changes imposed by the pandemic. At first, for example, we received various photographs showing masks “inhabiting” domestic environments, emptied public spaces, home “classrooms” and “offices”, and at a more advanced stage in the pandemic, various records of people being vaccinated. On the other hand, we found a series of images from a predominantly artistic standpoint, representing experiences, feelings, and reflections. The phenomenon can be illustrated by Guarabira Graça Dias’ photos. The images are accompanied by the following comment: “Shared loneliness. Sharing one’s fears, anguishes, and also one’s happiness. Solitude lurks from every corner, in your room, your home, yourself. Shared Loneliness is an experiment towards reaching out to other selves.” A naked body seated on cold tile floors, under a kind of bench where the artist attempts to assume a fetal position, next to the photograph of an old house with closed doors and windows (Fig. 4.3). In the third image one sees the profile of an elder lady looking passively at a screen. Next to her, cardboard boxes and packages pile up disorderly. These images are the testimony of an artist’s experiences during the pandemic, seeking expression through the performance of the body and the image. Through the mise-en-scène, Guarabira performs to the camera the self-entitled feeling of “Shared Loneliness”. Thus, actions are “thought out particularly for the camera” and “worked in a way that it results in a visually potent expressive image”13 (Vinhosa, 2016, p.  76). Photography is not used here to

 Authors’ translation.

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Fig. 4.3  Staging and mise-en-scène of the photos submitted to the project. Memory shared by Guarabira Graça Dias (2021). Available at https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=243

simply record or preserve a given event. It is employed as a staging space, to symbolize one aspect of the conflictual experience of isolation. However, this is not the only way of expression manifested by the project’s participants. Many submissions employed processes of intervention directly on the image’s surface, including collages and/or digital illustrations, color editing, video animations, and even images produced through artificial intelligence (AI). Such a variety of forms is paradigmatic of the refinement of “controls over captioning, processing, and distributing images, which had progressively been developed with photography, film, and the video” but “with a digital base reached a never before possible scale”14 (Baio, 2014, p. 140). Digital artifacts also provide the resignification of images by approximating symbologies of verbal and visual discourses. This is the case of a photograph depicting a tea cup and earphones – objects that became representative of remote work – followed  Authors’ translation.

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Fig. 4.4  Images employ a variety of styles and materials. Memory shared by Kahian Scabello  (2020). Available at https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ unity-­memorie?cod_post=49

by the tag “bread and circuses”, revealing the irony regarding the imposition of a certain way of living determined by social isolation. There is also the photograph of hand sanitizer being poured over hands passively open, bringing about the possibility of an interpretation: a gesture that becomes so trivial surfaces, subliminally, the frailty of human life facing the virus (Fig. 4.4). What is at stake in such records is the production of symbolic imagetic artifacts that, as well as textual reports, aim to interpret, represent the unspeakable, the incomprehensible, and to provide a dimension of the feeling of unrest through individual experiences in the pandemic. Amid a public health catastrophe, the data collected by the platform shows, even if only symbolically, a profusion of feelings related to the changes imposed by Covid-19 and the uncertain future marked by the fear for one’s life and that of their beloved ones. Therefore, given such

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personal sources produced and shared concurrently with the event, more than historians reflecting on the past, we are immersed, in real time, into a collective trauma. This is an unprecedented challenge that inspires us toward a redefinition and, ultimately, a resignification of our own profession and our relationship with the sources we collect and analyze. This long pandemic situation leads us to a redefinition of some common-based concepts among which one that is crucial: historical temporality. We face a synchrony of reports, trauma, and safeguarding initiatives that inspires us to rethink historiographical and mnemonic practices themselves.

“Real-Time” Memory and the Pandemic’s Temporalities There is no panic, there is no fear, just silence. Rebelling has proven useless, so let’s stop. How long is the effect of this psychotic fixation that has taken the name of coronavirus destined to last? They say that spring will kill the virus, but on the contrary it could exalt it. […] It matters little how deadly the disease is: it appears to be modestly so, and we hope it will dissipate soon. (Berardi, 2020, p. 38)15

In such a continental country like Brazil, with radically distinct rhythms and flows, it is worth noting, while analyzing the submissions collected in the platform, the difference between its sceneries and temporalities. Although the submission form has always been available since the project was launched, it is undeniable that its flow was influenced by some specific events that took place in relation to the pandemic—like the arrival of first vaccines—and by campaigns to disseminate our initiative, held by the project’s communication team. Therefore, it is hard to talk about the collection’s temporality in terms of continuity; rather, we prefer to analyze the different, and sometimes even fragmented, experiences of time expressed in some of the submissions. This is the case for an audiovisual record sent by Jeane Meire, who, by filming her daily life in a rural area, symbolizes a slower temporal dimension, almost impassive to the desolate and frightening scenario of the big cities and their crowded hospital wards. In the scenes, one can barely see actions, only the representation of waiting, at an uncertain time, which extends itself throughout the video (Fig. 4.5).  Authors’ translation.

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Fig. 4.5  Frames from the video submitted by Jeane Meire Eufrásio (2020) to the project #MemóriasCovid19. Memory shared by Jeane Meire Eufrásio da Silva. Available at https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=86

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Jeane lived in the city of Mossoró, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte, and during the pandemic she decided to spend the lockdown days of isolation with her parents and her sister in their ranch, situated in Maisa, a region of the countryside of Mossoró. In one of the few interviews (Jeane Meire Eufrásio, n.d.) we were able to have with some of the participants, she explained how as a photographer, she already had “an interest […] in the daily life, a gaze towards the mini-chronicles of things taken for granted”, but the pandemic allowed her more time to produce and edit the video and that without it, maybe, she would have not even lived these particular moments with her family. Even though she demonstrates a familiarity with the space of her parent’s home, which allowed her to produce a close register of their intimacy, as she punctuates that “it was as if they did not see me there. I am family, I am a daughter, a sister, and they can dissociate me and completely ignore me, maybe because I carry this connection with them,” Jeane also highlights her outsider position in a place that does not belong to her “I saw all of that with a gaze from the outside. It was not me, Jeane, owner of the space, but me, Jeane, a visitor.” On the other hand, and as a counterpoint to the temporality that is slowly depicted without direction, we have the photo of a “2020 Planner” spreadsheet sent by Anik Zaharic. In this image, there is no possible planning, but only a closing of April, May, and June with the words “Quarantine” repeated almost ad infinitum.16 The highlighted spreadsheet brings in a homogeneous sequence of resignation and uncertainty. There is no possible commitment except for adapting to the forced social isolation measures. Another temporal nuance is present in a photomontage that shows a “compressed time” in which a young woman executes tasks at the same time in the same place: leisure, studies, eating, daily chores, activities that were given a new meaning, which culminates in the revelation of a cloistered domestic space.17 Some excerpts textually express such “new”—and unprecedented—temporal dimensions. The phenomenon can be seen in the following report provided anonymously: “Time is no longer organized in months, days. I believe and see time spasms and at some points in time, I picture myself on top of myself or would it be over me? Integrating a project of a collective self with no foreseen end, but 16  Memory shared by Anik Zegman Zaharic  (2020). Available at https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-memorie?cod_post=27. 17  Memory shared by Giovanna Contel Kohn (Contel, n.d.). Available at https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-memorie?cod_post=50.

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which, by still incomprehensible forces, keeps going back and forth” (Anonymous, 2020).18 Besides such representation, which unveil individual and plural time dimensions, one must underscore the collecting, storing, and propagation of the testimonies received by the platform. These are fragmented testimonies that, with no temporal distance in relation to the events, end up promoting a change in the very act of gathering and propagating such information.

Closing Remarks More than three years after the World Health Organization (WHO) decreed a state of global pandemic, we found ourselves facing new challenges concerning the platform, in terms of both its ways of spreading the collected data and its function as a memorial framework for consultation and reflection. The final deadline for new submissions was held on December 31, 2022, and from that moment onward we  have concentrated on improving consultation mechanisms, such as adding a timeline with all submissions and creating new options for filtering data on the website, we have  also  implemented actions aiming to disseminate the project’s collection. We edited a compilation video  called “Pandemic Gazes” with an assemble of images and texts collected by #MemóriasCovid19  the video was projected in open air seasons at UNICAMP buildings, events promoted by the university Dean’s office with the purpose to pay homage to the several victims of Covid-19’s pandemic worldwide and, specially, to the 700,000 lives lost in Brazil. We have a memorial project underway at the university that will bring together various initiatives: planting a forest, building of monuments, mural paintings in open air walls by the campus, tributes that will remain in the university sharing spaces. We have adopted the idea of a “real-time” archiving once the origins of the platform took place as the Covid-19 pandemic progressed. The real-­ time experience is intrinsically linked to society’s technological access and, more specifically, to the modes by which interpretations and testimonies of such experiences are produced, stored, and shared. This acceleration of memory production and circulation was masterfully noted by Régine Robin in “pre-pandemic” times: “Memory is produced at a speed similar  Available at: https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-memorie?cod_post=107.

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to that of light. It is no longer possible, therefore, to distinguish an event from its apprehension, nor even this apprehension from the universal reception. The three moments coincide. There is no more time or distance between them. The present, the instant, means both by the event that takes place, its apprehension, and by its reception. The event, thus, does not even have time to become ‘past’”19 (2016, p. 401). According to a survey carried out by the project Coronarquivo (Project Coronarquivo, n.d.),20 82 initiatives related to pandemic historical experiences were created in Brazil, employing different mechanisms to collect testimonies. These initiatives share a common critical perspective. They were born out of a political stand in face of the absence of an effective action from the federal government to combat the disease. As mentioned before, Brazilian society faced, in addition to the SARS COV-2 virus pandemic, a pandemic caused by the denial and misinformation, witnessing, day after day, shallow graves being opened to accommodate corpses that piled up in residential and hospital beds, deaths that could have been avoided if effective measures had been taken by the leading authorities in the country. However, it is striking to see that the majority of the material we collected does not show explicit political claims and controversies. It first and foremost appears in opposition to this sordid scenario by translating, in various poetic and symbolic ways, pain, loneliness, love, contemplation, adaptation to the new status quo, and several other feelings that were never experienced before. These fragments are a true antidote against loneliness, as they allow for memorial and subjective experiences to resonate with each other in real time. Until then, never a global traumatic event was narrated—and archived—in such an immediate time frame. Synthesizing new paradigms that emerged from the pandemic experience, one main question remains: what is left for us in the face of this new condition of memory? It seems increasingly urgent that we seek strategies to reflect on memory and implement new measures for the conservation, dissemination, and safeguarding of testimonies to ensure that their singularities do not disappear as footprints in the sand. There is no more time. Memory and its respective apprehension occur here and now. An invisible and lethal virus that hastens us to review concepts, process perceptions, and share experiences that are painful, poetic, nostalgic, fearful, or hopeful. There is no possible dichotomy in this whirlwind of emotions that we  Authors’ translation.  https://www.chd.ifch.unicamp.br/node/9.

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are immersed in. This trauma that affects our contemporary society impels us to rethink the very place of the individual in history. We hope #MemóriasCovid19 Platform has been a movement in this direction.

Bibliography Assman, A. (2011). Espaços de Recordação: formas e transformações da memória cultural. Editora UNICAMP. Baio, C. (2014). A impureza da imagem: estéticas intersticiais entre a fotografia analógica e digital. Galaxia (São Paulo, Online), 28, 134–145. Berardi Franco “Bifo”. (2020). Crónica de la psicodeflación. In: Sopa de Wuhan: pensamiento contemporáneo en tiempos de pandemias. ASPO (Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio). Bloch, M. (2002). Apologia da História ou o Ofício do Historiador. Zahar. Bloom, I. (2007). Rethinking social memory: Archives, technology and the social. In I. Bloom, T. Lundemo, & E. Røssak (Eds.), Memory in motion: Archives, technology and the social. Amsterdam University Press. Bruner, J. (2008). Fabricando histórias: direito, literatura, vida. Letra e voz. Cohen, D.  J., & Rosenzweig, R. (2011). Collecting history online. In R.  Rosenzweig (Ed.), Clio wired: The future of the past in the digital age. Columbia University Press. Gundogan Ibrisim Deniz. (2023). On witnessing, trauma and slowness: Reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic. In A.  Menyhert, A.  St. John-Stark, & M. Makhortykh (Eds.), Trauma and Covid-19: Transdisciplinary perspectives. De Gruyter. Jelin, E. (2003). Trauma, testimony and truth. In State repression and the labors of memory. University of Minnesota Press. Piralian, H. (2000). Genocidio y transmisión. México/Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura. Rancière, Jacques. (2012). A Imagem Intolerável. In: O Espectador Emancipado. WMF Martins Fontes. Robin, R. (2016). A Memória Saturada. Editora da Unicamp. Sacramento, I. (2018). A Era da Testemunha: Uma História do Presente. Revista Brasileira de História da Mídia, 7, 125–140. Seligmann-Silva, M. (2008). Narrar o Trauma - A Questão do Testemunho das Catástrofes Históricas. Psicologia Clínica Rio De Janeiro, 20(1), 65–82. Vinhosa, Luciano. (2016). FOTOPERFORMANCE  - passos titubeantes de uma linguagem em emancipação In: arte Reflexões no Silêncio entre ruminâncias e experiências. PPGCA. Wieviorka, A. (2006). The era of the witness. Cornell University Press.

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Sources Websites Platform #MemóriasCovid19. (n.d.). Home page. Retrieved June 02, 2022, from https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ Project Coronarquivo. (n.d.). Home page. Retrieved November 23, 2022, from

September 11 Digital Archive. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2022, from https://911digitalarchive.org/

Quoted Memories Anonymous. (2020). Memórias Inconclusas. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp. br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=107 Contel, Giovanna. (n.d.). Untitled. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ unity-­memorie?cod_post=50 Dias, Guarabira Graça. (2021). Solidão Compartilhada. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=243 Eufrásio, Jeane Meire. (2020). Domingo. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ unity-­memorie?cod_post=86 Leopoldino, Luis Felipe Félix. (2021). Desabafo de um bobo. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=284 Lourenço, Lais. (2021). Untitled. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ unity-­memorie?cod_post=246 Ramos, Maria Madalena Felinto Pinho. (2020). Apartamento 1202, o arquivo de fora para dentro. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie? cod_post=119 Scabello, Kahian. (2020). Untitled. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ unity-­memorie?cod_post=49 Villa, Dalton. (2020). Maya à espera, na janela. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/unity-­memorie?cod_post=71 Zaharic, Amik Z. (2020). Untitled. https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ unity-­memorie?cod_post=27

Interviews Jeane Meire Eufrásio. Interview. (n.d.). https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ testimonies-­page-­en Luzimar Soares. Interview. (n.d.). https://memoriascovid19.unicamp.br/ testimonies-­page-­en

CHAPTER 5

The Danger of a Single Story: Epic-Pandemic Narratologies and Memorials of COVID-19 in Nigeria Ayokunmi Ojebode, Stephen O. Solanke, and Oluwabusayo Okunloye

Stories have been used to dispossess and malign. But, stories can also be used to empower and humanize. (Adichie, 2009)

A. Ojebode (*) SOAS University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. O. Solanke Ajayi Crowther University, Abeokuta, Nigeria e-mail: [email protected] O. Okunloye Texas Tech University College of Media & Communication, Lubbock, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_5

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Introduction The unprecedented impact of the coronavirus pandemic is universal across health systems, the economy, politics, education, religion, families, and the personal psyche, proving that the world is indeed a global community. Following the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, a market city with over 11 million, on 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. The virus reached Nigeria, a country of over 200 million, on 27 February 2020 through an index case of an Italian tourist. Initially, the Nigerian government was unresponsive but was later compelled by spikes and rates of deaths and infected persons. Thus, they engaged stringent public health directives across the country, especially mandatory closure of non-essential businesses, religious gatherings, schools, and markets, banning air travel, imposition of nose masks and sanitizer stands, and social distancing rules in public areas. The transmission rate during the first 45 days of the coronavirus outbreak in Nigeria was more widespread locally than the imported cases. Nonetheless, the Nigerian government focused on expatriates instead of the local populace (Adegboye et al., 2020). The Federal Government of Nigeria attempted to contain the coronavirus transmission by imposing curfews during the initial outbreak, mandating the use of face masks in public arenas, installation of sanitizer stands in public places, social distancing regulations, avoidance of congested areas, self-isolation for 14 days for anyone who tested positive to the virus, banning of air travels, closure of non-essential businesses and religious gatherings, and the creation of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) charged with collection and testing of samples across states in the country. The different timelines for each lockdown phase included 31 days for pre-lockdown (28 February to 29 March 2020), 35 days of complete lockdown (30 March to 3 May 2020), and 73 days for the easing-up of lockdown (5 May to 15 July 2020), and phase three of the gradual easing of lockdown finally announced on 30 June 2020. As of 4 July 2022, 256,415 infected persons and 3144 coronavirus-related deaths in 36 states, including the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, have been reported since the outbreak in the country (https://covid19.ncdc.gov.ng/). Some experts have predicted resistance during the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in Nigeria due to Africa’s pluralistic settings and setbacks in preceding vaccination programs, especially against polio in Nigeria, cholera in Mozambique, tetanus in East and West Africa, measles-rubella in

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Zimbabwe, and Ebola in parts of Africa (Ekwebelem et al., 2021). Recent studies finally linked Nigerians’ vaccine hesitancy to myths, conspiracy theories, and misinformation, especially among the grassroots, based on the country’s divergent socio-economic, religious, and political subjectivities (Tulloch et al., 2021). This chapter will break with the perspective of collecting stories from Nigerians about their plights during the COVID-19 era. It will serve as a path into personal and collective memories. As storytellers, the respondents’ narratives were analyzed to highlight the period’s gravity and assess the general impact of counter/alternative stories against the dominant media story and the public’s perception of the present and future global health crises. Indeed, though easily discarded as uncritical and unproven, stories in the medical field provide deeper insights into love, death, anger, pain, and other related themes in art, literature, and philosophy (Nussbaum, 2010). Storytelling overlaps with memory studies as it affords Nigerians the platform to collectively interpret, interrupt, or disrupt mainstream discourse on the coronavirus pandemic (Solanke, 2013). Collective memory, or ‘cohort memories,’ is often engendered by socio-political and cultural contexts as members of a social group affected by a large-scale event document or recount the event’s history with the aim of impacting future generations (Pennebaker  et  al., 2013). However, remembering is an active mediation of the past and the present, evoking memories as social dynamics of who we are and who we were, coherently articulating social psychologies grounded in lived contexts (Keightley, 2010). Drawing on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” Ted Talk in July 2009, this chapter is based on ethnographic data collected during the COVID era from March to December 2020, mainly through face-to-face interviews. The chapter offers a study of how Nigerians collectively memorialize the coronavirus pandemic putting these stories in perspective with the mainstream discourse on the global health crisis, government, and agencies.

Nigerian Storytelling During the Lockdown Period: Methodological Framework for Grassroots Memory In documenting the memories of the lockdown periods in Nigeria, we adopted African memory studies, which focus on storytelling as a central methodology, given its social significance. In South Africa, for instance,

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the African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s activist stance in supporting its members who were victims of apartheid’s political violence conveys a unique form of personal and collective storytelling. Khulumani Support Group utilized stories as traumatic-memory-making to boost their self-image to the public during the post-apartheid era. Christopher Colvin’s (2018) ethnographic study of the Khulumani experience reveals that storytelling is collective memory, which could serve therapeutic and nationalistic purposes. Most importantly, it is a potent weapon for social relations, economic exchange, political activism, and expressive practice. It can enhance new perceptions of self and reflections on the post-apartheid era. In Zimbabwe, Samantha van Schalkwyk (2018) highlights how refugee/migrant women living in South Africa construct stories around the social and material bodies of their muobobobo sex perpetrators to transfer negative stereotypes and feelings about their sexuality to men. From a feminist poststructuralist standpoint, it provided insight into agency and narratives of (re)creating selves among poor Zimbabwean women, who have been repeatedly abused. In this regard, the women storytellers tactically ‘unstitch’ themselves from patriarchal hegemony. More broadly, Davis (2000) explains that collective biographical research like Schalkwyk’s embodies imagined stories or creative narratives of various ‘truths.’ These resources are valuable for the participants’ advocacy, disruption, and decentering of dehumanizing social experiences. We share the same methodological stance in this study. So far, this approach has already been used in Africa to make sense of people’s experiences and grassroots memorialization of the pandemic. Indeed, Ian Williamson (2021) constructs personal stories from some Berean College students’ experiences of the coronavirus pandemic in Zambia. In this work, the narrator recounts a 14-day travel quarantine in isolation on an international trip during the COVID-19 crisis. The ethnographic narrative reflected collective and personal memory of the pandemic experience in Zambia – that of loss, depression, and the narrator’s family reunion. Though scholars of storytelling focused on adopting oral history as a methodology contextualized within the narratives of trauma, war, sexual abuse, and slavery, however, this chapter explores oral history as a vantage into memory studies to highlight Nigerians’ interpretation, interruption, or disruption of mainstream discourse on the coronavirus pandemic. As a research method, the choice of oral history was motivated by two factors: first, to deconstruct the stereotypes about social groups with undocumented/subverted histories lending voice to the ‘voiceless,’ including

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members of non-corporate organizations, rural settlers, and women (Finnegan, 1992, p. 46). Second, some scholars have argued that personal narrative is a reaction to the limitations of sociological research tools premised on quantitative methods. Berger and Quinney’s (2005) advancement of the sociological approach exceeds the researcher/narrator’s perspective to include informants and interview respondents. The scholars postulated that documenting research findings as a story was more effective than statistical information in conventional sociological studies. Therefore, sociological storytellers validate writing as an appendage of the research process instead of mere reportage of observations. The sociological storyteller creates and projects a voice, as in literature and personal essays (Ibid., 2005). As early as the classical era, storytelling was valued as a significant aspect of society, especially in transferring shared art, didactics, history, and values to children through daily conversational and epic stories. Stories were used to educate, instill morals/societal codes, strengthen social groups, and entertain. They also serve for the history-preservation of folk communities, embodying their challenges, setbacks, and conquests (Okpewho, 2003). The definitions of storytelling vary as to its functions, especially as personal stories based on its usage in casual settings or semiformal events like family events to formal contexts like documenting oral histories and personal narratives among academics (Fulton, 2006). In contrast, some scholars conceptualize storytelling as the official narration of tales, legends, and lore, as evident in many indigenous African cultures (Okpewho, 1996). The concept further applies to the official rendering of stories before a given audience for enlightenment, entertainment, and the continuation of cultural traditions (Pellowski, 1990). In this chapter, we consider storytelling as the joint process of recounting or memorializing an event and a methodological tool during interviews (Berger & Quinney, 2005). On storytellers’ authority in recounting historical events accurately, Okpewho (2003) opines that they have a right to modify truth and review historical facts within contemporary realities. In the process, the storyteller rebrands themselves as an author as he recrafts the people’s cultural history and, in so doing, the memory of the event. This perspective will be ours here in our endeavor to collect, discuss, and analyze how Nigerians narrate the story of the coronavirus pandemic during the lockdown from a grassroots perspective.

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Often, personal narratives are counter-narratives whereby individuals and social groups manipulate and personalize their divergent stories and experiences to challenge and subvert official discourses and histories. As espoused by Delgado (1995), counter-storytelling is one in which “outgroups,” in our case the Nigerian masses during the lockdown in the COVID-19 era, tell their stories, disrupting dominant characterization to “create their own bonds, represent cohesion, shared understandings and meanings … [and] circulate within the group as a kind of counter-reality” (p.  64). He further asserts that counter-stories could aid community-­ building, fostering “consensus, a common culture of shared understandings” and revealing “the way out of the trap of unjustified exclusion” (p. 65). In this chapter, the stories-within-stories were collected using ethnographic tools. They indicate that the coronavirus pandemic is more of a social than a biomedical crisis. They are critical to balancing predominant scientific and media hierarchies. They appear as counter-stories. Ethnography entails conducting painstaking fieldwork, observations, and note-taking about a group(s) of people over a long period, employing interviews and questionnaires or focus-group participation techniques to explore social, political, and historical narratives (Kielmann, 2019). The approach applies to performances, group processes or community issues, artifacts, language, rituals, social behaviors, and personal and public stories to unearth the themes and underline significance. While the ethnographic tools have been adopted in much of the previous research on storytelling (Okpewho, 2003, Gilliam, 2006; Kilianova, 2006), phenomenology has insufficiently been applied to personal stories during the lockdown in the COVID-19 era in Nigeria. It is one instance of individual and sociocultural memory, especially the former, which entails recounting an individual’s experience. However, sociocultural memory is a by-product of cultural-collective forms often deployed for socio-political purposes. Therefore, this chapter blends aspects of ethnographic and phenomenological methods contextualized within the literature and history of a global health crisis, considering Nigerians’ divergent socio-economic, religious, and political subjectivities during the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, stories collected through interviews present a practical tool to evaluate personal and collective memory, which distinguishes this study remarkably from existing studies balancing literature, history, and

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memory studies by blending two qualitative approaches: ethnography and phenomenology. This chapter claims that this study’s participants’ collective or group solidarity further validates storytelling as a national memorial of COVID-19 in Nigeria (Ojebode & Ayodabo, 2021). The ethnographic study was conducted during the COVID era in Nigeria from March to December 2020, using structured face-to-face interviews, focus-group observations, and participation to build trust with respondents between the ages of 18 and 60 years (low and middle classes) from the three predominant Nigerian religions, namely Christianity, Islam, and African Traditional Religion. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey in three Nigerian states using a snowball sampling method to conduct interviews with 300 respondents comprising pedestrians, market women, commercial drivers, cyclists, and skilled laborers. The residents’ stories from Ajegunle (Atiba Local Government, Oyo State), Ededimeji (Ede-­ South Local Government, Osun State), and Oro (Irepodun Local Government, Kwara State) represent Southwest and North-central Nigeria. The interviews were conducted in the local Yoruba dialect and later translated into English for this chapter. This collection was developed through the ethnographic efforts of the three authors to preserve and understand the underlying rationale for grassroots memories of the pandemic in their country. The crux of the chapter is the use of storytelling as a source of grassroots memorials/memories of COVID-19  in Nigeria. The interview records and transcripts were purely for research purposes and stored digitally as a reference for future viral epidemics or pandemics in Nigeria. The collection revealed three main canons of the grassroots memory of lockdown in Nigeria presented as eleven personal stories and summarized under three taglines: Virus Is Divine Retribution, Virus Is a Hoax and Government Conspiracy, and Virus Is Targeted at the Rich. The study provides practical insights into the art of storytelling and recollections of the COVID era in Nigeria by answering three key questions: Can personal needs and experiences shape personal and collective memory of the pandemic? To what extent do religions, culture, economy, and distrust for government trigger the public’s narratives of the pandemic? Do stories-­ within-­stories and counter/alternative stories expose complex personal crises within the global health context and offer a platform for Nigerians to project overt concerns and demands from the government?

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The Danger of a Single Story: Epic-Pandemic Narratives and Memorials of Nigeria’s COVID Era Consequently, the first 100 days from 28 February 2020 to 15 July 2020 were associated with challenges, such as inefficient testing laboratories, insufficient testing, irregular palliatives, and economic recession (Amzat et al., 2020). Throughout the world, banning social, economic, and religious activities during the lockdown was implemented, thus making the stay-at-home directive inconvenient for most Nigerians (Ozili, 2020). In Nigeria, there was a general awareness of the virus disseminated primarily through the mass media and social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp (Olapegba et al., 2020). Also, the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) partnered with popular telecommunication companies, governmental and non-governmental agencies (NGOs) like National Orientation Agency (NOA) and faith-based organizations (FBOs) to provide daily updates and sensitizations about the outbreak. The NCDC mass broadcast daily tips on preventing coronavirus (like social distancing, safe handwashing, and maintenance of personal and respiratory hygiene) and created a directory of helplines for each state (NCDC, 2020). Likewise, they translated messages on the COVID-19 infection into local languages to reach a wider audience. One of their online campaigns was tagged #Takeresponsibility for Nigerian virtual users (NCDC, 2020). Despite the Nigerian government’s laudable innovations in personal and collective mobilization against coronavirus transmission, some scholars have described it as ‘medico-centric and reactionary’ given that the schemes’ isolation centers were created following confirmed positive cases in the country. For example, the first infected person in Ogun State was transferred to Lagos State for diagnosis and treatment because they had no molecular laboratory. Likewise, governors in other Nigerian States like Akwa Ibom, Oyo, Sokoto, and Abia hesitated in procuring expensive medical equipment to contain the outbreak until cases of patients who tested  positive cases  in states started increasing. Thus, the general lackadaisical and inertness of the Nigerian government triggered the initial widespread panic among the Nigerian masses during the COVID-19 era (Amzat et al., 2020). On 30 May 2020, Nigeria recorded 553 confirmed positive cases, the highest during the first 100 days of COVID-19. Between 28 March and 7 June, there was a spike in the number of infected persons and the fatality rate. The outcome was a shortage of testing centers, medical personnel,

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and equipment, and it seemed the country had reached the peak of community transmission (News Agency of Nigeria, 2020). The report of community transmission was initially broadcast at a press briefing on 1 April, and eventually, additional 203 positive cases whose diagnosis remained inconclusive, according to the NCDC (Oyeleke, 2020). As of 7 June 2020, just 1 out of 36 States and FCT had a clean record of no COVID-19 cases. The highest numbers of infected persons were in Lagos at 46.2%, Kano at 8%, and the FCT at 7.6%, respectively. Lagos State was the epicenter of Nigeria’s COVID-19 crisis. The NCDC reported a shocking result that (80%) of COVID-19 patients exhibited mild symptoms and others had a complete recovery. Despite the quick intervention, more deaths were reported as the CFR spiked from 1.2% on 27 March to 3% on 27 April but reduced to 2.8% on 7 June 2020. Nigeria was tagged the most affected, given the highest fatality rate of COVID-19 cases in West Africa (Sobowale, 2020). Most fatalities were recorded among persons with underlying health conditions (NCDC, 2020), predominantly chronic/ non-communicable diseases that constitute a public health burden in Nigeria and Africa (Okpetu et al., 2018). Furthermore, it was reported that about 812 healthcare personnel (6.5% of the positive cases) contracted COVID-19  in Nigeria (Shaban, 2020). Such cases of transmissions were mainly from patients with underlined critical conditions in hospitals who hid their medical histories from attending health personnel (Ayeleso, 2020). Another contributing factor to transmission among health personnel was the lack of personal protective equipment (PPEs) at strategic isolation centers (Adejoro, 2020). Also, some medical practitioners who opened their private hospitals in affected locations like Lagos State were unethical. It was discovered that some private hospitals flaunted government approval by secretly administering treatments to infected COVID-19 patients (Adelakun, 2020). Therefore, as prompt intervention, the Lagos State Government instituted a telemedicine channel, Eko Telemedicine, to meet the demands of individuals with unrelated COVID-19 health conditions (Adediran, 2020). The Nigerian government’s uncoordinated and unresearched response to the COVID-19 crisis had adverse effects on public health. The different timelines for each phase included 31 days for pre-lockdown (28 February to 29 March 2020), 35 days of complete lockdown (30 March to 3 May 2020), and 73 days for the easing-up of lockdown (5 May to 15 July 2020) and phase three of the gradual easing of lockdown in Nigeria announced on 30 June 2020 by the Nigerian President following his

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receipt the Presidential Task Force’s (PTF) 5th interim report on COVID-19 crisis. The third and last phase lasted four weeks, from Tuesday, 30 June to Monday, 27 July 2020. However, some modifications were introduced during phase two, which included the reopening of airports for local flights “based on close monitoring,” the resumption of schools for returning students in secondary schools with the graduating set to resume first, and the lifting of the ban on interstate travels, which brought some glimpses of hope to many Nigerians who were fed up with the extended lockdown. Also, the nationwide curfew from 10 pm to 4 am and the unexplained compulsory and prolonged use of facemasks in public areas combined impacted the vulnerable population, who are daily income earners and had school children (Omilana, 2020). While the lockdown was essential for disease containment, it disrupted many vulnerable Nigerians’ socio-economic and religious fabrics of survival and resilience (UNDP, 2020). Many expected the Nigerian government would emulate developed countries in reinforcing and restoring economic balance in favor of the Nigerian masses, given that they had obtained COVID-19 recovery loans of US $288.5 million and US $3.4 billion from the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), respectively (IMF, 2020). The inexplicable and unpredicted lockdown around March 2020 generated public stories among many religious adherents and leaders in Nigeria and globally that the world was on the brink of an apocalypse. The eschatological interpretation was connected to the mass infection, deaths, burials, overcrowded hospitals, and delays of a cure that characterized the initial lockdown. Rev. Dr. ’Supo Ayokunle, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria and General Secretary of the Baptist denomination in Nigeria, buttressed in his public address on 23 March 2020 that it seems “the arrogance of humans against God and lawfully constituted authority led to God’s anger and judgment over the people” (Ramon, 2020). He further cited examples of lawlessness in Nigeria, like armed robbery, terrorist activities, banditry, and Fulani herders’ crises, which heightened kidnapping cases, ransom collections, and deaths. His interpretation of the coronavirus alludes the ten biblical plagues on Egypt preceding the Israelites’ exodus in Exodus 20. Perhaps, his rhetoric of divine judgment is not far-fetched from the Nigerian government’s unsolicited banning of religious activities in the country. In contrast, Sheikh Sani Yahaya Jingir, an Islamic cleric and leader of the Izala Muslim sect in Northern Nigeria, perceived the coronavirus as a

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hoax and conspiracy against Muslims in celebrating the Ramadan festival (The Guardian, 2020). On the other hand, Nigerian traditionalists affirmed that the general erosion of the indigenous offices, religion, and practices caused a global health crisis (Elebuibon, 2020). Our study indicates that Nigerians and their faith leaders (FL) prioritize religion over scientific logic, especially when dealing with a ‘supernatural’ disease like the coronavirus, which is “common sense” (Falade, 2019). Our interviews converged in the aspect of Nigerian government’s exclusion of faith leaders (FLs) despite mobilizing other stakeholders during the pandemic. Thus, religious institutions were non-compliant with the public directive, hurriedly reopening regular church and mosque  services in early June 2020, given that they were not officially carried along on the extended lockdown, which saw their members languor in penury and poverty (Amzat et al., 2020). This narrative appears strongly in our study and may suggest future disbelief in Federal interventions toward public health crises and scientific measures such as vaccines in Nigeria. The lockdown and stay-at-home policy impacted the Nigerian masses’ livelihood capitally, who work mainly in the informal sector, which requires close person-to-person interactions for cash transactions and patronage (UNDP, 2020). It further triggered poverty, languor and starvation, temporary and permanent joblessness, and the ensuing ‘hunger-virus,’ which seemed more terminal. Also, the lockdown heightened social vices like insecurity, armed robbery, abductions, gender-based violence, ransom collections, and ritual killings. Therefore, many Nigerians and faith-based institutions began to flaunt the government orders of social distancing and public gatherings by scheduling social events, while some religious organizations conducted congregational services. Consequently, the government deployed law-enforcement officers like police, military, and paramilitary organizations, degenerating into more chaos, brutality, and abuses of Nigerians by security officers (Kalu, 2020). The initial interventions to contain coronavirus began to decline as many Nigerians indiscriminately disposed of contaminated nose masks in public spaces (Ogoina, 2020). Sadly, Nigeria’s health sector struggled for success and was faulted as ineffective in meeting the needs of the general masses and coronavirus patients during the critical COVID-19 era (Ohiaa et al., 2020). The conventional Nigerian government’s power and media hierarchies over interviewed Nigerians’ complex personal memories of the crisis are underscored in the Igbo noun, “nkali,” loosely translated as “being greater than another.” Therefore, our analysis explores the emotive, cognitive,

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and creative aspects of Nigerians’ stories plotted with a beginning, middle, and open-ended to convey complex, contextual, and mnemonic dimensions to the COVID era in Nigeria. The following excerpts illustrate this memory dynamics and counter-storytelling. The Virus Is a Divine Judgment Respondent 1 Petty Trader, Female, 33, Christian, Osun State We learnt that there is no more coronavirus, except for our children, who are still awaiting a resumption date as directed by the government, and that is annoying. On the cause of coronavirus, I think that “When the wicked are being punished, the righteous would also partake.” But, may God not allow us to be among the punished. Also, since religious centers like churches, and mosques, except for traditionalists who are not limited by location, the pandemic has altered the modes of worship in Nigeria. My query about the public health directive is if coronavirus is airborne and the air is everywhere. The implication is that no medical protocol by the government can contain the virus even if we stay indoors for decades. Thus, the lockdown was unnecessary. The critical action now is to pray to God for the containment of the virus. In Nigerian hospitals, when cases defy medical intervention, individuals are often recommended to seek indigenous medicine. By implication, spiritual measures are needed to eradicate the virus and God’s wrath, proving his supremacy over the world.

Respondent 2 Cyclist, Muslim, Male 58, Kwara State Coronavirus is God’s wrath. A scripture from the Holy Quran buttresses this. As a paraphrase, it says God uses simple punishment on humans to test them, mostly when they err against His laws and precepts. But, it is capital punishment when it is outright disobedience. We have heard of SARS, HIV/Aids, and Ebola, but humans fail to adhere to God’s injunction. Also, the virus could have been claimed as insignificant and not made the headline if its outbreak had been traced to developing countries. The impact was more felt among the top and developed countries, and it has humbled them despite their highly developed medical resources. Thus, this is a caution to the high and mighty to be godly or face negative consequences. The pandemic is for the wise to pick lessons. For instance, when a subordinate refuses to comply with the rules of the superior, punishments would be

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meted out for such a person. The laws of God are for humans’ benefit, but when they are violated, this will invoke His wrath. A scripture in the Holy Quran states that every human has a fate which is peculiar to everyone. Thus, the reason for the different experiences of people during the pandemic. Based on my occupation as a cyclist, the lockdown was a disadvantage, and I suffered losses. Also, the government and the public intermediaries failed to deliver palliatives. Thus, it seems nothing significant has been done for the masses in Nigeria. During the lockdown, politicians’ wives and relatives began to trade foodstuffs meant for the public. In my case, the first palliative that I was informed about was some tins of rice which I did not even receive except for three tiny cans of guinea corn which I got later but fed to my fowls.

Respondent 3 Cleaner, 44, Female, Christian, Oyo State The wrath of God brought the coronavirus because so many evils and iniquities are perpetrated in the world today. In the Bible, it is well stated that strange diseases, pestilences, chaos, and virus are included at the end of the age. Nonetheless, I have never encountered a patient that manifested the symptoms of the virus, except for unimaginable starvation, languor and suffering by the masses due to the ongoing recession. For instance, the prices of foodstuffs and farm produce have been hiked in the market. A particular Local Government Area (LGA) in town had palliatives distributed, but it was uneven. The underprivileged they were meant for were exempted except for some selected few. A pregnant woman almost lost her life due to a stampede. She was hospitalized in due course.

Respondents 1, 2, and 3 attributed the coronavirus to the retribution of God for evils and social vices in Nigeria and the world, such as ritual killings, arson, assassinations, insurgencies, kidnappings, misappropriation of public funds, burglaries, rapes, pedophilia, and injustices, among others. Nigeria, the most populous black country in Africa and seventh in the world, is estimated at 192 million people with over 250 ethnolinguistic groups and 3 predominant religions, namely Islam, Christianity, and African Traditional Religion (ATR). During the lockdown, as was said, religious institutions, which served as the nation’s conscience and haven, were banned from conducting their usual activities, that is, services and gatherings. Thus, most respondents, middle-aged Nigerian Muslims of age 40 and above belonging to the low and middle classes, believed this

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act left the country vulnerable to a spiritual onslaught and setbacks in containing the virus. The memories epitomized in the delay of school children’s resumption, mismanagement of palliatives, and socio-economic meltdown served as an opportunity to emphasize morality and social justice in Nigerian politics. The counter-memory is not far-fetched from previous highlighted statements of top Nigerian religious leaders, which perhaps also influenced the public narratives. The complexity of Nigeria’s religious terrain serves as a framework of memory, as inferred in Halbwachs’ (1925) study. Religion is ingrained into the country’s social fabric, which serves as a coping mechanism during challenging moments. Here, religion structures the way the memory of the pandemic is built and transmitted. The Virus Is a Hoax and Government Conspiracy Respondent 4 Petty Trader, Female 40, Kwara State The Federal Government of Nigeria is deceiving us with the coronavirus, which has negatively affected petty traders like us. Most of our stocks got spoilt during the lockdown, which we could have sold to Unilorin (University of Ilorin) and Kwara Poly (Kwara State Polytechnic) students if they were in session.

Respondent 5 Petty Trader, Female 31, Osun State No coronavirus exists. Therefore, the government should allow students to resume school. We are starving, and if you consider China, where the virus broke out, they have resumed their everyday life. The prolonged lockdown of schools is because the government benefits from it. More so, the figures are inaccurate and seem to have been modified. In addition, there is no symptomatic case to prove to the entire nation that the virus exists.

Respondent 6 Petty Trader, 35, Female, Muslim, Oyo State When the world ends, there will be strange diseases like the coronavirus. However, I maintain that the virus is a hoax because no one is yet to encounter a symptomatic patient who has contracted the virus. The headlines supply us with mere figures and not facts about the infected in different Nigerian

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states. Therefore, I think it is a scheme by the government to exploit the masses and loot public funds. Another way to explain it is that some rich people seek fortunes through sinister means, and the virus could be one of those cases that backfired. There is no absolute cure except for Christians and Muslims to pray and seek God’s mercy. Nonetheless, we, Muslims, wash every time while observing our ritual prayers five times daily.

Respondent 7 Petty Trader, Christian, Female 52, Kwara State The coronavirus is a hoax. I read a newspaper where the former President of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, demanded to see a symptomatic patient as proof of the virus. More so, there has not been a complaint since the Junior Secondary students resumed school recently.

Respondents 4, 5, 6, and 7 infer that anguish, starvation, and poverty were more deadly than the coronavirus. Also, one of the respondents, who happens to be a mother, was concerned that her daughter could be lured into teenage pregnancy if schools remained closed. The economy of most respondents was gravely affected, and there were concerns that if the lockdown were prolonged, it would lead to increased anxiety and an upsurge in social vices. However, the Nigerian government released a special intervention fund of five billion Naira (US$ 12.5 million) and an aircraft for the NCDC’s emergency responses. Also, an extra ten billion Naira (US$ 25 million) was released to Lagos State, the most affected State during the outbreak (NCDC, 2020). Therefore, it seemed the masses’ distrust of the government and their intermediaries was connected mainly to the mismanagement of palliatives meant for the public. This was the basis for the counter-memory of coronavirus as a hoax and a scheme. More so, the government’s ambiguous data and insincerity regarding the symptomatic cases in Nigeria further strengthened the assumption of the non-existence of the virus. The Virus Is Targeted at the Rich Respondent 8 Petty Trader, Female 55, Oyo State The coronavirus is for the rich because of the headlines we have been hearing that most of them were infected. But may God preserve us all from

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this deadly virus. We have never experienced a gruesome pandemic in that pilgrims could not travel to Mecca and Jumaat, and the public Friday prayers were suspended.

Respondent 9 Petty Trader, Female 23, Osun State For me, coronavirus targets the rich and is dreaded even among health practitioners. For instance, if one should complain at a hospital about an ailment, the assumption would be that the disease is related to the coronavirus before they dispense treatment. Nonetheless, I prefer traditional medicine to modern medicine as a medical intervention against the coronavirus because I grew up knowing it is more potent. Moreover, I do not trust modern medicine because of many fakes and lies.

Respondent 10 Petty Trader, Female 43, Kwara State The rich caused the coronavirus because they traveled overseas and indulged in all frivolities, lifestyles, and feeding. For instance, the rich visit overseas countries where they feed on animals and reptiles and sometimes even cohabit and relate intimately with animals.

Respondent 11 Petty Trader, 54, Female, Oyo State We have never encountered a symptomatic patient of coronavirus. Therefore, it could be that expatriates and migrants are transmitting the virus.

The social stratification and the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor in Nigeria were further exposed in the above stories that the coronavirus aimed at the wealthy, not the middle or low class. There were observed indifferences among the respondents—8, 9, 10, and 11, who were predominantly of the low class and viewed the coronavirus as punishment, particularly for individuals who had accrued illegal fortunes. Logically, not all coronavirus cases were transmitted by returnees to Nigeria, as assumed by this group. However, like the previous two taglines: Virus Is Divine Retribution and Virus Is a Hoax and Government Conspiracy, the coronavirus pandemic gave the Nigerian masses ample

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opportunity to generate counter-memories focused on social justice, equality, and morality, which are essential to national transformation. Here the social class, one of the explicit frameworks of memory that Halbwachs listed as early as 1925, appears as another very proven framework of the vernacular memory of the pandemic among our interviewees. The social and economic conditions work as a screen through which people experience the pandemic and tell their stories.

Conclusion This study concludes that, in Nigeria, grassroots memories of the coronavirus pandemic were more of a social than a biomedical crisis, critical to balancing epidemiological models. Beyond complex socio-economic, religious, and political subjectivities, public stories and documentaries were crafted and created as coping mechanisms against the poor economy and social concerns, especially during the compulsory lockdown in Nigeria. They underscored Nigerians’ capacity to improvise, adapt, and mediate their experiences and the global health narratives. In this matter, the sanitary crisis does not appear to be able to break the existing society. On the contrary, the pre-existing structures of this latter offer a solid framework for the memorialization of the pandemic. The stories offered a deeper insight into individual and social contexts, religious didactics, conspiracy theories, and government distrust. The study reiterated practical strategies for the Nigerian government to contain the pandemic by considering socio-economic and religious needs across communities, public actors, and institutions and the expected sensitivity to public plights. Many respondents believed the coronavirus was divine retribution for evils and social vices perpetrated in Nigeria and the world. Thus, predominant stories validate Nigerians’ disapproval of the closure of religious activities and centers considered antithetical to efforts to contain the virus. Also, others believe the coronavirus was a hoax and one of the Federal government’s schemes to loot public funds. There are stories linked to the misappropriation and uneven distribution of palliatives in different Local Government Areas (LGAs) across the nation. There is an indication of social stratification in the country and the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. This social divide strongly influences how people remember and transmit the memory of the pandemic. Stories among Nigeria’s low and middle classes indicated that the coronavirus was a punishment for wealthy individuals who had accrued illegal fortunes. The

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analysis indicated that the informal sector dominated the Nigerian economy, and most respondents were struggling wage earners. The Nigerian-­ American novelist/storyteller Chimamanda Adichie cautioned in her famous 2009 TED talk that the ‘single-story’ approach is often motivated by misconceptions or one’s ignorance of others, which could ultimately rob an individual or a group of people of dignity. Thus, assumptions or mediocrity in the case of the Nigerian government may makes the recognition of equal humanity almost unachievable. Adichie cautions that media and literature sometimes foster generalizations and uncritical interrogation of multi-layered and divergent stories about peoples and cultures, especially during the COVID-19 era in Nigeria. Thus, as suggested, the socio-economic and religious subjectivities underlining collected stories extend their significance beyond the stereotypical (single-story) perspective, which often fosters biased assumptions, conclusions, and decisions. The collected stories indicated that the coronavirus pandemic was more social than a biomedical crisis, given that the stories were more believable to many Nigerians than epidemiological and demographic data presented by the media. Anchoring on Adichie’s inference, beyond the ‘single-story’ lens, grassroots memories and storytelling are a tool for political criticism, social therapy, and provoking moral convictions on failed expectations regarding public welfare and economic security during the COVID-19 era in Nigeria. This conclusion leaves open what will happen to these immediate and grassroots memories of the pandemic in the future. Will this contesting dimension foster future social and political revolts? Or will the Nigerian government’s policies establish a public and normative commemoration of the event, first and foremost a “health” and “sanitary” crisis? In any case, our work as researchers should contribute to collecting and preserving these stories as a form of counter-memory.

Works Cited Adeboye, O., Adekunle, A., & Gayawan, E. (2020). Early transmission dynamics of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Nigeria. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(9), 3054. Adediran, Ifeoluwa. (2020). Lagos begins telemedicine for Coronavirus-unrelated health issues. August 2022. https://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/ ssouth-­west/389205-­lagos-­begins-­telemedicine-­for-­coronavirus-­unrelated-­ health-­issues.html

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Adejoro, Lara. (2020). Punch newspapers. Shortage of PPE, N95 masks exposes us to infection risks—Lagos isolation center workers. August 2022. https:// punchng.com/shor tage-­o f-­p pe-­n 95-­m asks-­e xposes-­u s-­t o-­i nfection-­ risks-­lagos-­isolation-­centre-­workers/ Adelakun, S. (2020). Channels Television. About 40 Health Workers Tested Positive for COVID-19, Says Ehanire. https://www.channelstv.com/ 2020/04/23/breaking-about-40-health-workers-tested-positive-for-covid-19says-ehanire/ Adichie, C. (2009). TEDTalks: The danger of a single story. Films Media Group. Amzat, J., Aminu, K., Kolo, V., Akinyele, A., Ogundairo, J., & Danjibo. Maryann. (2020). Coronavirus outbreak in Nigeria: Burden and socio-medical response during the first 100 days. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 98, 218–224. Ayeleso, Yomi. (2020). Doctor tests positive for Coronavirus after treating infected pregnant woman in Ekiti. August 2022. https://tribuneonlineng.com/ doctor-­t ests-­p ositive-­f or-­c oronavirus-­a fter-­t reating-­i nfected-­p regnant-­ woman-­in-­ekiti/ Berger, R., & Quinney, R. (2005). Storytelling sociology: Narrative as social inquiry. Lynne Rienner. Colvin, C. J. (2018). Traumatic Storytelling and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Performing Signs of Injury. Routledge. https://doi.org/ 10.4324/9780429491818 Daka, Terhemba. (2020). “Covid-19 is western Deceit, Conspiracy against Muslims, says Islamic.” The Guardian Nigeria News - Nigeria and World News. The Guardian, March 25, 2020. https://guardian.ng/news/covid-­19-­is-­ western-­deceit-­conspiracy-­against-­muslims-­says-­islamic-­cleric/ Davis, J. (2000). Introduction: Social Change and the Problem of Identity. In J. E. Davis (Ed.), Identity and Social Change (pp. 1–10). New Brunswick, NJ. Delgado, R. (1995). Legal storytelling: Storytelling for oppositionists and others: A plea for narrative. In R. Delgado (Ed.), Critical race theory: The cutting edge (pp. 64–74). Temple University Press. Ekwebelem, O., Yunusa, I., Onyeaka, H., Ekwebelem, N., & Nnorom-Dike, O. (2021). COVID-19 vaccine rollout: Will it affect the rates of vaccine hesitancy in Africa? Public Health, 197, 18–19. Elebuibon, Oyelola. (2020). Personal interview. 23 March. Phone. Falade, B. (2019). Religious and traditional belief systems coexist and compete with science for cultural authority in West Africa. Cultures of Science, 2(1), 9–22. Finnegan, R. (1992). Oral traditions and the verbal arts: A guide to research practices. Routledge. Fulton, D. S. (2006). Speaking power: Blackfeminist orality in women’s narratives of slavery. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Gilliam, Karen. (2006). We take from it what we need: A portraiture approach to understanding a social movement through the power of story and storytelling leadership. PhD Diss., Antioch University, Yellow Springs. Halbwachs, M. (1925). Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Alcan. IMF [International Monetary Fund]. (2020). Press release NO.20/191: IMF Executive Board approves US$ 3.4 Billion in Emergency Support to Nigeria to Address the COVID-19 Pandemic. https://www.imf.org/en/News/ Articles/2020/04/28/pr20191-­n igeria-­i mf-­e xecutive-­b oard-­a pproves-­ emergency-­support-­to-­address-­covid-­19 Kalu, B. (2020). COVID-19 in Nigeria: A disease of hunger. Lancet Respir Med, 8(6), 556–557. Keightley, E. (2010). Remembering research: memory and methodology in the social sciences. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 13(1), 55–70. Kielmann, K., Vidal, N., Karat, A., Stagg, H., & Lipman, M. (2019). Supporting adherence to treatment for tuberculosis (TB): A relational view. The International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, 22(11), S385. News Agency of Nigeria. (2020). FG Bans Inter-State Movement of COVID-19 patients—Vanguard News. https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/04/fg-­ bans-­inter-­state-­movement-­of-­covid-­19-­patients/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_ medium=twitter Nigeria Centre for Disease Control. (2020). COVID-19 Outbreak in Nigeria: Situation Reports. https://ncdc.gov.ng/diseases/sitreps Nussbaum, M. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton University Press. Ogoina, D. (2020). COVID-19: The need for rational use of face masks in Nigeria. The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 103(1), 33–34. Ohiaa, C., Bakareyb, A., & Ahmad, T. (2020). COVID-19 and Nigeria: Putting the realities in context. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 95, 279–281. Ojebode, A., & Ayodabo, S. (2021). Name as national archive: Capturing of masculine names in Tunde Kelani’s Saworoide. In T. Onikoyi & T. Afolabi (Eds.), The cinema of Tunde Kelani: Aesthetics, theatricalities and visual performance (pp. 75–93). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Okpetu, E., Abimbola, S., Koot, J., & Kane, S. (2018). Implementing prevention interventions for non-communicable diseases within the Primary Health Care System in the Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria. The Journal of Community Medicine and Primary Health Care, 30, 1–18. Okpewho, I. (1996). How Not to Treat African Folklore. Research in African Literatures, 27(3), 119–128. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820315 Okpewho, I. (2003). Oral tradition: Do storytellers lie? Journal of Folklore Research, 40(3), 215–232. Olapegba, P., Lorfa, S., Kolawole, S., Oguntayo, R., Gandi, J., Ottu, I., & Ayandele, O. (2020). Survey data on COVID-19-related knowledge, risk perceptions and precautionary behavior among Nigerians. Data in Brief, 30(1), 6.

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Ozili, P. (2020). COVID-19  in Africa: Socio-economic impact, policy response and opportunities. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 42(3/4), 177–200. Pellowski, A. (1990). The world of storytelling: A practical guide to origins, development and applications of storytelling. New York: H. W. Wilson. Pennebaker, J., et al. (2013). Collective memory of political events: Social psychological perspectives. Psychology Press. Ramon, Oladimeji. (2020). “Sin, disobedience to god responsible for Covid-19 – Can president.” Punch Newspapers. Punch, March 23, 2020. https:// punchng.com/sin-­d isobedience-­t o-­g od-­r esponsible-­f or-­c ovid-­1 9-­c an-­ president/ Oyeleke, Sodiq. (2020). Source of infection in 203 COVID-19 cases unknown, NCDC, Punch Newspapers. https://punchng.com/source-­of-­infection-­in-­ 203-­covid-­19-­cases-­unknown-­ncdc/ Shaban, A. (2020). Coronavirus in Africa: 52 Countries, 9,393 Cases, 445 Deaths, 906 Recoveries | Africanews. https://www.africanews.com/2020/04/06/ coronavirus-in-africa-breakdown-of-infected-virus-free-countries/ Sobowale, R. (2020). Nigerian Deaths from COVID-19 Second-Highest in West Africa. https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/04/nigerian-deaths-fromcovid-19-second-highest-in-west-africa/ Solanke, S. (2013). Plebeians’ ability: Effecting sociological changes through mythic recreation and utilization in Femi Osofisan’s Morountodun. New Academia: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory, 2(3), 122–129. Omilana, Timileyin. (2020). Buhari extends phase two of the COVID-19 lockdown by four weeks. 29 June https://guardian.ng/ Tulloch, O., de Roldan, Jong, T., & Bardosh, K. (2021). Data synthesis: Covid-19 vaccine perceptions in Africa: Social and behavioural science data, March 2020– March 2021. Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform, 1–135. UNDP [United Nations Development Program] UNDP; Nigeria. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria: Potential impact of lockdown policies on poverty and well-being. Brief 3. Van Schalkwyk, S. (2018). Narrative landscapes of female sexuality in Africa: Collective stories of trauma and transition. Palgrave Macmillan. Williamson, I. (2021). COVID and college: A memoir. In N.  Hartlep, C.  Stuchell, & N.  Whitt (Eds.), Critical storytelling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Leiden. World Health Organisation (WHO). (2020). Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Report  – 37. https://www.who.int/docs/default-­ source/coronaviruse/situation-­r eports/20200226-­s itrep-­3 7-­c ovid-­1 9. pdf?sfvrsn=2146841e_2

CHAPTER 6

Pandemic from the Margins: How United-­States-­Based College Students Think the Pandemic Should Be Remembered Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan and Jill Strauss

“In remembrance that we are locked together as brothers and sisters during a time living with an Equal Opportunity Virus and fighting for Black Lives to Matter.” -Borough of Manhattan Community College Students

The exhibit discussed in this article can be found at the following URL: https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/from-­p andemic-­t o-­p rotest-­w e-­ remember/. As we know all too well, in early 2020, the world was overwhelmed by the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2. The United States learned quickly that the virus can make anyone sick, but it is most dangerous for those with underlying conditions, health challenges, and demographics

K. O’Brassill-Kulfan (*) Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY), New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Strauss Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_6

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that experience major social inequities like the elderly, poor, and people of color. In New York City, which was the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, there was shock and disbelief that the “city that never sleeps” shut down in mid-March, along with grief for the innumerable losses. Then in the early summer of 2020, a significant decrease in daily hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 coincided with the horrific public murder of an African American man named George Floyd by a white police officer on a street in Minneapolis. Witnessed in person by many who were prevented by other officers from helping Floyd, and seen globally on social media, this was shocking even for those who were already well aware that policing in the United States is inherently racist and white supremacist. Protests initiated by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement, “a Black-centered political will and movement building project”1 demanding accountability and an end to racial injustice, erupted around the United States and in many other countries in response. As the virus rapidly spread during those early days, the crisis was perceived similarly to a natural disaster—an unavoidable tragedy that brings neighbors together, much like onlookers gather to observe and assist during fires or storms. But within weeks, it became politicized; government lockdown policies were contested, mask mandates were disputed, and Asian American communities were blamed for its spread resulting in a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. Within months, it was clear that the virus was adversely affecting people of color, in terms of both morbidity and mortality rates as well as in economic impacts (Navarro & Hernandez, 2022). It was in this context that the police murder of George Floyd catalyzed social response to forms of oppression and inequity that had created the conditions for this disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black Americans in particular, exacerbating existing conditions under racialized regimes of state violence. In the United States, these seemingly discrete events—the COVID-19 pandemic and the Summer for Black Lives—were all a part of the same story that reflected the social and political conditions in which we lived. This chapter considers creativity, memory, empathy, and resilience in response to the trauma and social change (Gammel & Wang, 2022; Katti, 2020) created by the rapid transmission of the Coronavirus along with the Black Lives Matter Movement using Augmented Reality technology to remember this time of mourning and protest. This

1

 https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/BLM. Accessed 10 October 2022.

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technology enhances visual experience by superimposing a computer-generated image on the material world that appears to be in 3D. In the midst of a worldwide memory boom, the overlapping interconnected upheavals of COVID-19 and protests against police brutality prompted the authors, faculty members at two universities in the United States, to each design an assignment for our undergraduate students to memorialize their experiences of the virus and the racial-justice protests of 2020 by creating virtual memorials and monuments. We asked the students to reflect on what appeared to us to be the dominant experiences of the preceding year: pandemic and protest. In a time of upheaval and grief, they welcomed our suggestion which immediately echoed their personal experiences. They reflected, conversed, conceptualized, built, and interpreted monuments commemorating the events that related to those themes. This case study focuses on the outcomes this memorialization project generated, in terms of both the content the students produced and the learning experiences that comprised the project. It is important to acknowledge that some of the traditional power structures that operate in public art and memorialization were replicated in our classroom demographics; while the students whose work is discussed in this essay are from socioeconomically, ethnically, and racially diverse groups of young adults, they were generating content for white-presenting women of European descent in relatively privileged positions in their role as university instructors. While these dynamics likely shaped the content the students created in ways that may have obscured some authentic experiences they might have been more comfortable sharing with peers, it also offers an interesting glimpse of the visual and cultural narratives the students thought were acceptable or desired between these audiences. This chapter offers a unique perspective on what the generations born after the AIDS epidemic or 9/11/2001 imagine when they are the actual actors of memorialization rather than the intended target of the transmission of the past (Patterson & Friend, 2021). Furthermore, the authors argue that given the circumstances of Covid and the Summer for Black Lives occurring simultaneously in their own communities, it was inevitable that these late teens and early twenty-somethings would make links between social protest, Covid, and collective memory when imagining how the pandemic will be remembered in the future. Like many of their peers, our students found themselves isolated or in overcrowded conditions, taking classes online at home or somewhere else like their cars, often without internet or even a computer, and feeling afraid. In addition to the

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emotional, social, economic, and physical challenges faced by most people during the pandemic, students of all ages also faced substantial disruption to their education and learning loss that are having ripple effects (Housel, 2022; Katti, 2020). The quote at the beginning of this chapter comes from one of the undergraduate student memorials. This chapter is dedicated to them and all students who persevered through Covid. The authors have been teaching in the interdisciplinary fields of public history, restorative practices, and memory studies for over a decade. Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), where Jill teaches, is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) and, like Rutgers, is an urban public university in what is known as the US Mid-Atlantic States. BMCC students come from the five boroughs of New York City, New York State, and northern New Jersey. Similar to CUNY, more than 50% of undergraduates at the Rutgers University New Brunswick campus are people of color and come from New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Kristin’s history students need to be proficient with digital technology in order to meet the changing demands of public history and cultural heritage. Similarly, Jill’s communication studies students should understand how technology shapes human interaction and the ethical concerns surrounding social media best learned by creating it themselves (Strauss & O’Brassill-Kulfan, 2021). In our courses, students explored existing monuments commemorating diverse events, evaluating the rhetoric associated with them and considering the sociohistorical circumstances that underpinned them—then attempted to conduct this same evaluation on their present lived experience. While our distinct disciplines influenced how we shaped the collaborative project and our online course delivery modes were different—Jill’s was synchronous (the classes met at a specific time and day on Zoom throughout the semester) and Kristin’s was asynchronous (all communications and work for the course were conducted on the students’ and instructors’ own time)—remarkable similarities emerged in the visual narratives that the student groups constructed. Given the societal and media attention on contested memorials at the time (Strauss, 2020), we found that our students embraced the monument as a conceptual vehicle for social, cultural, and political intervention. Their generation’s use of social media is self-consciously made of immediate memories in the present, yet until now this has been an overlooked part of the Covid memory boom (Fridman and Gensburger, introduction to this book and see also Annabell in this book). This chapter also looks into the ways the student memorials

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articulate with other patterns of cultural memory and social protest. In what follows, we analyze and discuss ten of the two dozen virtual memorials created by our students that we believe best present the crisis in a time of profound uncertainty, ambiguity, and fear, juxtaposed with a burgeoning movement of solidarity in response to injustice. This volume as a whole asks how commemorative practice was impacted by the pandemic and, especially, how it shifted as a result of the social and physical isolation that it created. In the case study explored here, we found that student memorialists reached for broad themes to commemorate in their monuments that were regularly raised in national media, such as the valorization of front-line workers. But they also generated hyperlocal analyses that pointed to specific harms in particular neighborhoods struck by disproportionate losses during the early days of the pandemic. The monuments the students generated reflect their experiences of the pandemic on a metatextual level, as well, in that they were made entirely virtually, using Augmented Reality technology, using their phones—the very tools keeping them connected to the world whose changes they sought to commemorate. During the experience, they found others engaging in similar acts of commemoration or memorialization through digital tools, such as people “visiting” their family members’ homes via Google Street View. While engaging in “commemorative actions from below,” as this volume’s editors discuss, these student memorialists tried to pin down their unique and ephemeral experiences through linking them to broader narratives of loss and resilience.

Bringing Protest and Mourning Together: The Origins of the Project The Coronavirus pandemic is not something that happened to a few people or those in any one specific place. This was a global crisis, and at least for those in the developed world, it is not something that happens frequently. In fact, Western societies have to look back for historical reference to the Spanish Flu a century ago or HIV/AIDS that began more than forty years ago. Hayes maintains that heritage and culture in the West have traditionally valued commemorative practices like performance rituals and “materially weighty texts and depictions, meant to be evident to wide audiences and with an air of permanence by alienating history from its own history of production” (2013, pp.  5–6). This makes it difficult to

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commemorate death by virus in a heroic way as it is associated with a “sense of meaningless and wretched death” (Vinitzky-Seroussi & Jalfim Maraschin, 2021). Therefore, there are few mourning practices for devastating viruses like Covid to draw upon. According to Connerton, in the absence of “formalised channels which might, to some extent, ritualise and contain those responses of loss and grief” (Connerton, 2011, pp.  16–17, sic), unique cultural bereavement rituals are often born in direct response to peoples’ experiences at that moment in time. Sturken argues that the relative ease and availability of technologies in contemporary society to record our lives has made people more interested in “memory practices” than “objects of memory” (as cited in Van House & Churchill, 2008, p.  296). In support of BLM, numerous monuments and commemorative names and symbols honoring the Confederate side of the US Civil War, and racist ideology more generally, were toppled or removed (Blight, 2020). These efforts were sometimes ceremonious and at other times stealth like. Meanwhile, local municipalities around the country and globally initiated memorial resistance statements like “Black Lives Matter” painted on roads and walls, often involving artists and local community members. As inspiring and celebratory as the murals were, however, they were low-hanging fruits compared to the need for real systemic social change (Strauss & O’Brassill-­ Kulfan, 2021). Nevertheless, the memorial landscape was altered. It was in this context that the art critic Michael Glover noted that “we don’t quite know where to go with the idea of the monument these days” (2022). With the controversies surrounding contested monuments, removing them, keeping them, or altering them, historian Kirk Savage observes that permanent monuments may be a thing of the past (2018). This is made even more relevant in a time when people cannot gather together to honor and grieve. In fact, much of the literature in the humanities and social sciences suggests that memorialization is an important engagement process to document experiences and perspectives for posterity, for future generations. Since 2020, countless projects have emerged to create monuments and memorials for Covid victims but also for remembering the period. In the United States, there is the national initiative, Marked By Covid,2 that seeks to honor all those who died from the Coronavirus, and in New York City,

2

 https://www.markedbycovid.com/. Accessed 10 October 2022.

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the Zip Code Memory Project3 used the arts and storytelling for healing in the context of the highly contagious virus. However, if the future generations are the main audience, they are rarely involved in the creative activity. Part of the impetus for this artistic intervention was indeed to document the experiences of a population usually excluded from formal memorialization processes. How often are members of those future generations invited to engage in their own process of memorialization for audiences beyond their peers? We were interested to see how this particular set of stakeholders, late teens and early twenty-somethings, would consider these questions. In order to achieve these goals, the authors developed an experiential learning assignment that tasked students with exploring memorialization practices, considering how they would apply these practices to the contemporary emergency of the highly infectious deadly virus and police brutality, and developing a virtual memorial or monument using Augmented Reality software. They worked remotely in randomly assigned small groups, communicating virtually to complete their work, with the assistance of their instructors and a media artist educator. Meanwhile, they cultivated community as they reflected together upon their lived experiences in the context of what they were learning, relying on these social networks to build resilience in response to trauma. We wanted to investigate to what extent collective remembering and creation can honor loss and celebrate change as first steps on paths to healing. Toward that end, this artistic intervention was designed to support trauma-informed pedagogy and to help students process the crises while using disciplinary methods appropriate to our courses. Public historian Seth Bruggeman argues that “commemoration dwells almost entirely in feeling” (2017, p. 1), so asking our students to commemorate or memorialize the events of 2020 was also a request that they explore their own experiences and emotional responses to these historic events. Including stakeholder communities to engage in commemorative practice can create a powerful affective experience alongside traditional methodologically based learning (Bruggeman, 2017; O’Brassill-Kulfan, 2023). From a trauma-informed perspective, the process is equal to if not more important than the product. We believe that the memorials are valuable as creative practice that would help students understand how their own personal experiences related to the broader social contexts in which they were 3

 https://zcmp.org/. Accessed 10 October 2022.

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living. These larger scales of analysis emerged as the students considered what stories they would like their memorials to tell. In addition, we wanted our students’ work to be shared widely and their writing to be “published” so we planned for an online exhibit titled “From Pandemic to Protest: We Remember.” The display of select computer-generated monuments is viewable online (https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/from-­ pandemic-­to-­protest-­we-­remember/) and introduces the wider public to new modes of remembrance of contemporary history at a time when people could not gather together due to social distancing. Even as Covid has been lived in relative isolation, it has also been witnessed collectively primarily through media and social media. Therefore, there is shared memory that their artworks draw upon and that will, we hope, engender empathy and a deeper understanding in the viewer (Gammel & Wang, 2022). The activity required the expertise of a skilled media artist with training in Augmented Reality technology, so we brought in media art educator Will Roberts to collaborate. In order to compensate Will for his labor, we wrote a grant to subsidize the project and received funding from an organization called Bringing Theory to Practice. Their mission is oriented to educational opportunities that are “holistic and transformative — fostering engaged learning, personal and community well-being, meaningful preparation for work, and democratic citizenship.”4 The grant, part of a funding opportunity called The Way Forward, aimed to support work that would “catalyze creative educational responses to the intersecting crises of racism, pandemic, and economic catastrophe facing American society and American higher education.” The funds were used to pay for the Media Artist Educator to create six recorded tutorials that teach how to use Adobe Aero and other free computer applications like Photopea Online Photo Editor (similar to Photoshop) and Spark AR to create virtual images including monuments. Weekly office hours for students to get one-on-one help enhanced what was learned in the tutorials. The educator also needed to work within students’ technological access, from often outdated phones to spotty Wi-Fi connections. Many of the challenges the collaborators faced were meta-reflections on the challenges of their experiences with remote learning during the lockdown.

4

 https://bttop.org/. Accessed 25 August 2022.

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Digital Commemoration and Mourning In her opinion piece, “Will Covid-19 Become Part of Collective Memory?” Astrid Erll considers “Covid-19 [to be] the first global pandemic of the digital age” (2020). Erll argues that the omnipresence of the digital in our lives combined with our propensity for sharing personal stories via social media and the continual updating of news and statistics, including Covid deaths, means that from the start of the Coronavirus there was collecting and editing happening, even if people were not thinking about it in this way at the time. All this documentation of individual, specific, and more general (accurate and inaccurate) information is available for current and future collective memory to be used accordingly. Museums and archives, meanwhile, were grappling with how to preserve the materials that would eventually become necessary in order to curate the cultural heritage of the pandemic and protest moments. Many such institutions, as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, made a “public appeal for donations of items” and sent “countless emails to potential donors, asking them to hang on to objects and preserve them as carefully as possible.” But the curators encountered “three interlocking problems … They didn’t yet know what posterity would want to see, but they had to decide what to collect now, because some objects wouldn’t survive otherwise. Plus, the narrative of the virus was continually shifting.” In some ways, we placed our students in a similar position, asking them to think beyond their own firsthand experience and justifiably presentist lens to imagine what the most enduring narratives might be to emerge from this period (Dickson, December 9, 2020). The literature on digital memory work mirrors the development of the technology used to honor and commemorate in innovative ways. In 2005, Kirsten Foot, Barbara Warnick, and Steven Schneider describe “[w]eb-­ based memorializing” simply as the imaginative design, use, and display of “digital objects” that can be retrieved by users online (p. 73). With the advancements in equipment and programs over the following two decades, Benét Deberry-Spence and Lez Trujillo-Torres define “[o]nline commemoration” as the preservation of “digital assets and creation of digital legacies” (2022, p. 28). Jill and Kristin propose that the “creation of digital legacies” includes new works because the digital not only is useful as a method for recording, documenting, and archiving but can also be an artistic tool for remembrance. For these late teens and early twenty-­ something college students who grew up with computers and cellular

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phones, the tools necessary for this project were already familiar. As people become increasingly dependent on technology, most of our personal and collective memories are determined by the ubiquitous digital, which in turn shapes how and what we collect and create (Van House & Churchill, 2008, p. 299). Likewise, because of the ease of access to and use of electronic devices, it is no longer those in power who have sole control to legitimate what and how we remember (Connerton, 1989, p.  1; Liebermann, 2021). Therefore, online spaces create alternate places for memory making, empowering those at the margins by their own memory activism and the means for different discussions for underrepresented groups to be remembered and to take ownership of their memories. Furthermore, increased sensitivity to trauma and coping mechanisms, along with changes in attitudes and access to technology, has made it acceptable, even self-evident, to commemorate promptly (DeBerry-­ Spence & Trujillo-Torres, 2022, p. 28). Isolated and wary of others who could possibly make us sick while the numbers of dead, grief, and hardship grew, there was no single site of conscience, no single place of memory where people could come together to mourn. Instead, the numerous sites of loss and suffering necessitated various avenues for representative witnessing (Atkinson-Phillips, 2020), including computer-generated. An analysis of the many existing Covid-related commemorations is beyond the scope of this chapter. Relevant here is that, as diverse as those remembrances are, what they have in common is a focus on the dead. This is understandable, but they are not the only ones who suffered from the Coronavirus. What are the ways to remember the lived experience of survivors? Numerous oral history archives have collected narratives from medical professionals, first responders, and others directly impacted, but the memorials have been for the dead. How have people survived and thrived and struggled in the face of so much loss—loss of life, and also loss of a way of life, community, a sense of safety, and security? How do we memorialize absence? As noted above, there are as many perspectives on the pandemic as there are people who have endured it; the documentation of these undergraduate students’ experiences does not necessarily fill, nor need to fill, a historiographical or scholarly research gap. The experience of engaging in interpretation and memorialization collectively, as an iterative process, had its own value, distinct from what was produced at the end of the activity. The trauma of the shutdown did indeed make student’s lives and

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schoolwork much more difficult. Asking them to learn how to use Augmented Reality software added to that difficulty. However, producing something for public consumption seemed to act as an incentive to the students. While the audience for their work is limited in scale, the students reported being motivated by the idea that these monuments would be searchable online, pinning down a moment in time from this complicated experience. We are convinced that this helped push the groups to accomplish their coursework in spite of the many hurdles. Not only did they want to be part of the story, but they were also inspired by the chance to tell the stories of their generation through their own images and in their own words. Students in both courses were asked to develop a memorial/monument concept related to the theme of “pandemic and protest” and then design it using the software. This involved the aesthetic design as well as placement since the virtual display which appears in “Augmented Reality” must be “anchored” to an actual physical location. In Jill’s course, which was on Zoom, the undergrads created their own groups of three or four members based on an expressed interest in possible monument themes they generated. They also decided which jobs they would each be responsible for in their respective groups. In Kristin’s course, the asynchronous class was organized into groups of four to five alphabetically, and the students had to engage in the difficult work of sharing their perspectives and experiences in order to agree on a concept and narrative. Furthermore, the opportunity to talk to each other about what they were living through and to reflect together created community, albeit virtual, in a time of isolation. Through these discussions of what was happening at home, in their communities, and around the world, issues of disease, environmental degradation, injustice, and more were brought into the classroom in meaningful ways. For students of color, their experiences inside the university often feel like rituals of assimilation or resistance. The framing of this project, though, was designed to recognize the lived expertise of the students and to document their perspectives. As the university students were exploring how and what to honor and celebrate while in the midst of a pandemic, their virtual memorials reflect memory and meaning making in the moment. The Augmented Reality monuments and memorials serve as catalysts for different and deeper conversations about memory and history and the role of commemoration in the twenty-first century.

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Virtual Memorials to Lived Experiences of a Pandemic These young adults had the opportunity to consider how this unique historical moment would be remembered by future generations by creating virtual monuments and memorials commemorating how we protested in the streets and managed quotidian tasks during the lockdown. Their memorials to the pandemic and protest movement of 2020 reflected their raw experiences, as well as their curated and disciplinarily informed narratives. They used the very tools—their phones and computers—through which they had experienced much of the pandemic (learning remotely, communicating exclusively digitally with loved ones, etc.) to construct their analyses. Students in Jill’s communications’ classes focused on methods of conveying the depth of these events’ significance on an emotional, interpersonal, and rhetorical level in the present. Students in Kristin’s class, Public History: Theory, Method, and Practice, took a historically inclined didactic approach, constructing visual arguments for what would be worth remembering about this period in time—eager for the reassurance of an objective curator to tell them what would matter in five, ten, or fifty years. Gammel and Wang maintain that “[t]he cultural, social, and political concerns that have been brought to the forefront in our daily lives during COVID-19 are deeply entangled in the ways the pandemic is discussed, represented, and visualized in media and culture” (2022, p. 2). Perhaps because the students’ virtual memorials were created in groups and online in the absence of a safe way to gather in person, they focus on what was missing—people, connectivity, social rituals, places they couldn’t access. We understand the memorials as snapshots of moments in time even as they are constructed memories: they are an exploration of commemorative perspectives in development. The format, too, of Augmented Reality, is more dynamic than traditional modes of commemoration, lending itself to a uniquely twenty-first-century method for reflection and narration. They are a window into the students’ experiences, searing into our memories some of the moments that defined that first year of the lockdown. For this reason, we have opted to incorporate their own words taken from their artist statements and labels along with our interpretation. For the sake of brevity, we have opted to discuss a selection of the total number of works created that best illustrate the assignment. We also include portions of only a few of the artist statements that are particularly eloquent as well as representative of their peers’ work.

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One of the student groups from BMCC, creators of (Fig. 1) “EOV/ BLM,”5 used their artist statements to describe what it was like to live and learn at the height of the pandemic, reflecting on the activity and work on a group project with people they did not yet know. This group explained their perception of the political elements of the virulent disease with clarity, describing Covid as an “equal opportunity virus” that stimulated a total atmosphere of fear and limitation: they chose a lock and chain as the symbols of the year to depict “the world being on literal lockdown during this pandemic.” This was the context in which the Summer for Black Lives arose. The same symbol they chose to narrate the impact of the deadly virus also told the story of racial injustice that instigated that summer’s protests, writing “This lock symbolizes the struggles of Black men and women everywhere being locked down by circumstances, by the system, by the police unjustly. It represents those who locked arms in protest against police brutality, against systemic racism, and rape and violence in other countries across the world.” While some of the memorials, such as “EOV/BLM,” used symbolism to narrate their experiences, others sought to document the quotidian aspects of their lives that marked the period they were interpreting. “A Tribute to the Class of 2020” (Fig. 2), created by Rutgers students, pays homage to the loss of culturally and personally significant milestones due to public health restrictions, depicting a remote graduation in lieu of a triumphant walk across the stage. For the students, this memorial resonated giving them a chance to grieve for the missed important rites of passage that mark the transitions from secondary school to university and university to the challenges of a first-time job search during a nationwide shutdown. For their professors, the laptop perched on the knees of a student in bed was a reminder of the merging of public and private space when, as the world seemed to be crumbling, faculty taught from their living rooms and students came to class from their bedrooms, bathrooms, or cars. These two examples illustrate well the overlap of personal experience and cultural memory artifacts, on the one hand, and of local and national collective experiences, on the other. Other symbols are nearly universal in descriptions of pandemic memories, such as the face mask, which appears in several student memorials. Likewise, the phrase “stay 6 feet apart” was the mantra when engaging with others in person. Both BMCC and Rutgers student memorials honor the refrain, but it proved more challenging to represent empty space when  Unless otherwise noted, all the images are courtesy of the authors.

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designing virtual memorials, so they employed visual metaphors to communicate their messages. For example, a Rutgers student memorial entitled “Six Feet of Separation” (Fig. 3) reminds the viewer that the goal of lockdowns was to isolate ourselves for the public’s physical health remembering that these requirements arose at a time when people needed most to connect with others for their mental health. It is also a play on the saying “6 degrees of separation,” which is the idea that all people are six or fewer social relationships away from each other. The framing of this memorial also draws our attention to the absence or liminal space between individuals during this period, a nearly palpable reminder of the loss of physical contact at crucial moments. Students used the visual rhetorics of the pandemic to render material something otherwise abstract, like some of the well-known images that have come to symbolize this era, of people sitting inside hula hoops or large chalk circles in urban parks, or Jacob Kornbluh’s photograph of a socially distanced minyan in Brooklyn.6 The public history students, in particular, were attuned to the notion that they could not adequately utilize the methods of their profession because, as the students who created “Six Feet of Separation” wrote, “the project of documenting pandemic and protest in a monument came with a unique difficulty—creating a historical monument for a history still being made.” They argued that its protracted length and the whiplash of dashed hopes that vaccination campaigns and mitigation measures would allow us to live in a Covid-free world left “no room for hindsight in our monument’s design.” The student group also noted that in order to “represent the history of the pandemic and its protests accurately and with respect to people whose wounds are still open,” people should be invited to “share their experiences in their own words through oral histories,” which could initiate “intersectional understanding of the way [the pandemic] impacted each individual differently.” An additional repeated theme in the students’ monuments was, perhaps unsurprisingly, gratitude to first responders and other “essential workers.” Many of our front-line workers are immigrants and people of color in positions like grocery and pharmacy employees, food delivery workers, and emergency services, police, and hospital workers. The disease highlighted how these groups tend to have disproportionately less access to healthcare at the same time as they are disproportionately more exposed to the virus and other hardships. For example, as a result of centuries of 6

 https://pandemicreligion.org/s/contributions/item/35.

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white supremacist governance and culture in the United States, the marginalized are overrepresented in lower-wage jobs like those listed above. While still treated as expendable, during the nationwide lockdown these were the very people deemed essential, rendering them suddenly visible. In many cases, the students, or their roommates, friends, or family members, were themselves front-line workers; the first-generation and working-­ class demographics of our particular students offered an important perspective of solidarity with front-line workers while they grappled with how to memorialize and commemorate their experiences. For example, three immigrants to the United States depicted the experience of anonymity and invisibility in their memorial, titled “I Can See You” (Fig. 4). They wrote in their artist statement that “[b]eing an immigrant is not easy, but we hope this monument teaches you the journey of an immigrant’s life.” This tension between visibility and invisibility in a large urban metropolis was highlighted during the pandemic when New Yorkers clapped, yelled, banged pots and pans, and musicians performed at 7 PM nightly to thank those who came to be known collectively as “essential workers” during the height of the pandemic. This five- to ten-minute ritual performance lasted through that first summer and into fall 2020. Many of the student groups wanted their virtual artworks to be seen even as the medium was “in the ether” and so were intentional about the spatial orientations of their monuments. This was a discovery for us to see to what extent the very notion of public space, even virtually tackled, was meaningful and in a way socially highly valuable for our students. A BMCC design titled “You Kept Our City Alive” paid careful attention to place, with a design featuring “two cupped hands supporting five people, all dressed in different uniforms and wearing masks. The hands cradle these people, a diverse group of essential workers, the same way those workers supported the city through the pandemic.” They located their monument in Union Square in Manhattan because of its draw as a tourist destination and a regular gathering place for protests and other public events. What comes through in all the memorials honoring front-line workers is an “ethics of appreciation” and that “a key element in quickly containing the pandemic lies in ordinary people (including medical professionals) doing their part, whether it’s on the front line or staying at home” (Gammel & Wang, 2022, p. 3). Likewise, one Rutgers group placed their memorial directly in front of an emergency room in Corona, Queens (Fig.  5). They conceived of a monument that would not only memorialize the labor of essential workers

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and acknowledge lost lives, but also recognized the suffering of the viewer interacting with it: “This monument stands as a testament to the strength and resilience of essential workers who put their lives on the line to treat the sick, educate the masses and do the best they could to make times feel normal during such uncertainty. We still have a long way to go before treatment becomes accessible to all regardless of race or class but take a second now to thank those around you and to catch your breath.” Similarly, in “Untitled (We Can Do It)” (Fig. 6), BMCC students also located their artwork in front of a hospital, specifically the emergency room where so many found themselves in the early months of the pandemic. The students’ assertion that we … are stronger than coronavirus and we will survive and heal from the pandemic is evident in the female healthcare professional in the background on the right with her arm up at a right angle and her hand in a fist. This figure is an intentional adaptation of the US cultural icon Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It” from WWII honoring those, specifically women, who worked in the factories “on the home front” to help win the war.7 In this way, a direct connection is made to “winning the war on Covid.” In addition to acknowledging first responders, this group pointed to the official arguments in favor of the importance of memory in healing from trauma. In their artist statement, they quote then President-elect Joe Biden’s Covid memorial speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the eve of his inauguration, speaking about the role of memory in healing from trauma. In about a third of the memorials, student groups chose to highlight the Black Lives Matter demonstrations happening daily and nightly following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and that continued through the summer. Invariably, however, the consequences of Covid were inextricably linked. For example, “Rise Above All Odds 2020” (Fig. 7), which uses the symbol of the balance scales of justice to memorialize society’s justice and injustice and supporting a Black Power Fist that is the symbol of the Black Lives Matter Movement. This virtual monument speaks to the ethical and moral dilemmas Binoy Kampmark discusses in his article “Protesting in Pandemic Times: COVID-19, Public Health, and Black Lives Matter,” where he explores the tensions between the expectations of police control and the “urgency” of the Black Lives Mater political protests in the context of “the threat of viral transmission” (2020, p.  1). However, all those who took Covid seriously faced similar “existential” issues when just leaving home to accomplish everyday tasks (p. 2). In fact, 7

 https://rosietheriveter.org/.

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the majority of protestors took precautions including maintaining space between each other (social distancing), using sanitizer, hand washing, and masking. Furthermore, demonstrators took advantage of the need for face coverings to create an additional political statement by wearing masks that said “Black Lives Matter” or “I Can’t Breathe” over their mouths in solidarity with George Floyd and Eric Garner before him. In the context of a highly contagious virus that rapidly invades cells in our respiratory system,8 the “I Can’t Breathe” slogan took on greater significance. Hence, the scale is heavier on the side of Life and the hope that there can be Opportunity even in terrible circumstances when people come together in Unity, Cooperation, and Love. There are many African American women and men who have died as a result of racial violence throughout US history, and we will never know all their names. However, we know some of them and who they were which is why the “Say Their Names” face mask (Fig. 8) campaign was established by the African American Policy Forum9 to promote awareness about police violence against people of color. For the 14 June 2020 cover of The New Yorker magazine, a publication famous for its innovative and evocative covers, the artist Kadir Nelson incorporates the repercussions of historical racism in the United States into the torso of George Floyd (Fig. 9).10 The artist therefore has created a pictorial timeline relating the past to the present. The digital edition allows viewers to move around the body and use the scroll button to learn about the various individuals and histories. The assembling of a multitude of people is a powerful image on and offline. Several student groups used it as inspiration for their monuments. One student group adapted the montage concept Nelson employed designing a Covid face mask. Notably, they incorporated the US flag to remind us that police violence and other forms of racial injustice continues in the United States. To reinforce this idea, they included the names of the victims of hate on the white lines of the flag. For Gómez, naming “is to recognize. When no name is given, or a name is forgotten, or confused with another, then there is no existence. One is rendered invisible - insignificant, unworthy” (2012, p. 53). Another 8  https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/covid-19/about-­ covid-­19. Accessed 10 October 2022. 9  https://www.aapf.org/sayhername. Accessed 10 October 2022. 10  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2020-06-22. Accessed 15 August 2020.

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virtual memorial was also titled with the solidarity statement, “Say Their Names” (Fig. 10). Like the mask created by their peers, this memorial also includes the names of the African Americans who died because of police brutality. In this instance, the names are located on the pedestal and in the accompanying audio. Presumably, this work is about the dead, but it is also about the living and the resilience that comes from unity and shared goals. For example, it is located in front of Barclays Center in Brooklyn that became the meeting place for many of the George Floyd Protests in the summer of 2020. “[The memorial] is a statement piece that values lives of color, values action, but above all, the Say Their Name Memorial values justice … and this truly speaks to what can happen when we all come together.” Another symbol utilized in this memorial is the white gladiolus flower meant to offer remembrance, comfort, and sympathy to the grieving. Flowers have long been associated with funerals, and here they frame the handcuffed figure like a halo. While a single flower can represent the many nameless dead (Gammel & Wang, 2022), when we know their names then we need more flowers. Jill showed this artwork from the fall 2020 semester to her spring 2021 classes on Zoom, and in one instance, a student typed in the chat the names of the more recent victims of police brutality poignantly interacting with the monument to “[t]ake a moment for silent reflection and SAY. THEIR. NAME.”

Conclusion In this chapter, the authors have described a case study focusing on the ways some undergraduates from underrepresented groups in the United States reflected on the life-and-death events of the 2020–2021 academic year using Augmented Reality technological tools. In this context, we explore how commemorative practice was impacted by the pandemic and how online spaces created alternate places for memory making, empowering those at the margins by their own memory activism. Each of the virtual memorials discussed here is unique, yet they demonstrate that students imbibed and projected similar values like strength, solidarity, gratitude, compassion, and the importance of remembering what we survived as well as those whom we have lost whether to an invisible virus or visible racial violence. This, our students and their professors believe, is a shared responsibility of the living. Moreover, the way our students made the assignment their own illustrates the vernacular relationship their generation has with the immediate

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memorialization of the present on the one hand and with the digital memoryscape, on the other. It also illustrates to what extent collective memory is always the result of localized and individual perspectives on common narratives of the past, as Maurice Halbwachs has conceptualized it (Gensburger, 2016). While COVID-19 did not necessarily change the relationship between politics and commemoration, their artworks illustrate the many potentialities of the immediate memorialization of the pandemic. Looking back on this trauma-informed art intervention more than a year later, the temporality of the Coronavirus, the protests, and our collective narrativization and commemorations seem to have come unstuck in time. Periodically, throughout the pandemic, there have been a few flickering moments that seemed as though we would be in a position to begin reflecting on an event that appeared to be concluding. As a result, these monuments are more of a snapshot of a moment in time with an end that continues to be unclear. Also, in retrospect, we wonder whether we asked too much of our traumatized students, who were struggling to learn often in isolation and fear. There is a significant amount of technical skill required to use Augmented Reality technology even as this generation is already familiar with it. The intention was that working in groups would provide the peer support necessary to complete the task, along with guidance and feedback from professors, but there were challenges, nonetheless. These young adults persevered, and not just in terms of making these artworks. While it remains to be seen whether memorials like these will make it into the larger Covid memory, the longevity or broader social impact of this kind of memorialization is secondary to the individual and collective process of engagement and, hopefully, the healing and agency their production and publication facilitated. The production of this work, commemorating social and physical conditions and events that had not yet concluded, much less receded to the “safe” distance of retrospective historical analysis, asked students to wrestle with some cognitive dissonance, while many of them were still actively grieving the losses of loved ones and of social milestones. But they tried: they attempted to envision what a post-pandemic commemorative practice might involve, which was in itself an interesting intellectual exercise, which they then followed with argumentation and narration of experiences as they developed their monuments. These students, like the curators, artists, archivists, and others engaged in memory work over the last few years, experimented with trying to catch the wind, exploring what it means to try to understand the future while still living it.

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Acknowledgments  Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by the Professional Staff Congress and the City University of New York. Support was also provided by the Way Forward Grant from Bringing Theory to Practice. In November 2022, Jill’s communication students gave tours of the virtual memorials to their peers. Thank-you to Dr. Scott Tulloch and the BMCC Communications Club for the invitation to show the Covid memorials and for sharing their memories, expanding the archive of experiences from the margins.

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Hayes, K. H. (2013). Slavery before race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884. New York University Press. Housel, D. A. (2022). A trauma-informed inquiry of COVID-19’s initial impact on adult education program administrators and instructors in the United States. Adult Learning, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10451595211073724 Kampmark, B. (2020). Protesting in pandemic times: COVID-19, public health, and black lives matter. Contention, 8(2), 1–20. Katti, M. (2020). COVID-19 and the black lives matter movement: Managing academic realities. American Society for Microbiology. https://asm.org/ Articles/2020/July/COVID-­1 9-­and-­t he-­B lack-­Lives-­M atter-­M ovement-­ Manag Liebermann, Y. (2021). Born digital: The black lives matter movement and memory after the digital turn. Memory Studies, 14(4), 713–732. Navarro, S. A., & Hernandez, S. L. (Eds.). (2022). The color of COVID-19: The racial inequality of marginalized communities. Taylor & Francis. O’Brassill-Kulfan, K. (2023). People first: Commemorating Houselessness and Poverty. The Public Historian, 45(2), 25–50. Patterson, M. E., & Friend, R. (2021). Beyond window rainbows: Collecting children’s culture in the COVID crisis. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, 17(2), 167–178. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1550190620980836 Savage, K. (2018). Confederacy and Civil War Era monuments Visual culture of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Graduate Center, City University of New York. Strauss, J. (2020). Contested site or reclaimed space? Re-membering but not honoring the past on the empty pedestal. History and Memory, 32(1), 131–151. https://doi.org/10.2979/histmemo.32.1.07 Strauss, J., & O’Brassill-Kulfan, K. (2021). Memory in the moment: Augmented reality as opportunity for students to memorialize their experiences of the pandemic, racism and injustice, and citizenship. Bringing Theory to Practice Newsletter: Higher Education & Social Justice. Van House, N., & Churchill, E. F. (2008). Technologies of memory: Key issues and critical perspectives. Memory Studies, 1(3), 295–310. https://doi. org/10.1177/1750698008093795 Vinitzky-Seroussi, V., & Jalfim Maraschin, M. (2021). Between remembrance and knowledge: The Spanish Flu, COVID-19, and the two poles of collective memory. Memory Studies, 14(6), 1475–1488. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 17506980211054357

PART II

Commemorative Events Between Memory Politics and Protests: What Has Changed During the Lockdowns?

CHAPTER 7

“No quarantine to workers’ rights”: Recontextualizing Labour Day Commemoration in the Semiotic Landscape of a Pandemic Demonstration Roula Kitsiou and Stella Bratimou

Introduction The Covid-19 pandemic created an unprecedented context, including for commemorative gatherings and social protest. The spatialized response of the Greek government also brought forth a series of questions regarding state policies to address the pandemic, as well as social inequalities. As with most states, an extensive lockdown was imposed, presence in public spaces was considered a public health menace, while digital technologies became a main means of working and socializing. Adopting the Foucauldian approach on biopolitics (2012), medical science is perceived as a biopolitical tool and health protocols as a measure of control and discipline; the

R. Kitsiou (*) • S. Bratimou University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_7

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biopolitical handling of the pandemic thus resulted in turning the use of public space into a landscape of fear (Contiades, 2020). In this respect, the measures to address the challenges brought by the pandemic have been linked with the issue of human rights, since according to international human rights law severe public health threats allow states to restrict some rights. However, there are certain safeguards to ensure that limiting and derogating measures are not actually abusive (Spadaro, 2020). Attention has been called on the proportionality of Covid-19 restrictions on civil liberties, so as not to result in the overreach of the powers of executive authorities which may actually threaten the democratic foundations of the political system (Tsiliotis, 2020). Issues such as the prolonged duration of limitations, over-surveillance, fines, personal data collection, and tracking were all considered alarming aspects calling for constant vigilance to avoid a normalization of restrictions, which would result in an outward violation of human rights, along, of course, with the suspension of the right to freedom of expression, which is in any case unjustifiable (Spadaro, 2020). Not only are Labour Day celebrations, in the Greek context, associated with international workers’ struggles (Chicago 1886), but they also commemorate the execution of 200 partisans by the Nazi occupation on May 1, 1944, as well as the struggles of tobacco-workers in Thessaloniki and the murder of 12 protestors by the police between May 1 and 13, 1936. It is, therefore, an annual rally that bears a specific symbolic burden for social movements and collective memory in Greece while being a social protest integrating current relevant demands. In 2020, Labour Day Rally took place a few days before the first lockdown was lifted on May 4, after being imposed since March 23. During lockdown in Greece, spatial restrictions were imposed on mobility that was allowed solely within the precinct of habitat and only for six pre-approved reasons: (1) work (if teleworking was not feasible); (2) visit to the doctor; (3) buy of necessities (if delivery was not feasible) and bank (if e-banking was not feasible); (4) provision of help to person in need; (5) communication in case of divorced families; and (6) pet walking and physical exercise solely or in dyads. Every person leaving home had to declare (through an SMS/ printed declaration) his/her permanent address, the reason, time and destination of movement. Other mandatory regulations included physical distancing and the use of protective mask (Kitsiou, 2021). This context has led to the performance of an extraordinary commemorative protest which was organized in secrecy at the central Square of

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Athens in front of the Greek Parliament, Syntagma Square. The spatiotemporal specificities of the Rally were not publicly announced but were circulated by word of mouth and the participants improvised on how to reach the locus of the protest so as not to get caught by the police. In general, every aspect of organizing and participating to a protest required careful and detailed planning, including otherwise simple aspects of protest organization, such as carrying the banners and picket signs. Covid-19 precautions had to be taken under consideration during the commemorative protest as well, resulting to a series of choices that transformed the performance of the Labour Day Rally to an unprecedented experience despite its annual character. This chapter presents the appropriation of protesters’ practices concerning the commemoration of Labour Day (May 1, 2020) in Athens, Greece, amid the first Covid-19 lockdown situation. This was the first protest and public commemorative gathering organized after the beginning of the pandemic. Thus, an unprecedented semiotic landscape emerged due to the performance of a commemorative demonstration in a biopolitical context transforming the experience of memorialization.

Theoretical and Methodological Choices: The Semiotic Landscape of a Commemoration During Lockdown To make sense of the Labour Day 2020 rally in Greece, we draw on Train’s (2016) approach of collective memory as a dynamic and relational social process of negotiation and co-construction of meaning rather than a static entity. Indeed, the biopolitical handling of the pandemic calls for addressing commemoration as a field of struggle about visibility, in the sense that public space is reconstructed by the emplacement and materialization of commemorative discourses in the semiotic landscape. The latter, thus, constitutes a multimodal and embodied materialization of emplaced semiotic resources and meaning-making performances (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010). During the lockdown new layers of meaning were attributed to the semiotic landscape of commemorations, performed in street protests as complex forms of political activity. Memoryscapes have thus triggered an alternative frame of viewing the past through the lenses of the present while struggling against the precarious future of the Covid-19 sociopolitical implications.

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Memoryscapes of commemorations emerge as “constellations of spatiotemporal alignments”, fracturing temporal linearity by articulating, reconstructing and appropriating the past into the present (Richardson & Milani, 2022, p. 224). They can, thus, operate as disruptive forces against hegemonic configurations of the past (Tufi, 2020) or, in the pandemic context, against state control and prohibitions. Consequently, they constitute acts of resistance entextualizing and recontextualizing the past (Leppänen et al., 2013). Textual trajectories and re-uses of language and semiotic material, through their entextualization (Blommaert, 2005), reveal how commemoration protests retell the past in the light of present demands and new visions of the future. This retelling unfolds and is rearticulated across modes, modalities and media, and from some groups of people to others, since meanings are resemiotized in physical and digital spaces (Iedema, 2003, p. 41). This chapter focuses on the material forms of discourse at the commemorative protest site of the Labour Day Rally 2020—objects like signs, posters, banners and other “ephemera”, in order to understand how they travel along these “complex discourse itineraries” (Scollon, 2007, p. 233). Additionally, the extensive employment of digital technologies during the pandemic within the home and the experimentation with alternative ways of social participation have led to the further mediatization of commemoration. The mediatized memoryscapes potentiate the “connectivity” of memory (Hoskins, 2011), while new ecologies of meaning negotiation emerge from the complex itineraries of commemoration discourses. Merging the physical and the digital forges hybrid memoryscapes that are entextualized, resemiotized and re-negotiated in an “online-­ offline nexus” (Blommaert & Maly, 2019). Hence, the meanings conveyed by memoryscapes, though spatially embedded on a local scale, traverse spatiotemporal boundaries and scales especially in the case of forbidden commemorations (Árvay & Foote, 2019), as was the Labour Day Rally 2020. Thereupon, the collective space of commemoration enables sustaining and negotiating memory. Being deprived of this environment instead creates a sense of memory vacuum accompanied by feelings of isolation and alienation (Gensburger, 2019). Hence, in cases of banned protests, spatial occupation as a means of making possible a common space of collective meaning co-construction, in fact, transforms the occupied space into a “counter-space” (Rojo, 2014). The collective performances of protest commemorations unveil the embodied and affective facets of the semiotic

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landscape (Stroud, 2016). In that sense, the semiotic landscape performed during commemorative protests can be viewed as a process of deterritorialization and spatial appropriation that leads to the emergence of heterotopias contesting hegemonic discourses and neoliberal spatial policies (Anfinson, 2020). This process involves (de-, up-, re-, inter-)scaling of dominant and counter-discourses (Carr & Fisher, 2016) that in our case corresponds to the tension between the deterritorialization of commemorative protest practices from public space as the dominant/biopolitical discourse and the reterritorialization of the protest memoryscape as the counter-discourse. Focusing on the Labour Day Rally 2020 as performed in Athens, it is important to refer to the exceptional way it was organized. Since the rally was prohibited, it was not publicly announced through the usual media of dissemination on the semiotic landscape (e.g. posters, banners, announcements, pamphlets). Therefore, only members of the organizing collectives knew beforehand the specificities of the rally and could have been present. This was both a form of precaution against getting a fine because of mobility prohibition and a form of safeguarding the realization of the rally from police suppression. Specifically, the group of demonstrators consisted of young activists belonging to workers’ unions and political groups/parties, while their elderly members were advised not to participate as a Covid-19 precaution. Concerning our research participants, five demonstrators were recruited in order to be included in our study due to (a) their participation in prohibited rallies in 2020 and (b) their acquaintance with the second author. Thus, rapport was already built, and this relationship played an important role in their willingness to share their experience from participating in prohibited rallies, focusing here on the Labour Day Rally. Specifically, we recorded the narratives of a 19-year-old female student (Participant 1— P1), a 28-year-old male NGO employee (P2), a 30-year-old female shipping company employee (P3), a 37-year-old male archaeologist (P4) and a 38-year-old female teacher (P5). Two of them are members of the Communist Party of Greece, two are union members and one of them belongs to an anarchist collective. In line with research ethics, to safeguard their anonymity and avoid their identification, as they took part in a prohibited demonstration, we intentionally do not provide more metadata other than P1–P5 for the quotes of their narratives. Additionally, in order to pinpoint the dominant and competing discourses before, during and after the rally, we have also analysed examples from a dataset of audiovisual

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data: (a) pictures from the rally accessed through the major photo-video reporter agency in Greece; (b) political statements of the Prime Minister and ministerial board; (c) media coverage and users’ reactions on newsagencies’ social media.

Criminalization and Appropriation of Protest Practices in the Pandemic Semiotic Landscape As every other public gathering and social protest during this period was banned, the right to assembly emerged as a matter of biopolitics. Concerning the Labour Day Rally 2020 the violators of any of state regulations were subject to a fine of 150 euros.1 Tomorrow we welcome the 1st of May with a really springtime weather. As with Easter, we will spend tomorrow differently. Either at home or a walk AROUND it, within the permitted boundaries (…) Also on the 1st of May every year big demonstrations are realized from political parties, organizations and unions. This year is different. We expect that all workers’ unions as well as all political parties will by act acknowledge the severity of the current situation, the dangers first and foremost for their own members and they will contribute to the protection of human life. They will respect collective effort and the struggle of doctors, nurses, and of all the people who do everything to avoid the dispersal of the virus. I want to remind once again that until Monday the restrictive measures on mobility are in full force. So until then, a written form and an SMS is required for every NECESSARY movement. This new daily life also means new habits. And a new way of public behaviour. Their common element? Responsibility. Hands (we wash), Distances (we keep), Masks (we wear)! Hands. Distances. Masks. The threefold of our new plan. (Deputy Minister political statement, 30/04/20202)

The Deputy Minister of Civil Protection & Crisis Management (DM, hereafter) points here to individual responsibility for the sake of public health and human life using an affirmative that indexes a certainty which 1  See Hellenic Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (https://www.elinyae.gr/ ethniki-nomothesia/ya-d1agp-oik-200362020-fek-986b-2232020). 2   See political statement of Deputy Minister https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 3I03nqMkK6M&ab_channel=OPEN.

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draws on the biopolitical exercise of power, certainty implying the threat of punishment (they will contribute to the protection of human life, They will respect the collective effort). Additionally, political parties and workers’ unions are implicitly evaluated as thoughtless and disrespectful towards society in case they realize the rally. (We expect that all workers’ unions as well as all political parties will by act acknowledge the severity, They will respect.) The restrictions concerning participation in the public sphere are thus naturalized and normalized since they are presented as a new daily life, a new way of public behaviour that has become habitual and that calls for new patterns of social behaviour on the basis of responsibility. Therefore, protesters are constructed as irresponsible and anti-social violators of the new social norms, that is, governmental restrictions, jeopardizing human life while flouting the sacrifices of the rest of society. In addition, in the announcement, Labour Day is decontextualized since the DM started by referring to 1 May as an excursion day and the (expected) nice weather (we welcome the 1st of May with a really springtime weather). Additionally, it is paralleled with the holidays and the religious celebration of Easter (As with Easter, we will spend tomorrow differently). Therefore, the issue of the protest is descaled in terms of order, and there is no reference to the content and purpose of these annual commemorative demonstrations. This descaling is performed by an emergent antithesis, namely through suggesting an analogy between different practices and rights, that of celebrating religion/having holidays against that of commemorating/protesting. Moreover, concepts associated with workers’ struggles such as collective effort and struggle appeared on the DM’s rhetoric. Yet, they were detached from Labour Day and were associated with the management of the pandemic (collective effort and the struggle of doctors, nurses, and of all the people who do everything to avoid the dispersal of the virus). Finally, stressing that only necessary movement is allowed while banning the Labour Day Rally, the DM discursively constructed the demonstration as unnecessary. However, the unprecedented context of the pandemic and the biopolitics of its management which the former political statement epitomizes, including the criminalization of this specific demonstration, did not hinder unionized protesting bodies from performing the rally as a heterotopia. Instead, they defied the prohibition and performed it under suppressive conditions that became a source both of determination and of unease for the participants.

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I decided to go mostly because the protest was realized in these conditions (…) we are living a terrible densification of control; a terrible densification of suppression that seems to be relentless. Suppression is not just about the police beating you. Suppression is also about not letting you go, about blocking your way (…) it is also about the discourses terrorizing you so as not to go. Now the idea of going to a demonstration has to deal with fear as well. So before even heading out to go [to the protest] you must already have confronted this fear. (narrative data, P2)

The acuteness of suppression and state control over mobility and presence in public space was experienced as something unbearable that moves beyond police brutality in situ to involve the suspension of the right to assembly and restriction of access to public space. Suppression was also explicitly linked with the discourses terrorizing you so as not to go, or in other words, with the biopolitical discourses that produced fear. Thus, confronting and overcoming this fear emerged as a prerequisite for participation. Otherwise, the biopolitics of fear would result in suppressing even the idea of going to a demonstration. Deciding to set aside this fear, the protesters literally occupied—in the sense of entering a policed, blocked space and standing there—and re-­ negotiated the use of the city centre public space in novel ways. They kept physical distancing, while wearing masks and protective gloves, and stood still on predefined spots marked by red stickers on the ground, which demarcated the protest space into individual micro-spaces.3 Chanted slogans were limited and substituted by written texts on picket signs, banners, flags, masks and t-shirts. Apart from the spatial layout, the soundscape of the protest was also unusual, since both the expected sounds of a protest and of everyday city life were missing due to the lockdown. Consequently, the modes eminent in the performance of the semiotic landscape of the rally were spatial, gestural and visual, including written text. Voice was read not heard, appropriating the mask-use regulation in addition to restricted use of loud voices in order to limit the transmission of the virus. Hence, the textuality of the demonstrators’ bodies formed the semiotic landscape of a parade-like positioning of disciplined bodies, making possible the commemorative protest while following the measures for the protection of public health. 3  See relevant pictures that went viral in international media as reported in the digital article of a Greek newspaper: https://proini.news/egrapse-sta-diethni-mme-i-ergatiki-protomagiasto-syntagma/.

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Accordingly, the semiotic landscape of the Labour Day Rally was subjectively experienced with intensity and bred contradictory feelings due to over-surveillance and its strictly regulated embodied performances. It is an answer to everyone who claims that those who go to protests are thoughtless and swarm together. (…) This was the first demonstration; the most unthought-of (…) with masks and distances. It was a little weird; VERY WEIRD; unexampled. This thing was very weird, being away from each other, it was something unparalleled. (narrative data, P3)

The participant acknowledges that the appropriation of protesting practices rendered this first demonstration, the most unthought-of, weird, unexampled, and unparalleled. Repetition of the word weird, lexical choices (a little-very) and intonation (raising voice in VERY WEIRD) upscaled the peculiarity attributed by the narrator to the new proxemics of the commemorative protest. Hence, the mode of realizing Labour Day Rally caused a fissure on the paradigm of respective commemorative protests, since the participants could not relate it to any previous experience. However, recognizing the accusation of being thoughtless in case of protesting as implied in DM’s words, this protester construes the parade-like semiotic landscape as an answer to everyone who claims that those who go to protests are thoughtless and swarm together, namely as a counter-discourse. Furthermore, the content of slogans appearing on written elements of the semiotic landscape (e.g. banners, flags, picket signs, t-shirts, masks) was also an important facet of this counter-discourse. Slogans entextualized public discourse on Covid-19 and related it with workers’ rights and assertions. Quarantine, normalcy, in/visible enemy, as keywords of the pandemic-related public and political discourse were recontextualized in written form. The three following slogans were written on two of the major banners of the rally (see footnote 3) and on a picket, respectively: Slogan 1: HERE IS THE VISIBLE ENEMY/ CAPITALISM CANNOT BE HUMANIZED Slogan 2: SLAVERY IS NOT NORMALCY/ 1st OF MAY NO SACRIFICE FOR THE BOSSES Slogan 3: 1st of May 2020/ No quarantine/ to workers’/rights Slogan 1 appeared on a banner (Workers’ Union at Telecommunications and Informatics) that was carried by four distanced demonstrators wearing

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red gloves and red face scarves as protective masks. The slogan starts by pointing out (here is, as a translation of the original Greek demonstrative function word “Να/Na/”) in an emphatic way an enemy in order to make it visible. The slogan indexes and draws into the foreground capitalism as an inhumane enemy opposed to the way governmental discourse has constructed fear about Covid-19 as an invisible enemy. Thus, governmental discourse and biopolitical fear are descaled to upscale capitalism as the visible enemy of humanity. Accordingly, in Slogan 2 (Hotel Workers’ Union banner), the word normalcy defies the new normal not only regarding the health policies of the Greek government but mainly targeting the economic and labour measures imposed as part of Covid-19 biopolitics during the lockdown. These measures are addressed as enslaving (slavery), and the slogan deconstructs governmental discourse that called for a collective sacrifice to confront the common enemy of Covid-19. By implying that workers and the bosses do not have common interests the slogan calls for no sacrifice to their service. Additionally, Slogan 3 (Greek Women’s Federation picket) indexes that governmental policies have attacked workers’ rights; in other words they have put them into quarantine, which is contested by the protesters (no quarantine). Therefore, the pandemic policies were recontextualized as counter-­ discourse in the written messages of the protest and were negotiated from a new perspective strongly related to the context of the Labour Day Rally. The protest semiotic landscape thus upscaled workers’ rights and struggles, which were in turn redefined by the pandemic context. Consequently, these slogans shifted the agenda from the biopolitics of the pandemic to unions’ assertions on labour rights. The Labour Day Rally was lived as a conflicting experience. On the one hand, it aggrandized the importance of embodied presence in the performance of collective commemoration, boosting decisiveness to be there despite and because of prohibitions, and on the other it accentuated feelings of fear and isolation. All in all, the heterotopias of the protesting bodies performed an alternative commemorative semiotic landscape articulated as a counter-discourse to pandemic biopolitical discourse.

Memoryscapes on the Online-Offline Nexus How then collective memory was recontextualized within the semiotic landscape of the pandemic commemorative protest? On the one hand, the collective memory of historical 1 May struggles (steps of the workers who

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self-sacrificed—they) was invoked to interpret and negotiate the current situation, pointing out the continuity of workers’ struggles (following them), as shown in Slogan 4 (Electricians’ Union banner). Slogan 4: FOLLOWING THE STEPS OF THE WORKERS WHO SELF-SACRIFICED/WE ORGANIZE AND REINFORCE OUR STRUGGLE The connection to the past is emphasized through the metaphor of the “footprints” (i.e. the Greek word used in the original that we have translated as steps). This metaphor indexes a transmission of common values and fights that connects “them” and “us”. Namely, working-class activists are commemorated as a source of inspiration (reinforce our struggle) for a present struggle (a current us—our). On the other hand, recent past experiences of the Greek society were pulled into the present context of the pandemic in order to interpret it, as, for example, in Slogan 5 (Greek Women’s Federation picket). Slogan 5: 1st of May 2020/ We/ and our families/ are not going to pay again/ for this crisis The refusal to pay again along with the use of the word crisis indexes the deep socioeconomic crisis that Greece has been going through since 2009 and which has resulted in pay cuts, dismantling of the welfare state and, in general, the impoverishment of the Greek society. By bringing it to the fore, the experience of the crisis is related to and sheds light on the present pandemic context as a prism that helps to reconstrue how the working class (we and our families) should address the current crisis for its future wellbeing. Hence, the memoryscape constructed by the semiotic landscape of the Labour Day Rally emerged as a constellation of various spatiotemporal alignments (here and now, past workers’ struggles, the recent past of the Greek crisis, the future prospect). Accordingly, along with the redefinition of the commemorative protest by the context of the pandemic, the participants’ narratives reveal the dialogue between past and present for the sake of the future. On the bright side, to realize this demonstration was a necessity and despite the restrictions this necessity had to be expressed. Due to the symbolism of Labour Day, not as a mortuary but because what people have fought for is

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once again relevant; from Chicago in ’86 to the tobacco workers in Thessaloniki and the 200 of Kaisariani and a lot more struggles fought at the 1st of May. A lot of the rights that were claimed and gained, now due to the pandemic are infringed, demolished. So the NEED TO GO, to DEFY the restrictions became greater. (…) The ice had to be broken and I think this protest set the tone. And the pictures let’s say; and the picture per se it went viral, in general and on a European level and internationally; namely it set the tone. (narrative data, P3)

Here the interviewee clarifies that the commemoration of Labour Day is not addressed as a mortuary of a fossilized symbolic memory but rather as a protest necessitated by the present attack on workers’ rights and guided by the collective memory of workers’ struggles. Temporal linearity is fragmented, creating a constellation of spatiotemporal alignments of the past, that is, Chicago (USA), 1886; Thessaloniki (Greece), 1936; Kaisariani (Greece), 1944. Thus, seminal moments of fights performed on Labour Day have inspired labour movement duties and action in the present circumstances. Without overlooking the pandemic context regarding the way of realizing a protest, the commemorative protest sought to challenge its instrumentalization as an excuse to demolish the rights vested to the people thanks to these past struggles. Hence, the collective memory of the Labour Day emerged as a beacon whose flashlights in the present, while and through fragmenting space and time, have set the imperative of a dual continuance: that of collective memory of struggle itself and that of the rights gained thanks to it. Additionally, accomplishing the imperative of realizing the commemorative protest and defying biopolitical policies, despite acknowledged fear, was experienced as a great achievement. More specifically, the phrase The ice had to be broken indexes the iconic phrase in V.I. Lenin’s (1965/1921) speech on the fourth anniversary of the October Revolution “The important thing is that the ice has been broken; the road is open, the way has been shown”. Through this intertextual reference, a triumphant moment in working-class history is added to the constellations constructing the memoryscape of the Labour Day Rally. The spatiotemporal alignment “Russia-1917-1921” that emerges when reflecting on the importance of the 2020 Labour Day Rally triggers an analogy with the sense of importance attributed to revolutionaries’ victory. Through its recontextualization in the narrative of the 2020 Labour Day Rally, the latter is construed as a “trailblazer” protest in the pandemic lockdown context, the first one

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to take place, the one that set the tone for the rest to follow. It thus emplaces the 2020 Labour Day Rally and the memoryscape constructed during its realization (the picture per se it went viral), within the constellations of Labour Day struggles’ collective memory as a breakthrough activism of translocal influence and value (and on a European level and internationally, see footnote 3). The commemorative protest gained further visibility at the intersection of online-offline, since it appeared as a news item in the digital media and it was further disseminated in social media. The phrase “further visibility” acknowledges a first level of on-site visibility that was restricted because no other citizen apart from the demonstrators was around due to the strict “stay-at-home” imperative. Hence the semiotic landscape of the Labour Day Rally was resemiotized in social media mostly focusing on the unexampled mode of performing a protest in the Covid-19 context and especially the spatial layout of the distanced protesting bodies. Various images of the commemorative protest appeared online, but the most impactful in terms of dissemination and engagement were those depicting the positioning of the protesters. For example, an article featured on the Facebook page of a Greek newspaper bearing the title The demonstration of PAME [All-Workers’ Activist Front] from drone: unprecedented pictures from Syntagma and the subtitle A drone has recorded from above unprecedented images of Syntagma square and the symbolic demonstration of PAME for Labour Day, followed by a photograph of the rally depicting the spatial positionality of the protesters. Much like the participants’ remarks on the rally, the word unprecedented appears twice on the title and subtitle of the news item and, as well, stresses the unparalleled performance of the protest. The picture accompanying the titles stresses this element and became the object of discussion in the comment section. The impact of the resemiotized protest is also evident, along with the comments, by the engagement with the post: 2400 reactions (1800 like, 288 love, 214 haha, 59 wow, 46 angry, 20 care, 4 sad), 293 comments, 95 shares. The Facebook reactions showcase a generally positive reception of the performance of the Labour Day Rally. However, two commenters refer in contradictory ways to how the rally was performed indexing complementary understandings of the memoryscape. Comment 1: Workers of the world line up!!!!! Hurray Stalinism!!!!! Comment 2: Excellent demonstration on their part to honour the dead of Labour Day and to support workers’ rights sincere congratulations!!

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The first commenter appears negatively positioned towards the rally. Specifically, s/he states her/his disagreement in an implicit manner by paraphrasing the iconic ending phrase of the Communist Manifesto (Workers of the world unite!) (Marx & Engels, 1848/2011) to scorn the spatial layout of the protest. Sarcasm featured in the recontextualization of the phrase substituting the original unite with line up turns the call for unity into a bureaucratic spatial practice of lining up, thus descaling its importance. Sarcasm is upscaled through typographic energy (e.g. multiple exclamation marks, see Jane, 2015, p. 66) and the use of hurray to actually disapprove of this practice (of parade-like positioning) thus negating its meaning in an ironic way. Further on, s/he identifies the appropriation of protesters’ practices with Stalinism, namely the parade-like positioning of the protesters-at-attention. This comment criticizes the present commemoration through the emergence of the spatiotemporal alignment Russia-Stalin period. Relating the Russia-Stalin alignment with the protest adds to the constellation of the Labour Day collective memory an additional lens to view the semiotic landscape of the 2020 Labour Day Rally. On the contrary, commenter 2 expresses an outwardly positive opinion that is overstressed through typographic energy using bold font in the word congratulations and double exclamation marks, as well as amplifiers (excellent, sincere). The commenter characterizes the memoryscape of the protest as an excellent performance that accomplished the dual imperative of honouring the past while fostering for the present. Contrary to the online dissemination of the rally that triggered interaction and distant participation in the event, on-site activity of the protesting body was less interactive with non-participant citizens, since there were no passersby. There were no passersby. The city center was empty. The presence of the police and in general of control […] felt like panopticon. They were everywhere. They were watching you, they knew that you were going to the protest, they knew what you were about to do. This may have been true in the past as well but now the gaze was focused SOLELY on you. It was a spatiotemporal reality where you were the center and everything else was control. There was nothing else. You and your comrades […] we were also imbued in fear. (narrative data, P2)

The only “gaze” making the rally visible was that of the protesters (you and your comrades) and the police, which was experienced as a panopticon, making the experience of P2 feel like you were the center and everything else

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was control, because now the gaze was focused SOLELY on you, contrary to past experiences of demonstrating. It is therefore evident that the semiotic landscape appropriating Covid-19 protective measures was either scorned for docility or marvelled for overcoming the pandemic biopolitics, part of which was also the fear to realize the commemorative protest (we were also imbued in fear). It has also revealed the importance of resemiotization processes for the social dissemination of the protest, due to its limited visibility in physical space since the city centre was empty of people due to the lockdown. Hence, it is not just that the protest semiotic landscape gained more visibility but rather that visibility to anyone non-participant in the protest was achieved solely due to its digital resemiotization on the online-offline nexus. Therefore, the role of digital media emerged as very important in the performance and negotiation of collective memory, especially in the biopolitical context of prohibition.

Closing Remarks In this chapter we have identified the interplay of the pandemic context with an annual demonstration of the workers’ unions honouring Labour Day. In order to address the way a commemorative social protest is performed in the semiotic landscape of the pandemic, we have explored an assemblage of (counter-)discourses. Specifically, due to the pandemic, assembly and thus the Labour Day Rally were reconstrued as a matter of biopolitics (Davis & Boler, 2022; Bowman, 2020), whereas its annual realization is a common practice in the Greek context. The questions of realizing the protest or not as well as of the ways to do so became a matter of primary concern. This was due to the criminalization of demonstrations and the right to collective commemoration (Fritsch & Kretschmann, 2021). The enforced “new norm” resulted into evacuated public spaces and was oriented towards an alienation from collective sociopolitical participation, since the latter presupposes an accessible common space. Thus, spatial exclusion, understood as denied access to common space, threatened to create a sociopolitical and commemorative vacuum (Gensburger, 2019) in terms of performing the protest. In this context, the importance of embodied presence in the city centre so as to protest became both a priority and a goal per se. This was contrary to the pre-covid condition when the semiotic performances as such were not the motive of commemoration (Blackwood & Macalister, 2020).

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In order to legitimize the assembly against the biopolitical discourse framing it as a threat to public health and thus to exercise their right to protest, bodies appropriated health protection practices. Usual demonstration practices in the Greek context include public calls to the demonstration, holding each other arm-in-arm to secure the protesting body’s coherence, shouting slogans, marching through the city centre and confronting policemen (Kitis & Milani, 2015). Instead, the protesters arranged their bodies in prescribed distanced positions, using masks and gloves and replacing voiced protest and commemoration messages with written texts inscribed in various media such as picket signs, clothes and masks. This led to the emergence of a remarkable, unprecedented heterotopic semiotic landscape (Anfinson, 2020). Concerning the content of the protest messages, protesters decontextualized keywords of the “pandemic lexicon” and creatively embedded them into the protest’s slogans, thus fuelling collective memory slogans about Labour Day. Consequently, this recontextualization (Leppänen et al., 2013) of collective memory in the pandemic context involved descaling biopolitical discourse and, concurrently, upscaling workers’ rights-­ related discourse. Namely, the slogans of the commemorative protest re-negotiated the pandemic biopolitics as an attack on workers’ rights, thus resisting the rhetoric of the “quarantine for public health” and uncovering the underlying quarantine on workers’ rights. Therefore, No quarantine on workers’ rights emerged as an element of the counter-discourse that was performed during the Labour Day Rally, aiming to bring to the fore social demands while undermining biopolitical suppression and fear (Carr & Fisher, 2016). Furthermore, the counter-discourse constructed during the commemorative protest was entextualized and mediatized on the online-offline nexus (Blommaert & Maly, 2019) as the protest’s semiotic landscape was resemiotized through social media discourse (Scollon, 2007). In the case of the 2020 Labour Day Rally, digital media served as a prerequisite for the protest to gain visibility, because no passersby were present to share this experience in the physical space due to the “stay-at-home” pandemic imperative. In other words, the online-offline nexus was the only possible way to reach non-protesters, everybody, and to perform the memoryscape rather than just facilitate the communication of the protest as usual. Protesting bodies, claiming visibility through these media, became the object of competing discourses. On the one hand, the performed protest was appraised valuing the difficulty to overcome the biopolitics of fear and confinement while respecting public health. On the other hand,

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protesters’ choices received deprecation concerning their appropriation practices and especially the disciplined distanced bodies that were related with docility attributed to former socialist regimes. These spatiotemporal alignments (Richardson & Milani, 2022) do not appear in the traditional public discourse around annual commemorative protests that usually focuses on the emergent clashes between the police and the protesting bodies (Sakellaridou, 2014). In addition to online commentary, the semiotic landscape of the commemorative protest and protesters’ narratives have also revealed that the spatiotemporal constellations (Tufi, 2020) constituting the memoryscape (Árvay & Foote, 2019) of the 2020 Labour Day Rally were far more complex than expected in an annual Labour Day Rally. More specifically, the pandemic as a new type of crisis activated anew the memory of the Greek economic crisis and brought forth this spatiotemporal alignment as a lens to negotiate the present (drawing on recent Greek past). The complexity of the constellations was analogous to the difficulty met in order to perform the protest in the first place. This was experienced as an achievement of outmost importance by the protesters, triggering the memory of the victory of the Russian Revolution (drawing on distant Russian past). Additionally, expected spatiotemporal alignments, that is, those regarding Labour Day struggles, were reconfigured through the perspective of the pandemic biopolitics that entrenched the rights gained by these struggles. Therefore, they were reconstructed and updated as current demands (drawing on multiple spatial “pasts”) (Blair et al., 2010). Finally, overcoming the fear of biopolitics, protesters actually addressed the threat of a memory vacuum through the performance of an unprecedent semiotic landscape of the pandemic Labour Day Rally. In other words, unlocking memory in more complex ways due to the pandemic norm, protesters entextualized what we may call an emergent heterotopic memoryscape.

References Anfinson, A. (2020). Hong Kong’s paper cities: Heterotopia and the semiotic landscape of civil disobedience. In D. Malinowski (Ed.), Reterritorializing linguistic landscapes: Questioning boundaries and opening spaces (pp.  137–159). Bloomsbury Academic. Árvay, A., & Foote, K. (2019). The spatiality of memoryscapes, public memory, and commemoration. In S.  De Nardi, H.  Orange, S.  High, & E.  Koskinen-­ Koivisto (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of memory and place (pp. 129–137). Routledge.

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Blackwood, R., & Macalister, J. (2020). Introduction. In R.  Blackwood & J. Macalister (Eds.), Multilingual memories: Monuments, museums and the linguistic landscape (pp. 1–10). Bloomsbury Academic. Blair, C., Dickinson, G., & Ott, L. B. (2010). Introduction: Rhetoric/memory/ place. In G. Dickinson, C. Blair, & B. L. Ott (Eds.), Places of public memory: The rhetoric of museums and memorials (pp.  1–54). The University of Alabama Press. Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J., & Maly, I. (2019). Invisible lines in the online-offline linguistic landscape. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 223. Retrieved August 22, 2022, from https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/invisible-­lines-­ in-­the-­online-­offline-­linguistic-­landscape Bowman, B. (2020). On the biopolitics of breathing: Race, protests, and state violence under the global threat of covid-19. South African Journal of Psychology, 50(3), 312–315. Carr, E. S., & Fisher, B. (2016). Interscaling awe, de-escalating disaster. In S. Carr & M. Lempert (Eds.), Scale: Discourse and dimensions of social life (pp. 133–156). University of California Press. Contiades, X. (2020). Pandemics, biopolitics and rights. The world after covid-19 [Πανδημία, βιοπολιτική και δικαιώματα: Ο κόσμος μετά τον covid-19]. Kastaniotis. Davis, E., & Boler, M. (2022). Affect, protest, pandemic: Conversations from the crises of 2020. Cultural Studies, 36(3), 355–359. Foucault, M. (2012). The birth of biopolitics. [Η γέννηση της βιοπολιτικής]. Plethron. Fritsch, K., & Kretschmann, A. (2021). Politics of exception. Criminalizing activism in Western European democracies. In V. V. Weis (Ed.), Criminalization of activism. Historical, present, and future perspectives (pp. 19–29). Routledge. Gensburger, S. (2019). Memory and space: (Re) reading Halbwachs. In S.  De Nardi, H.  Orange, S.  High, & E.  Koskinen-Koivisto (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of memory and place (pp. 69–76). Routledge. Hoskins, A. (2011). Anachronisms of media, anachronisms of memory: From collective memory to a new memory ecology. In N.  Motti, O.  Meyers, & E. Zandberg (Eds.), On media memory (pp. 278–288). Palgrave Macmillan. Iedema, R. (2003). Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice. Visual Communication, 2(1), 29–57. Jane, A. E. (2015). Flaming? What flaming? The pitfalls and potentials of researching online hostility. Ethics and Information Technology, 17(1), 65–87. Jaworski, A., & Thurlow, C. (2010). Introducing semiotic landscapes. In A. Jaworski & C. Thurlow (Eds.), Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space (pp. 1–40). Bloomsbury Academic. Kitis, D., & Milani, T. (2015). The performativity of the body: Turbulent spaces in Greece. Linguistic Landscape, 1(3), 268–290.

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Kitsiou, R. (2021). Face covering as a social practice: The rhetoric of anti-/masking during the covid-19 pandemic in the Greek digital public sphere. AWPEL, Aegean Working Papers on Ethnographic Linguistics, 3. Retrieved August 22, 2022, from https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/awpel/article/ view/30653 Lenin, I. Vladimir. (1965/1921). Fourth anniversary of the October revolution. In Lenin’s collected works (2nd ed.), 51–59. Trans. D. Skvirsky and G. Hanna. : Progress Publishers. Leppänen, S., Kytölä, S., Jousmäki, H., Peuronen, Saija, and Westinen, E. E. (2013). Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for (dis)identification in social media. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 57. Retrieved August 22, 2022, from https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/ entextualization-­and-­resemiotization-­as-­resources-­for-­disidentifi Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2011). The communist manifesto. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1848). Richardson, E. J., & Milani, T. (2022). Politics of commemoration and memory. In C.  W. Chun (Ed.), Applied linguistics and politics (pp.  211–232). Bloomsbury Academic. Rojo, M.  L. (2014). Taking over the square: The role of linguistic practices in contesting urban spaces. Journal of Language and Politics, 13(4), 623–652. Sakellaridou, E. (2014). Whose performance?: The politics of protest and terror in Greek civic life. Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 22(2), 189–202. Scollon, R. (2007). Discourse itineraries. Nine processes of resemiotization. In V.  Bhatia, J.  Flowerdew, & R.  H. Jones (Eds.), Advances in discourse studies (pp. 233–245). Routledge. Spadaro, A. (2020). Covid-19: Testing the limits of human rights. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 11(2), 317–325. Stroud, C. (2016). Turbulent linguistic landscapes and the semiotics of citizenship. In B.  Robert, E.  Lanza, & H.  Woldemariam (Eds.), Negotiating and contesting identities in linguistic landscapes (pp. 3–18). Bloomsbury Publishing. Train, W. R. (2016). Connecting visual presents to archival pasts in multilingual California: Towards historical depth in linguistic landscape. Linguistic Landscape, 2(3), 223–246. Tsiliotis, C.. (2020). Pandemic and restrictive measures (Part II) [Πανδημία και περιοριστικά μέτρα (Μέρος II)]. Syntagmawatch. Retrieved August 22, 2022, from https://www.syntagmawatch.gr/trending-­issues/pandimia-­kai-­ perioristika-­m etra-­m eros-­i i-­o i-­a rxes-­t is-­a nalogikotitas-­k ai-­t is-­a pagorefsis-­ paraviasis-­tou-­pirina-­tou-­dikaiomatos/ Tufi, S. (2020). Instances of emplaced memory: The case of Alghero/L’Alguer. In R.  Blackwood & J.  Macalister (Eds.), Multilingual memories: monuments, museums and the linguistic landscape (pp. 237–262). Bloomsbury Academic.

CHAPTER 8

The Struggle to Remember Tiananmen Under COVID-19 and the National Security Law in Hong Kong Francis L. F. Lee

The 1989 Beijing Student Movement—sometimes known as the Tiananmen protests—and its eventual crackdown constituted one of the most important events in late twentieth-century China. While memories about the protests were suppressed and public commemoration of the event banned in the mainland (Lim, 2015), the event was persistently remembered in Hong Kong. Every year between 1990 and 2019, tens of thousands of citizens gathered at the city’s Victoria Park, the largest public park on Hong Kong Island, on June 4 to commemorate the dead and call for democratization in Hong Kong and China. For more than two decades, the June 4 commemoration constituted one of the most important “difference markers,” signifying the status of Hong Kong as an exceptional liberal enclave within China (Lee & Chan, 2021).

F. L. F. Lee (*) Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_8

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However, the mass pro-democracy protests that broke out in 2019 (in response to the government’s proposal to allow extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China) and the state’s hard-line response had led to fundamental changes in the city’s political landscape. In June 2020, the National Security Law (NSL) was enacted. The law criminalizes subversion, secession, terrorist activities, and collusion of foreign powers. Subsequently, numerous political groups, civic associations, and critical news outlets disbanded (Kwan, 2021a). As part of such development, the annual June 4 vigil was not held since 2020. The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China (the Alliance hereafter), the association formed by pro-democracy politicians and activists during the 1989 Beijing Student Movement and the organizer of the annual vigils since 1990, dissolved in September 2021 after three leaders were arrested and charged for incitement to subversion under the NSL. Attempts to commemorate the event did not entirely disappear, however. Hong Kong migrants held rallies in different cities around the world. Inside Hong Kong, in both 2021 and 2022, many citizens disregarded the police’s warning and went to the district outside Victoria Park to express their will to remember in various ways. People also shared thoughts about 1989 via social media platforms and/or turned their profile pictures into a candlelight. This scenario needs to be understood in relation to the fact that, by summer 2022, the state had yet to explicitly and clearly claim that any form of the June 4 commemoration would be illegal. In fact, from 2020 onward, the annual vigil was banned1 in the name of group gathering prohibition under COVID-19. Around the world, COVID-19 has brought about significant challenges to collective remembering and social mobilization. Many memory institutions and entrepreneurs developed alternative practices for remembrance to continue (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020; Steir-Livny, 2021), and movement groups adjusted their tactics to different degrees (Flesher Fominaya, 2022; Pressman & Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2021; Zajak et  al., 2021). But in Hong Kong, the challenges brought about by the pandemic were intertwined with the state’s tightening of political control. For some authors, Hong Kong illustrates how an 1  In Hong Kong law, people need to notify the police if they want to organize a public meeting or public procession. The police have the power to prohibit the planned public meeting and procession if the prohibition is believed to be in the interests of public safety, public order, or national security.

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authoritarian state could make use of the pandemic to aid human rights suppression (Deva, 2020; Pleyers, 2020). However, beyond the simple idea that the pandemic has been an “excuse” for the government to ban certain public gatherings, how can we further understand the relationship among COVID-19, the NSL, and Tiananmen commemoration in contemporary Hong Kong? This chapter thus has two aims. First, it provides an update of the politics of collective remembering of Tiananmen in Hong Kong under the NSL. It extends Lee and Chan’s (2021) analysis of Tiananmen commemoration between 1989 and 2019 to the happenings after 2020. It recounts the developments that constitute the trend of memory erasure, yet it also notes how the public responded and resisted. Second, the chapter discusses the role of the pandemic, being literally a co-incident, in the politics of memory erasure. I argue that, for Tiananmen commemoration, the impact of COVID-19 mainly resides in the sustenance of the strategic ambiguity that is central to the state’s attempt to induce societal self-censorship. The account is mainly based on the analysis of media materials, supplemented by onsite observations and a few in-depth interviews with journalists and activists. The following begins with a brief review of Tiananmen commemoration in Hong Kong. It then describes the process of memory erasure since 2020 and discusses how people continued to contest the right to commemorate. The chapter then tries to explicate the role of COVID-19 in the process. The conclusion offers some remarks about the possible future of Tiananmen commemoration.

Remembering Tiananmen in Hong Kong: 1989–2019 Happening eight years before Hong Kong’s scheduled return to Chinese sovereignty, the 1989 Tiananmen student movement captured extraordinary levels of attention from the Hong Kong public. The news media provided virtually non-stop coverage of the unfolding of the events in Beijing between mid-April and early June (Chan & Lee, 1991). Driven by a mixture of genuine patriotic sentiments and self-interests in having a democratic China, Hong Kong citizens actively supported the movement through protest marches, donations, and other actions at the individual level. The shocking and bitter ending of the movement thus left a deep emotional imprint onto the minds of Hong Kong citizens.

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The Alliance, formed during the 1989 protests, organized the first annual June 4 vigil in 1990, which was participated by 150,000 citizens (according to the organizer). The size of the vigil dwindled, however. By 1995, the number of vigil participants dropped to only 35,000. With China’s reconfirmation of the “reform and open up” policy, normalization of international relations, and the impending transfer of sovereignty, Hong Kong people had seemingly adopted a “pragmatic” attitude on the matter of Tiananmen. Nevertheless, on the eve of the handover, it was uncertain if China would allow the Alliance and the annual vigil to continue to exist. Under this context, collective remembering of June 4 was valorized in public discourses into a demonstration of people’s conscience and courage. Lee and Chan (2021) thus argued that a strong collective memory of Tiananmen, which combined a consensus on the wrongfulness of the Chinese government’s action with the moral imperative to remember, was formed only right before the transfer of sovereignty. Lee and Chan (2021) adopted a processual framework to elucidate how collective remembering of Tiananmen persisted. First, the ritualized June 4 vigil provided the focal point for an annual process of memory mobilization. Relevant news reports and commentaries typically began to appear in mid-April. Into May, the Alliance and numerous civic associations would organize activities ranging from exhibitions to drama and music performances. An atmosphere of remembering was created, driving more people to join the vigil. Second, government officials and pro-government politicians might occasionally contest the significance of Tiananmen or the need of continual commemoration by promoting certain memory-blurring discourses, such as the idea that the students also made mistakes during the 1989 protests or the claim that one should evaluate the Chinese government more “objectively” by taking into account the economic development of the country after 1989. However, such attempts often generated heavy criticisms by the mainstream media, signifying and reinforcing the strength of the social consensus on the matter. Memory contestation thus often inadvertently reaffirmed the moral imperative to remember. Third, with the conscious efforts by the Alliance and the memory work conducted by the news media, teachers, and parents, many young people who otherwise had not personally experienced the event were socialized into the mnemonic community of Tiananmen. Intergenerational memory transmission was largely successful, at least until the early 2010s.

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Fourth, there were efforts trying to inscribe collective memory of Tiananmen into relatively enduring forms. Without official support, memory institutionalization had been an ongoing struggle, but there were some notable achievements. The teaching of June 4 was incorporated— though only in a limited manner—into the subjects of Chinese History and Liberal Studies in secondary schools. The more liberal schools and teachers also addressed the matter through designing extra-curricular activities. Two Tiananmen-related monuments—the Pillar of Shame and the Statue of the Goddess of Democracy—were placed inside the campuses of two local universities, even though the university administrations had never formally agreed to the placement of the artworks. A “permanent June 4 Museum” built by the Alliance opened in April 2014, though it struggled to sustain itself partly due to harassments by government departments and pro-government groups. These memory processes are highly pertinent to understanding the state’s attempt to erase memories of Tiananmen after 2020, as to be discussed in the next section. Suffice it to note here that, by the end of the 2000s, collective remembering of Tiananmen in Hong Kong not only continued but also grew in strength. The number of the June 4 vigil participants reached 150,000 in 2009. The commemoration had become a symbol of Hong Kong people’s moral conscience. There was a sense that Hong Kong people were commemorating not only the events in 1989 but also their own persistence on remembering Tiananmen over the years (Chu, 2021). Certainly, collective remembering of Tiananmen did face various challenges even before the events in 2019/2020. In addition to the struggle to institutionalize the memory, Hong Kong witnessed the growth of “localism” in the 2010s (Kaeding, 2017): facing increasingly serious social, cultural, and political conflicts between Hong Kong and mainland China, young people began to reject their Chinese identity and develop the idea of Hongkongers as a distinctive ethnic group. They started to see democratization of China as irrelevant or even detrimental to the interests of Hong Kong. They thus questioned the meaningfulness of the June 4 commemoration. Some young localist activists urged people not to participate in the June 4 commemoration. In response, proponents of Tiananmen commemoration had to adjust their narratives in order to seek common ground with the radicalizing young generation. Meanwhile, counter-mobilization by the state against the pro-­ democracy movement had gained strength (Cheng, 2020), and some of

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the state-sponsored groups had started to criticize Tiananmen commemoration more proactively, such as by accusing the Alliance and other pro-­ democracy groups for making false claims about what happened in 1989 or manipulating the public in order to gather donations. Interestingly, the quasi-official media outlets of the Chinese government in Hong Kong— the communist-sponsored newspapers Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao—had remained silent on the matter of Tiananmen. That is, they provided close-­ to-­ zero coverage of the annual vigils and relevant controversies. Nonetheless, the second half of the 2010s saw the emergence of pro-­ government online media outlets (Lee, 2021). These outlets often offered explicit criticisms against the Alliance and the vigils. Cass Sunstein (2001) has coined the term cyberbalkanization to refer to the development of an online environment in which people of different views are located in their own echo chambers. Edy (2014), developing a similar line of argument specifically about collective memory formation, has noted the possible emergence of memory silos within which contrasting narratives of the past were circulated. Borrowing from these writings, Lee and Chan (2021) used the phrase memory balkanization to refer to how, especially in the online environment, contrasting narratives about Tiananmen were disseminated to citizens with contrasting political views. Despite the presence of a pro-commemoration majority, opinion poll data showed that, during the 2010s, the gap between the views of the pro-­ democracy citizens on Tiananmen and the views of the pro-government citizens on Tiananmen was enlarged. That is, Hong Kong people started to become more polarized in their views toward 1989.

National Security Law and Memory Erasure On June 4, 2019, the vigil commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown was held. Memory mobilization for the event, however, was overshadowed by the growing controversy surrounding the Hong Kong government’s proposal to amend the Fugitive Ordinance in order to allow the extradition of criminal suspects to Taiwan and mainland China. Five days after the vigil, one million citizens joined a protest against the proposed amendment. The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement would persist for months. Movement demands expanded from withdrawing the bill to democratization and police accountability. In the face of the government’s irresponsiveness, street protests turned violent. Movement tactics expanded to include lobbying

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foreign governments to sanction China, and sentiments supporting Hong Kong independence became more and more conspicuously expressed at protest sites (Lee et al., 2020). The Hong Kong and Chinese governments insisted on stopping the violent protests with forceful means. More than 10,000 people were arrested in association with the protests.2 In June 2020, China bypassed local legislation procedures and imposed the National Security Law onto Hong Kong. The NSL criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign powers. The law was criticized for its vagueness, and the subsequent implementation by the National Security Department (NSD) was criticized for broadening the range of activities and speeches seen as contravening the law (Lai & Kellogg, 2022). The NSL created a new political environment in which a process of the erasure of Tiananmen memories began. As explicated earlier, collective remembering of Tiananmen in Hong Kong was sustained not only by the annual vigils but also by a wide range of efforts that made references to Tiananmen a pervasive feature in the society. But after the NSL’s enactment, the Alliance’s June 4 Museum was pressured to close down in May 2021 when, only a few days after the museum finished renovation and reopened, it was charged by a government department for not holding a proper license according to the Places of Public Entertainment Ordinance. In October 2021, pro-government politicians claimed that public exhibition of the Pillar of Shame, the sculpture that has been placed on the campus of the Hong Kong University (HKU) since 1998, risks violating the NSL. On December 22, HKU removed the sculpture from the campus. The next day, the Chinese University of Hong Kong removed the Statue of the Goddess of Democracy from its campus. In January 2022, HKU covered up a tribute to the Tiananmen movement that was painted on a bridge on campus back in 1989 (Leung, 2022). In secondary schools, teachers who used to tell students about the 1989 protests ceased the practice. Teachers were not necessarily afraid of the NSL; a more imminent risk is the possibility of conservative parents complaining to the Education Bureau, which might cost the teachers their jobs (G Cheung, 2021). Self-censorship extended from classrooms to libraries. A news report quoted a school librarian saying that books mentioning the death of ordinary people in 1989 were removed from her 2  https://hongkongfp.com/hong-kong-protest-movement-data-archive-arrestsprotest-statistics/.

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library, but books mentioning the deaths of military officers remained (Ming Pao, 2022). Not surprisingly, many books about the 1989 protests, especially those written by prominent figures such as ex-student leader Wang Dan and the late Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, were taken down from the shelves of public libraries (Cheng, 2021). The above happenings combined to eliminate a significant portion of the achievements of memory institutionalization in previous decades. They could have implications on other memory processes such as memory mobilization and intergenerational memory transmission. Since these processes were the key to the persistence of collective remembering of Tiananmen in Hong Kong, the weakening of these processes was the crux of the memory erasure process. Notably, the memory-erasing practices were seldom executed directly by the state. The NSL has created an environment in which legal risks proliferated and self-censorship became widespread (Kwan, 2021b). Therefore, memory erasure has been part of the broader politics of societal self-censorship in Hong Kong, which has a number of characteristics. First, it is premised on strategic ambiguity and the refusal to draw clear boundaries of acceptability. The NSL itself was criticized for its vagueness. Such ambiguity made it impossible for people to ascertain where “the red lines” are. The situation compels people to play safe and leads to the tendency to over-react, as illustrated by how seemingly innocuous books were also taken down by school or public libraries (Ming Pao, 2022). Second, a politics of public denouncement mediated between the legal framework and self-censorship. The NSD established a hotline for citizens to report cases of suspected NSL violations, and as noted earlier, school teachers were concerned more about the risks of complaints than about the NSL itself. The culture of denouncement thrived under the vagueness of the NSL. It heightened the psychological pressure and various kinds of risks for the individuals involved, thus exacerbating the tendency to self-censor. Third, there is a tendency for the scope of self-censorship to expand over time. When certain books are taken down from the library shelves, another group of books could become the “relatively most sensitive” and the targets of the next round of complaints. This slippery slope could theoretically go a long way. This is important for understanding the evolution of memory erasure regarding June 4: after calling for the end of one-­ party rule is considered probably subversive, people could start wondering if publicly commemorating June 4 by itself is problematic; if many people

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start believing that publicly commemorating June 4 is legally risky, some might wonder if sharing June-4-related messages via social media is also risky. The range of memory practices that are considered “risky” can become wider and wider. Self-censorship by itself does not necessarily change how people understand the happenings in 1989  in their minds, but it can substantially undermine Tiananmen-related public expression and engagement. The over-time evolution of self-censorship can be illustrated by the changing amount of media coverage devoted to Tiananmen. In year 2020, a search on the electronic news archive Wise News using “June 4” as the keyword could derive 198 articles from five Chinese newspapers between May 6 and June 5.3 The figure jumped to 340 in 2021, probably due to the relative lack of other important news topics in the year, and the Alliance was still in operation and was applying for holding the June 4 vigil. But in 2022, the Alliance had already dissolved, and its key leaders were in detention. A mainstream newspaper reporter opined that his media organization needed to manage legal and political risks by adopting a passive approach to reporting about June 4. That is, it would be fine for them to report on related events when the latter happened, but they would not proactively develop stories about June 4.4 When this change in approach was coupled with the disappearance of social organizations and activists conducting activities and events, the result was the decline of coverage. The number of articles in 2022 thus dropped to only 113. The professional and somewhat liberal-oriented Ming Pao accounted for 75 (66.3%) of the 113 articles, whereas Hong Kong Economic Times and Oriental Daily had only two and four articles respectively. With ongoing memory erasure, public opinion toward Tiananmen exhibited a significant shift. The Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI, formerly Public Opinion Programme at the Hong Kong University) had conducted polls about June 4 for more than two decades.5 Support for calling upon the Chinese government to re-evaluate the student movement dropped from 59.4% in 2020 to 39.6% in 2022, while percentage opposing it rose from 22.9% to 29.8%. Notably, percentages answering “don’t know” increased even more substantially from 17.7% to 30.6%. 3  The five newspapers are Ming Pao, Hong Kong Economic Journal, Hong Kong Economic Times, Sing Tao Daily, and Oriental Daily. 4  Interview conducted in July 2022. 5  https://www.pori.hk/pop-poll/june-fourth.html?lang=en.

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The latter hints at the possibility that many respondents might have become more reluctant to express their views instead of having their views changed. Similarly, percentage of respondents seeing the Chinese government’s actions in 1989 as wrong declined from 66.4% to 45.3% between 2020 and 2022. Percentage seeing the Chinese government as acting correctly rose from 14.8% to 22.8%, and percentage of don’t knows rose from 18.7% to 31.8%. The majority remained supportive toward the student movement, but the gap was narrowed.

Contesting the Right to Commemorate June 4 Under COVID Since the suppression of collective remembering of Tiananmen resulted mainly through self-censorship, and ambiguity is a core feature of the politics of self-censorship, the suppression is inherently incomplete. It would be wrong to say that publicly available memory objects related to Tiananmen were comprehensively removed. As of August 2022, some books directly about the Tiananmen student movement could still be located using the online catalog of public libraries in Hong Kong, not to say university libraries. A few news outlets remained willing to put the June 4 commemoration to the top of their agenda in early June. In addition to Ming Pao, the online news outlet The Initium published a series of six feature stories on Tiananmen between June 2 and June 5, 2022, while its social media account also pushed several pieces of in-depth reportage about Tiananmen from previous years. Citizens who cared about the historical memory did not merely accept the new reality; some tried to continue to contest the right to commemorate June 4 in different ways. This is most evident in how Hong Kong people attempted to continue the annual commemoration against state disapproval. In 2020, the Alliance applied for holding the annual vigil in Victoria Park. The police issued a letter of objection, using the ongoing pandemic and the Hong Kong government’s group gathering prohibition as the justification. The police also rejected the Alliance’s application for holding a march on May 31 based on the same reasons. Leaders of the Alliance decided to enter Victoria Park despite the disapproval. They insisted that the park was a public space, and they had the right to enter it and carry out their own commemoration. The Alliance also called upon citizens to commemorate in their own districts and prepared 100,000 candles for distribution.

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Hundreds of citizens turned out at Victoria Park. Notably, over the years, the Alliance had established a more or less standardized “program” for the June 4 commemoration inside Victoria Park (Lee & Chan, 2021, pp. 85–92). But since the police had not approved the rally, the Alliance and the individual citizens did not follow the program. Some citizens brought flowers and candles, signifying their intention to commemorate the dead. Some stayed only briefly. Others stayed and shouted protest slogans. Items symbolizing the June 4 commemoration mixed with items associated with the Anti-ELAB protests (Fig. 8.1). Activists and citizens straddled between engaging in individualized commemoration and participating in a collective action. Beyond Victoria Park, commemoration activities were held in numerous districts. A Catholic Church organized a mass for the dead. A range of participation opportunities associated with different levels of political and legal risks were therefore available. The police did not clamp down the activities on the street or inside Victoria Park that night, but 12 activists were ultimately convicted for illegal assembly in September 2021. When meting out the sentences, the judge referred to the context of the pandemic and stated that “the defendants […] belittled a genuine public health crisis” and “arrogantly believed their common purpose was more important than protecting the community” (Wong, 2021). That is, state institutions consistently treated the pandemic as the justification of banning public commemoration. June 4, 2021, was the first anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident after the establishment of the NSL. By mid-year, there were already discussions in the public arena about whether the Alliance would be charged with subversion under the NSL given their call for “ending one party rule.” However, by May, the government had yet to clearly indicate that the Alliance would be outlawed. The Alliance applied for the letter of no objection to hold a march and the vigil. The police again refused to approve the public gatherings in the name of the pandemic. Nevertheless, different from year 2020, the police were more adamant to prevent people from gathering inside Victoria Park. In the early morning hours of June 4, the police arrested vice chairperson of the Alliance Chow Hang-tung for publicizing an unauthorized assembly via social media. The police deployed 7000 officers on the day and evoked the Public Order Ordinance to close down the main parts of Victoria Park. Yet hundreds of citizens still went to the Causeway Bay district, where Victoria Park is located, in the evening. Some acted as passers-by but had the

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Fig. 8.1  A citizen put together several items on the ground inside Victoria Park on June 4, 2020. The candlelight was the only item derived from the symbolic repertoire of Tiananmen commemoration. All others were associated with the Anti-ELAB Movement, with the two hand gloves signifying the slogan “Five Demands, Not One Less.” (image by the author)

flashlight of their mobile phones turned on. The more risk-taking citizens congregated on the street. Protest slogans of the Anti-ELAB Movement could occasionally be heard. The police demanded the congregating citizens to leave. At one point, the police raised a purple flag warning the congregating citizens that they might be violating the NSL, apparently due to the protest slogans being shouted. Similar to the year 2020, there were citizen self-initiated actions in other districts, and the Catholic Church held commemoration masses in

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seven parishes. At the end of the night, the police arrested at least six persons for offenses ranging from disorderly conduct to criminal damage, whereas at least 12 people were fined for violating the COVID-related public gathering prohibition (SCMP Reporters, 2021). The NSL was not invoked for prosecution related to the June 4 commemoration in 2020 and 2021. In September 2021, however, the NSD arrested three leaders of the Alliance for incitement to subversion. In late September, the Alliance disbanded after a vote in a special meeting (Grundy, 2021). The move was understood as a means to protect other members of the Alliance, with the assumption that the police might make further arrests if the Alliance remained in operation. The government still had not claimed that commemorating June 4 by itself is subversive, but by mid-2022, public perceptions of the legal risks associated with the June 4 commemoration had seemingly changed. Most notably, the Catholic Church canceled the commemoration masses in 2022, claiming that “frontline colleagues […] are concerned that such activity, if held this year, might violate the National Security Law now in force” (J Cheung, 2022). In the absence of the Alliance, no individuals or groups applied to hold the June 4 vigil. Nonetheless, sensing that citizens might still try to congregate, the police issued warnings to the public that, even if a citizen goes to the Causeway Bay district alone, s/he might still be regarded as participating in an assembly if there are other individuals arriving there with the same purpose (RTHK, 2022). On June 4, the police again enclosed Victoria Park. Nonetheless, in the period leading to and on the day of June 4, there were still citizens attempting to promote commemoration in various ways. A group of students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for example, coordinated a “campaign” to hide miniatures of the Statue of Goddess of Democracy around campus and encouraged fellow students to find the miniatures. The campaign ended prematurely due to pressure on the students. According to Fanny (pseudonym), one of the coordinators of the activity, the students started feeling the pressure partly because of the general social atmosphere, partly from family members after the activity was publicized, and partly from the university, who sent workers from the Estate Management Office to find out and throw away the mini-statues. With the interference by university workers, it became practically impossible to continue the activity.6

6

 Interview conducted in July 2022.

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In the evening of June 4, some citizens still visited Causeway Bay and tried to engage in individualized commemoration. There were no established rituals or practices to follow, and individuals improvised their own symbolic acts of commemoration, including an activist bringing six white flowers and four red flowers to the district, a youngster reading out loud the works of a local poet who had written Tiananmen-related poems, a person wearing a face mask with “don’t forget June 4” written on it, a citizen driving a Porsche with car plate number “US 8964” (thus referring to June 4, 1989) to Causeway Bay, and more typically, people bringing with them electronic candles or turning on the mobile phone flashlights (Dimsumdaily Hong Kong, 2022; Hong Kong Free Press, 2022). What the citizens did, in other words, was to engage in non-confrontational and sometimes creative acts of defiance. Police officers typically stopped and searched the citizens, warned them, and asked them to leave. Six people were arrested for offenses such as possessing an offensive weapon, obstructing officers, and in one case, inciting others to join an unauthorized assembly (Gan, 2022). On the whole, from 2020 to 2022, the Hong Kong society had experienced the shrinking of opportunities to publicly commemorate June 4. However, the Hong Kong government had yet to declare the June 4 commemoration to be illegal/officially banned. The pandemic remained the justification used by the police to ban public commemoration of Tiananmen, and the main legal risk that the defiant citizens had to face was that of being charged with participating in an illegal assembly (instead of being charged with subversion). The question of the legality of the June 4 commemoration under “normal circumstances” had yet to be answered.

Evaluating the Role of the Pandemic In mid-May 2020, the Hong Kong government announced that the emergency restrictions it put in place to handle the COVID-19 outbreak would be extended until June 5. The implication of the new end date was clear for observers: the extension allowed the emergency restrictions to cover June 4. A Washington Post article opined that the move was “just the latest example of how the Chinese Communist Party is using COVID-19 as a pretext to throttle Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement” (Thiessen, 2020). The article criticized China for “attempting to take advantage of the lockdown to ram through a new national security law […] which would effectively end the ‘one country, two systems’ principle.”

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Pro-democracy Hong Kong citizens probably shared the view. In fact, when the pandemic started in Hong Kong in late January 2020, the AntiELAB movement was still ongoing. Public trust in the Hong Kong government was low. Interestingly, the 2019 protests had helped consolidating and activating societal mobilizing networks, which played important roles in citizens’ self-coordination to fight the pandemic. As various scholars have explicated, early response to the pandemic in Hong Kong was civilsociety-led (Wan et  al., 2020; Yuen et  al., 2021), for example, citizens reduced outdoor activities even before the government suggested people to stay home; activists organized to ensure the supply of face masks; a medical workers’ union formed during the Anti-ELAB Movement staged a strike to pressure the government to close the mainland border; pro-­ democracy District Councilors organized community forums about the pandemic, which attracted the attendance of Anti-ELAB protesters (Fig. 8.2). Pandemic control was therefore highly politicized from the beginning. While the number of infections and deaths remained low for a long period of time, opinion polls showed that people attributed the success of

Fig. 8.2  A community forum addressing the pandemic on March 1, 2020, in the Yau Ma Tei District. At the back, participants carried flags associated with the Anti-­ ELAB movement (e.g., the American flags signified the movement’s attempt to appeal to the U.S. for support). (image by the author)

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pandemic control to the citizen self-initiated efforts instead of government policies (Lee, 2022). In fact, Hong Kong people had complicated attitudes toward the social distancing measures and group gathering restrictions imposed by the government. On the one hand, Ho et  al. (2020) noted that levels of compliance with COVID-19 lockdown measures were high in Hong Kong. This can be understood in terms of Hong Kong people’s experience with the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2003, which led them to recognize the need of having adequate preventive measures. But on the other hand, a significant portion of the public were highly suspicious toward the possible political motivations behind the pandemic control policies. For instance, the government’s refusal to close the mainland border in the early stage of the pandemic contrasted sharply with its readiness to suspend flights from the UK when the COVID outbreak in the UK became serious. The banning of the June 4 commemoration rallies and July 1 protest marches contrasted with permission for ceremonies and cocktail parties celebrating National Day to be held. Such inconsistencies contributed to the public’s tendency to see government restriction measures as unnecessarily tight. The PORI, starting in early 2021, constructed a group gathering prohibition index by combining survey data with the daily number of confirmed cases.7 According to the study, in January 2021, around 50% of the public regarded the group gathering ban as too tight. The figure rose to around 80% when the pandemic stabilized. Throughout May and early June 2021, around 90% of the public saw the group gathering ban as too tight. Lee (2022) further analyzed the data and showed that, throughout year 2021, public evaluation of the government and its leaders was more negative when the number of confirmed cases went down, that is, when the pandemic situation improved. A plausible explanation of this counter-intuitive finding is that improvement in the pandemic situation led even more people to see the group gathering ban as too tight, thus generating even more public discontent. Such results suggest that, although the pandemic could theoretically obscure the legitimacy of public gathering control to a certain extent, the Hong Kong public did not really see the government’s control measures as legitimate. When the pandemic and the existing control measures were used as the rationale for banning public gatherings, would-be participants 7

 https://www.pori.hk/penri/ggpi-appendix 2.html?lang=en.

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of such activities were unlikely to see the ban as reasonable. This added fuel to the defiance against the government on the matter of Tiananmen commemoration. Nonetheless, if the pandemic did not legitimize the ban on Tiananmen commemoration, it did allow the government to sidestep the question of the legality of Tiananmen commemoration under the NSL and sustain the condition of ambiguity surrounding the matter. From the state’s perspective, there are several possible, interrelated advantages of sustaining the condition of ambiguity. The condition of ambiguity allowed the state to implement political control more gradually, thus reducing the risks of forceful backlash from the society and damage to its international reputation. The state could separate the question of the legality of the Alliance and the legality of Tiananmen commemoration, outlawing the former based on its publicized platforms while postponing the decision on the latter. This facilitated the extension of societal self-censorship. With the Alliance gone and the Anti-ELAB Movement suppressed, the state could then decide if they would allow the continuation of domesticated forms of Tiananmen commemoration in order to maintain a certain façade of civil liberty.

Concluding Remarks This chapter has recounted the development and transformation of collective remembering of Tiananmen in Hong Kong since the anti-government protests in 2019 and the establishment of the NSL in 2020. The NSL, mediated by a politics of denouncement, produced an atmosphere within which many anti-government speeches and actions became “risky.” A process of memory erasure began, as the achievements of previous memory institutionalization were dismantled. Complete elimination of memories of Tiananmen throughout the society is not easy, however, since references to and records of the happenings in Beijing and Hong Kong in 1989 existed in many different corners of the society. It might still be difficult to foresee Hong Kong to become a city of total amnesia. But the conditions and infrastructures for the perpetuation of Tiananmen memories had been weakened substantially, jeopardizing the processes of memory mobilization and intergenerational memory transmission in the long haul. In the epilogue of their book on Tiananmen commemoration in Hong Kong between 1989 and 2019, Lee and Chan (2021) noted that commemoration of Tiananmen by Hongkongers is likely to become

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virtualized, decentralized, individualized, and internationalized. Into 2022, we have indeed seen the continuation of these trends. While public commemoration has been ruled out, many citizens continued to post messages and engage in symbolic acts in the digital arena. There is no standard template for everyone to follow. Hence commemoration had, to a certain extent, become more individualized yet networked. Meanwhile, political change in Hong Kong led to a wave of outmigration. Communities of Hong Kong migrants are being formed around the world. In 2022, the June 4 commemoration rallies were held in cities such as London, Manchester, Birmingham, Vancouver, Toronto, Paris, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, and Auckland. According to the author’s onsite observation of the Manchester rally and his colleagues’ observations of rallies in Vancouver and London, the size and degree of formality of the rallies varied, but they shared the same characteristic of having a strong presence of elements related to the 2019 Anti-ELAB Movement. These overseas rallies were apparently as much about the loss of freedom in Hong Kong as about the events in 1989. How the collective remembering of Tiananmen evolved through the actions of diasporic communities constitutes an important object for continual observation. Nonetheless, given the edited volume’s focus on the implications of the pandemic on collective remembering, this chapter focuses mainly on what happened inside Hong Kong. The pandemic was treated as a co-incident that arose during the latter part of the Anti-ELAB Movement. In fact, the protesters also appropriated the pandemic to highlight the incompetence of the government. Actions criticizing the government for the lack of effective pandemic control policies were mixed with symbols and slogans from the Anti-ELAB protests. On the other side, the pandemic provided the government with a pretext to ban public gatherings, including protests and commemoration rallies. The annual June 4 commemoration thus ceased. In addition to the idea that the pandemic had been used as an “excuse” by authoritarian states for suppressing human rights (Flesher Fominaya, 2022), this chapter argued that, in the case of Hong Kong, COVID-19 had helped sustain the condition of ambiguity central to the politics of self-censorship under the NSL.  Up to March 2022, 183 people were arrested under the NSL (Lai & Kellogg, 2022), but a much larger number of people in a wide range of sectors were also affected by the NSL indirectly through the threats of “reporting” and denouncement. Instead of employing explicit coercive measures all the time, for the state, the

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preferred scenario would be one in which self-censorship prevails. Ambiguity is central to self-censorship because it is through the absence of clear boundaries that people are compelled to stay away from the “red lines.” With the pandemic, the state evaded the question of whether sheer commemoration of the dead in 1989 would constitute an act of subversion. The pandemic will end. But by that time, a significant portion of the civil society in Hong Kong would have been dismantled. Citizens might already have adapted to the “new normal” in which actions and expressions have to be carefully crafted to avoid enraging the state. The state could benefit from such a situation no matter whether it decides to call Tiananmen commemoration illegal. The weakened civil society means that opposition to the declaration of the illegality of Tiananmen commemoration might not be strong, and it also means that large-scale public commemoration of June 4 is unlikely to arise even if the state remains silent on the legality of Tiananmen commemoration. In more general theoretical terms, this chapter illustrated some of the nuances that might be involved in how the pandemic aided the exercise of political control. Yet it should be reiterated that the suppression of collective remembering can hardly be complete. Even inside mainland China, it has taken many years to cultivate a generation of young people who have no idea of the events of 1989. Hong Kong is an open society with a long tradition of Tiananmen commemoration. To fully eliminate all traces of memories in the city remains a very difficult task. It is still up to the people to perpetuate their memories, though possibly increasingly in privatized, individualized, and virtualized ways.

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hongkongfp.com/2021/11/28/explainer-­o ver-­5 0-­g roups-­g one-­i n-­1 1-­ months-­how-­hong-­kongs-­pro-­democracy-­forces-­crumbled/ Kwan, R. (2021b). “It’s about self-censorship”: Hong Kong counsellors struggle to navigate security law concerns. Hong Kong Free Press, August 22. https:// hongkongfp.com/2021/08/22/hong-­k ong-­c ounsellors-­s tr uggle-­ to-­navigate-­security-­law-­concerns/ Lai, Eric Y.H., and Thomas Kellogg. (2022). Arrest data show National Security Law has dealt a hard blow to free expression in Hong Kong. China File, April 5, 2022. https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-­opinion/features/arrest-­data-­ show-­national-­security-­law-­has-­dealt-­hard-­blow-­free Lee, F. L. F. (2021). Countering the counterpublics: Progovernment online media and public opinion in Hong Kong. International Journal of Communication, 15, 3397–3417. Lee, F. L. F. (2022). Pandemic control and public evaluation of government performance in Hong Kong. Chinese Journal of Communication, 15(2), 284–302. Lee, F.  L. F., & Chan, J.  M. (2021). Memories of Tiananmen. University of Amsterdam Press. Lee, F. L. F., Tang, G. K. Y., Yuen, S., & Cheng, E. W. (2020). Five demands and (not quite) beyond: Claim making and ideology in Hong Kong’s Anti-­ Extradition Bill Movement. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 53, 22–40. Leung, H. (2022). University of Hong Kong covers up 33-year-old Tiananmen tribute painted on bridge, weeks after removing statue. Hong Kong Free Press, January 29. https://hongkongfp.com/2022/01/29/university-­of-­hong-­ kong-­c overs-­u p-­3 3-­y ear-­o ld-­t iananmen-­s logan-­p ainted-­o n-­b ridge-­w eeks-­ after-­removing-­statue/ Lim, L. (2015). The people’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen revisited. Oxford University Press. Ming Pao. (2022). Librarian saddened about “burning books” but was worried witnessing peers having license revoked. Ming Pao, June 6. [in Chinese] Pleyers, G. (2020). The pandemic is a battlefield: Social movements in the COVID-19 lockdown. Journal of Civil Society, 16(4), 295–312. Pressman, J., & Choi-Fitzpatrick, A. (2021). COVID-19 and protest repertoires in the United States: An initial description of limited change. Social Movement Studies, 20(6), 766–773. Radio Television Hong Kong. (2022). Don’t test us on June 4, police warn. Radio Television Hong Kong, June 2. https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/ k2/1651369-­20220602.htm SCMP Reporters. (2021). Tiananmen vigil: At least six arrested as Hongkongers fan out across city to mark June 4. South China Morning Post, June 4. https:// www.scmp.com/news/hong-­k ong/politics/ar ticle/3136117/hong-­ kongs-­tiananmen-­vigil-­candles-­crowds-­nowhere-­sight

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CHAPTER 9

“Memory Does Not Quarantine”: COVID-­19, Remembering the Coup, and the Struggle for Democracy in Bolsonaro’s Brazil Macarena Moraga

Introduction On February 11, 2020, a group of human rights activists and survivors of the Brazilian dictatorship (1964–1985) gathered at the Brazilian Press Association’s headquarters (ABI) in downtown Rio de Janeiro. The collective met to coordinate a commemorative act entitled “Caminhada do Silêncio” (Walk of Silence) to honor the regime’s victims. Building off similar commemorative activities that originated in São Paulo in 2019 under the social movement “Vozes do Silêncio” (Voices of Silence), representatives from Rio advocacy groups such as the Rio de Janeiro Collective for Memory, Truth, Justice and Reparations, favela organizations, and

M. Moraga (*) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_9

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leftist political parties gathered to discuss how to honor the victims of state repression on March 31 and April 1 of that year. These dates were laden with significance, given that they marked the 56th anniversary of the coup that dismantled the constitutional government of João Goulart and inaugurated 21 years of authoritarian rule (Bethell, 2008, p.  159). Formed by Brazil’s military, political, and economic elites and backed by the US, the new regime systematically employed repressive measures such as purges, imprisonment, torture, and the forced disappearance of those deemed “enemies of the state” (Skidmore, 1988). According to the final report of the National Truth Commission (CNV), which was launched in 2012, 191 individuals were murdered by the armed forces, and another 243 were disappeared. Further, 1803 people were tortured, for some of them several times (CNV, 2014). For its part, the Rio de Janeiro State Truth Commission (CEV-­ Rio) established that 41 individuals were murdered in the state by the regime, along with 3 others whose remains were still missing. As the activists highlighted during the planning meeting, Rio has lived on a continuum of violence. Even under democracy, justice for the regime’s violations has not been pursued, the use of torture in the penal system has increased, and police brutality, state abandonment, and declarations of “states of emergency” in Rio’s most impoverished neighborhoods have been deployed as tactics of social control (Penglase, 2009; Sikkink & Walling, 2007; Teles & Quinalha, 2015; Teles & Safatle, 2010). In 2020, acknowledging Brazil’s political, social, and then public health challenges in the wake of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the activists urgently called attention to the connections between past and present state violence. This chapter analyzes one such effort: that is, as most of Brazil, and the world, were going into lockdown, how a collective of Rio-­ based activists turned a commemorative event related to the dictatorship’s repression into a pro-democracy online engagement. Here, I attend to the concept of crisis, as well as assessments that question its explanatory power, to elucidate the structural conditions that produce social disjunctions and historical disruption (Roitman, 2013). Specifically, I explore the concept of “crisis as critique” that was forged by Koselleck (1998): that is, a reformulation of crisis as a decisive moment that elicits historical awareness of a collective’s political conditions, a translation and mapping of experiences of disruption, or an index of the occluded systemic inequalities and power relationships that provoke both a collapse of political projects and responses to it (Boletsi et  al., 2020;

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Cordero, 2017). I contend that despite the shortcomings presented by contemporary (mis)uses of crises by elites who seek to demobilize the public and impose their agendas, the notion of crisis as critique can help us to scrutinize authoritative, progressive, and homogeneous narratives about the past and elucidate the structural and historical conditions that engender them. Uncritical and revisionist accounts of Brazil’s contemporary history have attempted to negate the fact that Brazil experienced a repressive dictatorship and instead have characterized the regime as “soft” (Betim, 2021). The implication has been to render judicial transitional justice measures a poor fit for the Brazilian case, especially as the transition occurred through an alleged pact between the military regime and the (admittedly rather weakened) opposition via the 1979 amnesty law. For its part, early transitional justice scholarship often saw judicial measures as undesirable during Brazil’s democratic transition, especially as the process of democratization was led by the still-powerful military (Abrão & Torelly, 2011; Sikkink & Walling, 2007). On the opposite, these activists, who sought to commemorate the regime’s victims, armed themselves with a sense of urgency and mobilized notions of crisis as a continuous experience of political violence to protect democracy from the far-right government led by Jair Bolsonaro, who in March 2020 was diminishing the pandemic by labeling COVID-19 a mere “gripezinha” (little flu) (Folha de São Paulo, 2021). The commemorative event Caminhada do Silêncio was situated vis-à-vis the longer temporality of crises that have afflicted Brazil, both before and since the onset of the pandemic. Caminhada was one of the commemorative events that members of civil society employed to “not forget” the responsibility of the state for the gross human rights violations it committed during the military regime, along with those it has continued to commit. For its part, the state had traditionally not sponsored official commemorative acts so as to avoid honoring the regime and opening divisive social wounds that political leaders wanted to believe had been healed. However, the military’s branches had traditionally, and officially, commemorated the coup in events often held at the Military Club in Rio,1 a de facto civil society club for members of the armed forces. Soon after Bolsonaro took office in 1  In 2011, Rousseff attempted to curtail the commemorations held by the three branches of the armed forces by directing their commanders to cease these activities. See: (https:// politica.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,planalto-confirma-ordem-de-bolsonaro-paracomemorar-aniversario-do-­golpe-de-1964,70002767921).

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2019, he issued a decree to officially commemorate the coup’s authors (and not the regime’s victims) and declare March 31 as the day of the armed forces. Bolsonaro and allied members of the military elite remember March 31 as the day on which a “military revolution” protected democracy from a would-be communist dictatorship (Skidmore, 1988). For this reason, since 2019 activists have operated under a state of alarm as they respond to Bolsonaro’s political memory antics and seek to contest the conventional, authoritative version of Brazilian history, which overlooks the role of popular resistance during and after the 1964 coup (Almeida & Weiss, 2000, pp. 328–330). A year later, despite being taken by surprise by the scale of the COVID-19 health emergency, activists were anticipating a potential public health tragedy due to Bolsonaro’s anti-­ democratic practices and nostalgia for the dictatorship. In this chapter, I shed light on how the ensuing COVID-19 health crisis inflected this civil society-led commemorative event, pushing organizers to employ virtual and material forms of expression to protest past, present, and even future state violence. I contend that, in the context of COVID-19, the 56th anniversary of the coup became a grassroots commemorative event oriented toward resisting the pandemic and confronting the government’s negligent inaction. Even though the pandemic forced activists to abandon their plans of solemnly marching through downtown Rio, they still firmly asserted to the public that memory does not quarantine. These activists thus reformulated their commemorative act as a “Vigil for Democracy,” and in so doing, they connected different temporalities of repression and drew attention to how Bolsonaro’s politics of institutional dismantling increased Brazilians’ vulnerability during the ensuing public health crisis. Immediately before the onset of the pandemic, I had just returned to Rio after having previously lived in Brazil for five months. I was researching the efforts of political activists and civil servants to push for transitional justice initiatives. Upon my arrival, I began to observe and participate in the preparations for the Caminhada commemorative act, before being forced to suddenly return to the US due to the global health crisis. Subsequently, I carried out interviews with event organizers from Rio and São Paulo via Zoom. Although many of the organizers with whom I interacted are highly recognized public activists in Brazil, I use pseudonyms throughout the text to maintain their anonymity. Acknowledging the partiality and fragmentary nature of any ethnographic fieldwork (Clifford, 1986; Günel et al., 2020), I provide here an

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ethnographic account of the transformation of this event, as well as an interpretation of an important image shared through social media: that is, the official event banner. Overall, I argue that rather than framing their efforts solely as reactions to Bolsonaro’s offenses, these activists conjured the tragic memory of past dictatorial repression and anticipated future pandemic-related loss of life to protest the current government’s ongoing and recurring abuses.

A Surprising Foretold Crisis When the pandemic reached Brazil in March 2020, reporters were discussing the possible consequences of the looming health crisis and anticipating how Bolsonaro would respond. While Asian and European nations were enacting strict lockdowns, Bolsonaro was calling COVID-19 a “little flu” and holding rallies that flouted social-distancing measures (Reeves, 2020). Pro-human rights scholars and activists began to voice on social media and in the press a feeling of impending danger but also pride regarding the country’s health and scientific institutions, which had responded effectively to various epidemics, including HIV in the 1990s. The sense of impending danger stemmed from the institutional dismantling that had been carried out since Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment. After several politicians from across the political spectrum were implicated in the Car Wash corruption scandal2 (Meyer, 2016), Rousseff mandated an official investigation to hold them accountable. The latter moved quickly to shield themselves from investigations and voted to raise corruption charges against Rousseff to incapacitate her as president. Although at the time Brazil was in recession due to factors including decreasing exports to China (Meyer, 2016), the supposed stabilizing policies adopted soon after 2  The Car Wash Operation was a judicial investigation into a complex, large-scale corruption scheme that involved illegal payments to business executives and politicians, amounting to close to five billion dollars. Executives from Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, along with major infrastructure companies, and international politicians were involved in the overpayment of lucrative contracts, money laundering, and bribing politicians. Recently, however, the operation has been exposed to be corrupt itself, especially in relation to its role in illegitimately putting presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva behind bars during the 2018 election. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/01/brazil-operation-­ car-wash-is-this-the-biggest-corruption-scandal-in-history, and https://www.nytimes. com/2021/02/26/opinion/international-world/car-wash-operation-brazil-bolsonaro.html.

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her impeachment further diminished the state’s capacity to respond to emergencies. In 2017, for example, the then-president Michel Temer signed a spending roof law that put a cap on social spending, including healthcare and education, for 20 years (Marcello & Soto, 2016). Tellingly, during the 2016 impeachment process, Bolsonaro, then a member of congress representing Rio de Janeiro, cast his vote to impeach Rousseff while simultaneously celebrating the memory of the infamous Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who was allegedly responsible for the death and disappearance of more than 60 dissidents during the dictatorship (Barrucho, 2016). Further, he is the only member of the military who was found guilty of kidnapping and torture—for a case regarding two political dissidents and their children—by a civil court. Like Paula—one of my research participants who was involved with the organizing meetings of Caminhada—Rousseff was herself a survivor of the dictatorship. Indeed, both Paula and Rousseff were detained by the state’s intelligence operation, DOI-CODI, in São Paulo in 1970, severely tortured, and imprisoned at the Tiradentes prison until the mid-1970s. This was the time of the so-called regime decompression, in which the military began to consider a transition to democracy, as the draconian governing decree Institutional Act 5 (AI-5), which had been issued in 1968 and paved the way for increasing repression, had expired. The “crisis” that led to Brazil’s 21-year dictatorship has traditionally been analyzed in developmental and structural terms to elicit causal analyses regarding how socio-economic transformation led to political instability (Dulles, 1970; Ianni, 1970; Pereira, 1984; Skidmore, 1988). These analyses provide diagnostic historical assessments of the economic and political conditions that led to the breakdown of democracy in the 1960s. Although revealing, the meaning of crisis in the Brazilian dictatorial context has been denoted, problematically, as a set of accrued political conflicts and choices made by relevant actors within a historical trajectory that ultimately resulted in Brazil not fulfilling the utopia of a properly modernist project like more “developed” nations (Hochuli, 2021). However, it is important to note that for most of its republican history, Brazil had indeed not experienced full democracy, and structural and racial inequalities permeated Brazilians’ lives. This begs the question of how to discuss notions of historical crisis, especially during the ongoing global health emergency provoked by the emergence of the novel coronavirus. In what ways is the concept appropriate for shedding light on this acute public health emergency?

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Recently, scholars have interrogated to what extent the concept of crisis is useful for explaining historical turning points, or moments of profound disruption that destabilize balanced ecosystems and/or traditional socio-­ political conditions that become foundational to groups’ identities (Barrios, 2017; Tanabe & Keyes, 2002). In one camp are critical analyses that elucidate how the concept of crisis has been employed by economic and political elites to advance agendas of social control (Boletsi et  al., 2020; Barrios, 2017). These scholars have further explored how crisis can instead be a demobilizing, self-referential concept that conceals the very structural conditions that produce disruptions to an assumed “normal” reality (Roitman, 2013; Lomnitz-Adler, 2003). Here, it is also suggested that when crisis is referenced to explain a permanent mode of existence, it should lose its explanatory power, as the notion of permanent crisis introduces a conceptual contradiction. Furthermore, explaining a group’s recurring historical woes as the result of permanent crises can also elicit essentialist connotations about communities’ incapacity to overcome their chronic conflicts. In this sense, crisis not only names objective situations but also generates subjectivities (Beckett, 2008, p. 48). However, in the context of the pandemic, as the Brazilian public became aware of the perils posed by COVID-19, they themselves began to employ crisis rhetoric to shed light on the existential threat they were facing due to the Bolsonaro administration insistence on downplaying its gravity. In this context, crisis rhetoric functioned as a public critique of the neglectful quality of Brazil’s government. The notion of crisis as critique is not new and was first coined by Koselleck (1998) in his analysis of the development of historical consciousness and socio-political transformation in eighteenth-century Europe. Crisis serves, on the one hand, to denote an objective situation where the status quo is disrupted. On the other, crisis can also provide an opportunity for assessing the conditions of that disruption, since, in order to comprehend and signify a situation of disruption, it is necessary to define and develop an understanding of that disruption vis-à-vis a comparatively “normal” context. In this regard, a judgment or decision is issued concerning what was considered normal and no longer is. Thus, while crisis can evoke a moment of interruption in historical developments, it can also prompt a review of the normative assumptions embedded in what was considered customary, traditional, and typical. However, even when the notion of crisis as critique is invoked, this may reproduce pernicious ideas that critical scholars vow to avoid. For example, Roitman (2013) highlights how assessments of political-economic

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crises may generate a series of depoliticized and technocratic conclusions and reproduce unequal power relations between those who issue expert/ diagnostic claims and those who become disempowered as consumers of expert analysis. In this sense, expert critiques may truncate transformative actions that are elicited during a deep questioning of the foundations of the social fabric by those affected by critical phenomena. Thus, the notion of crisis would create complacency and engender non-action. If crisis were a transformative concept, it would generate more than critique and prompt the material reorganization of the conditions that produce inequities (Roitman, 2013, p. 6). In the pandemic context of Brazil, this elicits questions about how, on the one hand, forms of precarity—such as impunity for state violence, deeply rooted racism, and entrenched economic inequality—have been normalized, while on the other, activists mobilized the crisis-critique concept precisely to hold Bolsonaro’s administration accountable for his mishandling of the pandemic. Indeed, recently, Bolsonaro has felt compelled to react to the very real possibility of him being prosecuted for his catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic (Barabara, 2022). Though I acknowledge the shortcomings of the crisis-critique cognate, there is still value in the concept’s explanatory capacity. Indeed, despite having the potential to conceal structural and unequal foundations, crisis has a rather revelatory nature (Solway, 1994, p. 473). In this sense, crisis can provide a window for seeing how power relations operate behind moments of emergency (Cordero, 2017). In turn, I propose that the necessary task is not so much to question what crisis obliterates. Rather, it is to identify how conflicting moments of emergency and disruption find expression through public notions of crisis, thus making legible the fraught historical and structural conditions that produce precarity. In the pandemic context it is important to ask for whom it has been convenient to silence the very real experiences of negligence, inequity, and injustice that fall under the umbrella concept of crisis. In Brazil, activists have assessed the political conditions that have historically placed them in an acute state of vulnerability. Thus, rather than claiming that a permanent sense of crisis obscures and undermines political action, the pandemic experience in Brazil has revealed the interconnected historical moments that intensify precarity in the present. In Brazil, the pandemic made visible the chronically underfunded universal healthcare system. In this regard, the looming global health crisis revealed both the importance of universal health care and Brazil’s

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persistent lack of investment in public health institutions (Costa et  al., 2020). The Universal Health System (SUS) reflects a democratic healthcare system that currently serves 75 percent of the Brazilian population.3 Despite the consistent lack of funding, many Brazilians still prided themselves on their universal access to healthcare, and as the pandemic’s lethal effects manifested themselves, activists, scholars, and progressive politicians began to publicize the health emergency through social media in early March 2020, using hashtags such as #somostodossus and #governogenocida.4 This was a form of response to a critical time that—as mentioned in separate interviews in 2022 by Danielle and Júlia, lead organizers of the movement Vozes do Silêncio in São Paulo and Rio respectively—no one could have ever imagined what was to unfold, and yet somehow, they could unsurprisingly anticipate that the worst was coming. Activists had perpetually fostered a sense of mistrust in the capacity of the Brazilian state to keep the public interest in focus and manage adverse situations (Azevedo, 2016, pp. 226–227). “Look”—explained Danielle, a São Paulo-based public prosecutor and former member of the Special Commission for the Dead and Disappeared who was unceremoniously deposed by Bolsonaro in 2019—“we never imagined a situation like this. But we never had full trust in our governments. We were always skeptical of all of them.” Similarly, Júlia, a survivor of the dictatorship’s repression who worked with the now-shuttered psychological reparations program Clínicas do Testemunho (Testimony Clinics)5 in Rio, called attention to how “ever since Dilma’s impeachment, we militants understood the need to unite our efforts to respond to the political emergency.” Thus, rather than being demobilizing, notions of crisis and a sense of permanent urgency to develop human rights and accountability campaigns have set the tone for the Vozes do Silêncio movement since its inception in 2019 and have focused activists’ attention on how the current far-right government would strive to preserve itself to the detriment of the public. 3  See https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=3f52890d-402a-4cf7-b2eb7371e61bc733. 4  These translate as “We are all the Universal Healthcare System” and “genocidal government.” 5  The Testimony Clinics were a psychic reparations project organized by the Amnesty Commission that, between 2013 and 2016, sought to provide psychological support to victims of state violence during the dictatorship. The program was ended after Rousseff’s impeachment, during the government of Michel Temer. See: https://www.uol.com.br/ ecoa/reportagens-especiais/clinicas-do-testemunho-mostraram-como-ter-justica-pelaconstrucao-da-memoria/#page9.

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A clear example occurred on March 12, 2020, when Bolsonaro appeared in a nationally televised official announcement to urge the public to remain united during the pandemic and not to panic, while still reassuring his followers that they were constitutionally protected to assemble on the scheduled marches of March 15 to support his government and protest the isolation measures that individual state and local governments had issued at the time.6

The Silent Treatment: Organizing Caminhada do Silêncio in Rio de Janeiro In the late afternoon of February 11, 2020, I arrived at one of the conference rooms in the Brazilian Press Association’s headquarters in time to perceive a sense of urgency among the activists who were there to plan the Caminhada do Silêncio event. I had been invited to the meeting by Elisa, a research participant who between 2013 and 2015 worked at the Rio de Janeiro State Truth Commission and had become friends and collaborated with Júlia during the Testimony Clinics project. As I entered, I greeted some of the activists. Among those present were members of left-leaning political parties, representatives of student organizations, members of the press, union members, artists, and survivors of the dictatorship. I saw both Paula and Júlia; the two had attended classes at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in the late 1960s, precisely at the time when the hardline faction of the military had assumed power in Brazil and issued the aforementioned Institutional Act 5 (AI-5), which severely curtailed human and civil rights and set the stage for a period of intensified repression (Bethell & Castro, 2008). Like many university students at the time, Paula and Júlia became active political dissidents against the regime (Skidmore, 1988). In 1970, Paula was forced to live clandestinely and move between Rio and São Paulo before being captured by state agents and taken to the Tiradentes prison in São Paulo, where she was held until 1974. For her part, Júlia had been forced to live in exile in Chile until Augusto Pinochet staged a US-backed coup on September 11, 1973, against the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. Afterward, she was compelled to return to Brazil. Although when I saw Paula and Júlia at the Caminhada organizing meeting more than 50 years had passed since AI-5 was adopted, its revival 6

 Watch the official announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS2qiXHtMnI.

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had recently been invoked by Eduardo Bolsonaro, a São Paulo representative and the second of the president’s four sons. In a 2019 interview, he defended the use of drastic measures, such as “a new AI-5,” to prevent protests like those then unfolding in Chile (G1, 2019). For his part, only three months after assuming the presidency, his father mandated that the Ministry of Defense “appropriately” commemorate (that is, glorify) the dictatorship on March 31 (Tharoor, 2019). To this provocation, a federal judge responded by barring Bolsonaro from commemorating the regime and inciting social divisions (BBC, 2019). However, later an appellate court federal judge affirmed the right of Bolsonaro’s government to commemorate the dictatorship.7 Various social movements responded by protesting Bolsonaro’s authoritarian nostalgia and sympathies. As some of the Caminhada’s attendees proposed ideas about how to commemorate the dead and disappeared in Rio in 2020, they mentioned how activist groups such as Tortura Nunca Mais (Torture Never Again) had been organizing marches outside the Rio de Janeiro Military Club, a space that had traditionally served as an influential political and ideological forum for the military. This controversy underscores how important the battles for memory are for contemporary politics, as actors employ the past as a means to express and actualize their political ideology and agendas (Bauer, 2014; Weld, 2014). In this way, survivors of dictatorial regimes and activists are not engaging in a struggle for memory and against forgetting. Instead, it is a struggle against intentional, revisionist narratives that seek to silence the harrowing experiences of repression during these regimes (Jellin, 2002). As the meeting started, and close to 30 representatives from civil society organizations marked their presence, Júlia, who was part of the group organizing Caminhada do Silêncio in Rio, opened the proceedings with a propositional yet urgent tone, affirming the importance of creating a unified front. “We need to articulate a movement to defend democracy and human rights, and protest during the anniversary of the civil-military coup of 64.” Drawing from São Paulo’s Caminhada do Silêncio the year prior— when more than 10,000 participants attended the commemorative act that led to the formation of the Vozes do Silêncio movement—Júlia encouraged activists to make their presence heard through the silence of those killed by the state. Thus, one of the goals of the commemoration 7  See: https://www.dw.com/pt-br/justiça-derruba-decisão-que-proibiu-governo-decelebrar-golpe-de-64/a-48130756.

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was to elevate the notion of silence as a moment to honor the victims and counter, through this speech act, the politics of silencing that Brazil has adopted regarding the dictatorship since the transition to democracy (Schneider, 2011). Traditionally, rather than pursing judicial accountability for ongoing, imprescriptible human rights crimes, the Brazilian state had opted to handle the regime’s abuses as a private matter between victims and the state via an extensive reparation program that nonetheless served as a basis for later organized grassroots demands of state action in terms of transitional justice (Abrão & Torelly, 2011). Although the notion of silence was important for the São Paulo organizers and Júlia, this proposed concept was met with a degree of skepticism by Rio activists. During the meeting, for example, some representatives from favela organizations who had been victimized by contemporary police violence raised questions about their role within the movement and expressed doubts about the framework of silence. As expressed by one of the representatives of a favela mothers’ group that seeks accountability for state violence against their children: “The groups from the periphery, traditionally, do not feel enticed to come. Many fear the danger of infiltration. Very few leading organizations will show up. We are already a population that is silenced enough. So, I ask, what is the meaning of this theme for us?” Sitting across from the audience, Júlia and the four lead organizers who introduced their proposals that day attended to these activists’ valid concerns. They invited reflection about the connections between their present experiences of state terror and the systemic use of torture and detention during the dictatorship. “Rio de Janeiro is one of the most violent states in the country, and let’s not forget, it was one of the most violent during the dictatorship. So, how is it possible for us not to protest? We have continued to live in a condition of violence. We cannot forget. We can coordinate with the acts to be held in São Paulo,” argued Júlia. She was encouraging activists to join a national action around the concept of silence. In this way, Júlia and the other lead organizers underscored the role of silence as a powerful form of speech that could provide space for other forms of artistic expression. “Silence in the context of Caminhada,” Júlia shared, “can cause a visual-emotional impact through arts, music, and banners.” Furthermore, Júlia drew from her time at the Rio chapter of Testimony Clinics between 2013 and 2015, when she worked to support victims of the dictatorship as they prepared their testimonies for national and state truth commissions, to invoke the value of silence in testimonies.

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As Júlia engaged in debate over silence, her longtime friend Paula, who was sitting next to me, raised her hand and began to speak. In a conciliatory tone, she mentioned how both silence and speaking are two sides of the same coin: “To speak in today’s time is a necessity. Who are the most silenced? The dead and the disappeared! They are the most silenced, they cannot speak for themselves anymore, but we can, and we have the right to speak on their behalf.” I see Paula’s notion of silence as necessitating that we listen to the unvoiced testimonies of absence and death, which, despite their impotent nature, still have the force to open the cracks that exist in all-encompassing narratives of Brazil’s violent past. These authoritative truths seek to conveniently diminish trajectories of repression and current forms of crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which by the end of 2020 had claimed close to 300,000 lives in the country, all the while the Brazilian government maintained, at best, a politics of inaction. For activists like Paula, silence marked the presence of those who no longer could speak for themselves, while for the mothers of children murdered by police operations in favelas, silence implied a decisive question about how to integrate the movement and confront the state. For Caminhada’s organizers, then, silence reframed the dialogue between the state and advocacy groups. While silence brought to the fore the notion of solemnity, that is, a minute of silence to remember those who fell victim to state power, it also called for sitting close to those who can no longer speak, to listen to their absence, and voice their grievances before the state. Conjuring the presence of the dead in political action indeed remained a central theme during the 2022 elections, as the close to 700,000 lives lost due to COVID mismanagement were invoked on social media as a reason to vote against Bolsonaro in the October 30 elections. As the meeting’s open debates came to a close after about two hours of conversation, the agenda moved to planning the activities to be held during Caminhada. For Rio’s activists, it was crucial to gather a critical mass, such as the one achieved in São Paulo the year prior. However, the fact that March 31 and April 1 fell on weekdays in 2020 created logistical issues for organizers who feared that there would be low turnout. Some activists argued that it was better to commemorate during the weekend so as to invite families to artistic activities to be held at Plaza Mauá, near the futuristic Museum of Tomorrow, in the recently renovated coastal downtown area. Others mentioned their desire to avoid the March 31 date so as to stand against the triumphalist celebration that the military often holds within their quarters to remember the coup. While Júlia argued that

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the Rio event should be held in coordination with the one in São Paulo, which would take place on March 31, activists ultimately decided to engage the public on two separate dates. First, on Sunday, March 29, they would walk through downtown Rio holding candles and white flowers through emblematic spaces, such as the Candelaria Church,8 to signify the continuous nature of state violence. Then, on April 1, a subcommittee composed of public education teachers and members of leftist parties and unions would host open-air classes to engage the public with talks concerning local instances of state violence from both during and after the dictatorship. The meeting then broke into three subcommittees to organize these events. I joined the “cultural activities” group and met with organizers on several occasions at the iconic Amarelinho restaurant in downtown Rio, near the Brazilian Press Association’s headquarters. We proposed hosting cultural acts such as poetry readings and theater performances and discussed logistics, such as bringing megaphones and banners that would prompt public reflection. That is, if only.

From Silence to Blast: Pots and Pans and Images of Hope As, in early March, subcommittees went into the field to trace the Caminhada do Silêncio path and others were securing permits to hold a public event, we began to develop a collective sense of impending danger due to the global health crisis, which had already claimed its first victim in São Paulo. On the morning of March 13, I met with Júlia and other activists and scholars at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro to participate in a session of a semester-long seminar led by the Truth and Memory Commission of the university, of which she is a member. That day, we were bombarded by messages from the city government and the University, announcing that Rio would soon go into lockdown, and all in-person gatherings were thus prohibited. For Júlia and the organizers, the lockdown would entail re-conceptualizing the march. Caminhada was part of a series of pro-democracy actions and protests happening that month. On March 8, for example, there would be a women’s march, while on March 14, there would be a commemoration to remember Marielle Franco, a 8  The choice of this site is significant, given that in June 1993, members of the police massacred a group of homeless children who were sleeping near the church, after some of them had thrown stones at their patrol vehicles the previous day.

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black and lesbian city council member from Rio who was assassinated alongside her driver on March 14, 2018. On March 26, a collective of students and the National Student Union would honor the death of high school student Edson Luis, who was killed by military police in 1968, which triggered street protests against the dictatorship (Skidmore, 1988, p. 74). These planned events underscored the chronic sense of vulnerability experienced by excluded populations. Activists were anticipating that with the onset of the pandemic, Brazil’s ongoing social crisis would turn for the worse, especially since Bolsonaro was downplaying the pandemic’s severity. On March 13, as activist groups began to suspend in-person activities, Júlia informed the organizers that the event would be postponed and reconceptualized. From that moment, she and other lead organizers began to participate in calls with activists from São Paulo to plan a series of online engagements. Although there were initial fears that turning the commemorative act into a virtual protest could have a demobilizing effect among some activists, these were quickly erased as members of Caminhada argued via its WhatsApp group that the use of virtual spaces could allow them to reach a wider audience and finally coordinate a national event. In this sense, activists put an optimistic spin on this new, uncertain context. Honoring and remembering the dictatorship’s victims via virtual spaces could also become an arena for scrutinizing understandings of Brazil’s political and economic woes, as many of them began circulating information online concerning Bolsonaro’s response to the pandemic. This is how, by mid-March, Caminhada was reframed as “Vigil for Democracy.” As explained by Júlia in a subsequent interview, Caminhada pivoted toward making visible, in diverse virtual formats, the date that marked the start of a nefarious era: “We made different registers, … [collected] testimonials… [and] people recorded themselves and shared their grievances with the public via different social media. We hosted international scholars, such as James Green [a leading Brazil specialist and historian, based at Brown University], public prosecutors, and survivors of the dictatorship in virtual roundtables, and more.” While before the pandemic, the plan of walking in silence in downtown Rio emerged from a negotiation process between members of different activist groups, in the virtual space, testimonies of ongoing forms of state violence became the vehicle for honoring the dictatorship’s victims and demanding democracy. It is true that the relevance of virtual spaces in social movements should be critically assessed (Kaun, 2016, p.  4). Nonetheless, as mentioned by

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Bonilla and Rosa (2015), when virtual spaces take on the connotation of non-spaces, they offer the opportunity to dislocate grievances and spread them through broader networks. In this sense, instead of a circuit of manifestations in different localities, the coordination of a united national virtual engagement could be facilitated through online media, in a lockdown context where virtual engagements had become the norm rather than the exception. Nevertheless, such engagements were not solely “located” in virtual spaces. Indeed, Vozes do Silêncio called for people to bang pots and pans through their apartment windows and balconies and hang black drapes and posters to commemorate the victims of state violence. Historically, in the period leading up to the beginning of Cold War-era authoritarian rule in the Southern Cone, pots-and-pans protests were often associated with more conservative sectors (Skidmore, 1988, p. 15; Thomas, 2011, pp. 70, 78). Furthermore, during the recent political crisis that culminated with Rousseff’s removal from office, this form of protest was seen as emerging from a “middle-class condominium” logic, where affluent urban Brazilians invoked, in a rather disengaged and individualistic manner, from the comfort of their homes, politicized rage and an end to redistributive efforts that were seen as undermining their economic privileges (Dunker, 2015; Tesheiner et al., 2018). However, in the context of COVID-19, this was not the logic that made people protest from their apartment windows. Instead, an existential health threat had forced individuals to protect themselves while making their discontent heard despite the lockdown, especially as the federal government was unwilling to adopt (and, indeed, was obstructing) sensible public health measures. In this sense, both the memory of the dictatorship and current political discontent were bolstered by fears of the global health crisis. To make the government virtually and materially listen, protesters were asked to make noise at coordinated times and share videos and images on social media under hashtags such as “#ditaduranuncamais,” “#lutonajanela,” “#forabolsonaro,” and “#greveporeducaçãoesaúde.”9 Here as elsewhere (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), hashtags not only served as a medium to index different content related to a given cause. They also conveyed meaning, synthesizing, in a few words, wider debates about the social impasse. These hashtags, then, congealed a widespread sense of crisis and 9  They translate as: “dictatorship never again,” “mourning in the window,” “out with Bolsonaro,” and “strike for education and healthcare.”

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a need to engage politically to address it, precisely by revealing the linkages between past forms of state violence and the present failure of the government to effectively respond to the COVID-19 health emergency. For example, on March 31, 2020, Vozes do Silêncio shared on its website and Facebook page videos with the explicit message that “memory does not quarantine.”10 These virtual spaces thus served as avenues through which Brazilians voiced their subjectivities and interpretations of their political circumstances, while also asserting in autonomous ways what mattered to them during a moment of disjunction with regard to their government (Povinelli, 2011). In this sense, protesting for democracy in 2020, from home and virtually, entailed sharing in the experience of remembering past state violence from one’s intimate spaces while also sharing with the “outside” world their discontent about the current political situation. Indeed, the event would engage with provocative visual content that would add intensity to the concept of silence. In an equal manner, some of the images shared via social media were likewise polysemic in nature, not only actualizing the social relations that engendered them but provoking ever-growing interpretation. Thus, when I asked Danielle about the meaning of the main logo of the “Vigília pela Democracia” poster (Fig.  9.1), she focused on the representational elements of the poster, such as the flower, explaining that the colors and images therein were meant to convey a sense of solemnity. But by transposing the image to the present moment, a second reading provokes commentary beyond the meanings espoused by Danielle, by attending precisely to those aspects that escape immediate description (Kernaghan & Zamorano, 2022). The poster includes as backgrounds two crowds of people. On the right is a group of photographs of the dictatorship’s victims, which are usually employed during commemorative acts and protests to demand state accountability. To the left, a crowd stands next to the photographs, gathering to demand justice. But in the context of COVID-19, the crowd likewise stands for the impossibility of marching in person during the pandemic. While the drawing of a flower serves to honor those who perished at the hands of the state, the line that comprises the flower’s stem is also connected to the hand that holds it, as if representing both a tribute to the dead and disappeared, and the connections and continuities between past and present violence. The colors of the image are also communicative. To  https://vozesdosilenciocom.wordpress.com/vigilia2020/.

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Fig. 9.1  Poster from the “Vigilia Pela Democracia” online event. Created by Joanna Brasileiro. Shared via social media on March 31, 2020, under the hashtags #ditaduranuncamais, #lutonajanela, and #56anosdogolpemilitar. The last of these translates as, “56 years since the military coup.” Used with the author’s permission

the right, the sepia tone assimilates the blurred presence of the dead and disappeared, as if filtered by the murky process of justice in Brazil, while as the image transits to the left, the contemporary crowd stands clear in its insistence on accountability. Finally, over this unfiltered crowd, the sharp image of a woman wearing a surgical mask, decorated with the words “Dictatorship Never Again,” accentuates the current health crisis by connecting it to the commemorative event. Thus, beyond honoring the dead and the disappeared, the “Vigília pela Democracia” event is synthetized in this image, which expresses a composition of different temporalities, where the conjuring of the loss of life through dictatorial violence foresees the loss of life through active government negligence during the pandemic. Nevertheless, this montage of the various iterations of vulnerability that Brazilians continue to experience in the present also expresses the incessant hope for a future in which accountability will prevail over state violence and impunity.

Conclusion How did the context of crisis, COVID-19, and state repression inflect the commemorative act, Caminhada do Silêncio? Caminhada was originally planned to honor the victims of state repression, but also to contest state

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silences regarding the dictatorship, and voice grievances about the current government’s insistence on glorifying a terribly dark episode of Brazilian history. The event shed light on the chronic political crisis in Brazil, especially after the 2016 impeachment of Brazil’s first female president, who was also the first head of state who dared to advance significant transitional justice measures. Departing from notions of crisis as self-referential, rhetorical devices that occlude more than they elucidate, I adopt the notion of crisis as critique. Here, crisis can make visible the social conditions that engender states of conflict. In this sense, crisis as critique can open fractures in progressive, linear, and authoritative accounts of the past. The work of memory and aesthetic assessments of images shared during the Caminhada commemorative act can be revealing, for it is through the fragmentary nature of memory that all-encompassing accounts of the past can be questioned. But if the fragmentary nature of memory can be deployed to counter authoritative accounts of the past, elements such as testimonials and engaged listening and silence are equally relevant for provoking a dialogue between those who were silenced by state repression and those who remain present, demanding accountability for atrocious acts of injustice. In the context of Brazil’s current political crisis, activists saw the need to unify the movement to defend their democratic institutions, demand structural changes, and combat the generalized climate of impunity. What remains to be seen is how the COVID-19 crisis will be remembered and by whom. Who will attempt to erase the crude realities that led millions to perish around the world due to sheer negligence and misinformation? Who will be held accountable for purposeful inaction in terms of a lack of access to healthcare? Has COVID-19 provoked transformation, or, as Roitman would contend, has the notion of crisis instead prevented profound social reorganization? As humanity enters the third year of the pandemic and Brazilian activists continue to reckon with authoritarian legacies, analyses of the structural and historical dimensions of social and political crises and vulnerabilities, as well as the actors that participate in and respond to them, are of fundamental importance. The goal, here, has been to understand how collectives can and do cope with paradoxically anticipated and yet sudden transformations of their habitual existence. Indeed, one of the COVID-19 pandemic’s clearest lessons is that our responses to local phenomena inevitably have global ramifications.

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As a form of postscript, in late 2021, the Brazilian judiciary allowed for a criminal investigation of the mismanagement of COVID-19 to proceed. It may be unlikely that Bolsonaro or his administration will be held criminally accountable. Nevertheless, an understanding of how crises can also be underplayed by actors who seek to control through generating a sense of false normalcy will be an asset when activist and scholars aim to interpret this experience. This understanding of crisis as critique may also be useful when survivors of this crisis decide to mobilize around their right to access healthcare and demand accountability from their governments. In this regard, Caminhada has precisely sought to continue in its struggle to demand structural and legal changes to an entrenched interpretation of the 1979 Amnesty Law that shields perpetrators of human rights violations from prosecution. They have launched the campaign #ReinterpretaJá (Reinterpret Now!) to shed light on how crimes such as forced disappearance and torture are imprescriptible. By maintaining and transforming a commemorative act into a broader human rights movement, organizers of Vozes do Silêncio not only continue to engage with the past by honoring those who perished at the hands of the state. Further, these activists have asserted that, despite experiencing one of the worst global health crises in the last 200 years, the memory of political violence does not quarantine.

References Abrão, P., & Torelly, M. (2011). The reparations program as the Lynchpin of transitional justice in Brazil. In F. Reátegui (Ed.), Transitional justice handbook for Latin America. Brazilian Amnesty Commission, Ministry of Justice, International Center for Transitional Justice. Almeida, M. H. T., & Weis, L. (2000). Carro Zero e Pau de Arara: O Cotidiano da Oposição de Classe Média ao Regime Militar. In L. Moritz Schwarcz (Ed.), História da Vida Privada no Brasil: Contrastes da Intimidade Contemporânea (pp. 323–408). Companhia das Letras. Azevedo, D. (2016). ‘A Única Luta que se Perde é Aquela que se Abandona’ Etnografia entre Familiares de Mortos e Desaparecidos Políticos no Brasil: Campinas, SP. Barabara, V. (2022). Bolsonaro is Afraid of Going to Prison, and He’s Right to Be. nytimes.com. Retrieved August 29, 2023, from https://www.nytimes. com/2022/08/08/opinion/bolsonaro-brazil-prison-election.html Barrios, R. (2017). What does catastrophe reveal for whom? The anthropology of crises and disasters at the onset of the anthropocene. Annua Review of Anthropology., 46, 151–166.

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Barrucho, L. (2016). Brazilian vote-pledge stirs memories of military rule. BBC. com. Retrieved May 15, 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-­latin-­america-­36093338 Bauer, C. (2014). Brasil e Argentina: Ditaduras, Desaparecimentos e Políticas de Memoria. Medianiz. BBC. (2019). Brazil: Bolsonaro’s Coup Celebration Barred by Judge. Retrieved May 15, 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­latin-­america-­ 47757616 Beckett, G. (2008). The end of Haiti: History under conditions of impossibility. PhD dissertation. University of Chicago. Bethell, L. (2008). Politics in Brazil under the Liberal Republic, 1945–1964. In L.  Bethell (Ed.), The Cambridge history of Latin America: Brazil since 1930 Volume IX (pp. 87–160). Cambridge University Press. Bethell, L., & Castro, C. (2008). Politics in Brazil under military rule. In L. Bethell (Ed.), The Cambridge history of Latin America: Brazil since 1930 Volume IX (pp. 165–230). Cambridge University Press. Betim, F. (2021). Braga Netto Mente sobre Ditadura, Enquanto Diz que Forças Armadas Respeitarão a Constituição. El País. Brasil.elpais.com. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2021-­08-­18/ braga-­n etto-­m ente-­s obre-­d itadura-­e nquanto-­d iz-­q ue-­f orcas-­a rmadas-­ respeitarao-­a-­constituicao.html Boletsi, M., et al. (2020). Languages of resistance, transformation, and futurity in Mediterranean crisis-scapes: From crisis to critique. Palgrave Macmillan. https:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nla bk&AN=2593744 Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States: #Ferguson. American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12112 Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial truths. In J. Clifford & G. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 1–26). University of California Press. CNV. (2014). Comissão Nacional da Verdade Vol. 1, Relatório. Brasilia. http:// www.memoriasreveladas.gov.br/administrator/components/com_simplefilemanager/uploads/CNV/relatório%20cnv%20volume_1_digital.pdf Cordero, R. (2017). Crisis and critique: On the fragile foundations of social life. Routledge. Costa, A. M., et al. (2020). In the Covid-19 pandemic, Brazil sees the SUS. Saúde Em Debate, 44(125), 289–296. https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-­ 1104202012500i Dulles, J. (1970). Unrest in Brazil: Political-military crises 1955-1964. University of Texas Press. Dunker, C. I. (2015). Mal Estar, Sofrimento e Sintoma. Boitempo.

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CHAPTER 10

Human Rights Day: Grassroots Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic Restrictions in South Africa Joseph Mairomola Ngoaketsi

Introduction: The Sharpeville Commemorations in a Historical Context In the 1960s, Sharpeville was a relatively small, typically bleak, and unknown South African township established in the 1940s. Most of its residents were African migrants re-settled from the top location in Vereeniging, far away from the proximity of white residents in the current Sedibeng District Municipality—Gauteng Province. On 21 March 1960, a males-only protest march against a number of new laws which controlled the movement and employment of blacks and forced them to carry

J. M. Ngoaketsi (*) University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_10

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‘reference books’ of identity papers (Bolarinwa & Falode, 2021,p. 11) was led by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe, its founding president. The aim of the protest was to prove that if Africans could not work because they were all in detention, then the whole state would be at a standstill in terms of economic production. From the early morning, the protesters made their way to the local police station precinct to demand court arrest for not carrying the derogatory passbooks which Sobukwe described as ‘the distinctive badge of slavery and humiliation for Black South Africans’ (Evans, 2017, p. 74). The crowd was close to 5000 people, among them also women and children who joined out of curiosity. Without an order to fire, police discharged more than 1000 rounds of bullets at the crowd, killing 69 and leaving close to 180 wounded, many of them shot while fleeing (Dubow, 2014, p. 74). Humphrey Tyler, an eyewitness, writes: ‘When the shooting started, it did not stop until there was no living thing on the huge compound in front of the police station’ (Tyler et al., 1960, p. 5). This tragedy came to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. Scholars have established that, in many ways, Sharpeville was a key turning point in the fight against apartheid in contemporary South African history. What followed was a storm of global demonstrations, mainly by the Boycott Movement, which transformed itself immediately after the massacre into the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). The killing was further condemned by the United Nations (UN), and for the first time, the question of apartheid was raised at the UN Security Council (Bolarinwa & Falode, 2021, p. 11). In 1966, the Council proclaimed 21 March as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to be commemorated annually in honour of the victims (Banton, 1991, pp. 7–12). This chapter provides a comparative study of different commemorations of the Sharpeville Massacre, underscoring important parallels in three cases. The outbreak of COVID-19, which led to restrictions on the use of public spaces in order to manage infection rates during the pandemic, heavily impacted observances of the Sharpeville commemorations. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the 60th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre was cancelled. Instead, low-key observances were characterised by social distancing protocols, providing innovative ways for grassroots cultural activists to unlock alternative forms of commemorative practices and (re)appropriate memorialisation of the Sharpeville Massacre. The chapter addresses the following questions: Which key aspects of the Sharpeville commemoration were affected by the COVID-19

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pandemic? And how? Who were the people involved in facilitating the grassroots-­led Sharpeville commemoration? Qualitative research methods were deployed in this study. The chapter is based on a content analysis of how the Sharpeville Massacre came to be, as well as a brief chronological sweep through the decades that this incident has been observed. In terms of data collection, the study deployed participant observation whereby, ethnographically, I attempted to blend into the studied environment: that is, going native in order to gain access to tacit, embodied knowledge, using the technique of direct observation.

Commemorating the Sharpeville Massacre: Pre-cOVID-19 Sharpeville has a unique capacity to evoke worldwide recognition even amongst people with little knowledge about the struggle against apartheid. Sharpeville continues to occupy emotional heights of the anti-­ apartheid struggle that no person or place has superseded for generations and will continue to remain inscribed in the historic memories of those who witnessed the struggle for freedom in twentieth-century South Africa (Frankel, 2001). Following the massacre, the anguish, loss and trauma experienced by deceased families and the Sharpeville community at large, including their efforts to memorialise, were mobilised in the public sphere as collective political action through commemorations. Despite international solidarity commemorations, the apartheid regime proscribed all liberation movements and many of their leaders went into exile, while many others who chose to remain were detained (Ejiogu, 2011, p. 260). This led to a vacuum of political leadership that was temporarily filled by ‘soft powers’ in the form of the Liberal Progressive Party (LPP) and the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), who acted as African voices, a move that the African intelligentsia resented. The 1960s is regarded as the ‘silent decade’ (Friedman, 2017, p. 236), which saw commemorations spearheaded by students of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It took the form of exhibitions staged at the university and depicting the massacre under different annual themes such as ‘Remember Sharpeville’. These exhibitions were often inspected by University authorities before they were held and removed if found to be ‘morbid and distasteful’ in contravention of the Publications and Entertainments Act No. 26 of 1963, which prohibited the publication of

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‘undesirable’ material by the university authorities (Rand Daily Mail, 1965, p. 15). Commemorations during this decade were used as a platform to wage a struggle against complex censorship machinery, and they gained momentum from the mid-1950s until well into the 1980s, which officially institutionalised publication control for the decades that followed and extended powers over imported and locally produced publications (Matteau-Matsha, 2013). Commemorations, which continued into the 1970s, were also carried out by white liberal students. Notably, in 1970 Ken Costa, a student at the University of Witwatersrand mounted a oneperson poster demonstration on Jan Smuts Avenue in Johannesburg. In 1972, students of Witwatersrand University cut white polystyrene boards into the shape of tombstones and engraved them with black lettering, thereby symbolically transforming the library lawns into a cemetery with, according to Moss (2014, p. 7) had, the wording: R.I.P. Killed on March 21, 1960 at Sharpeville.

In 1968, a black radical tradition emerged in the form of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) under the leadership of Steven Bantu Biko. It was the BCM, in 1969, that popularised the annual commemoration of the Sharpeville uprising as ‘Heroes Day’ (Moodley, 2010). During this decade, the commemorations took on the religious service tradition. For example, in 1975, the students’ wing of the BCM, the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), held an uneventful commemoration conforming to the order of ordinary church service. In another commemoration service, an activist in Soweto used his blood to capture the image of a man shot in Sharpeville, which he juxtaposed with a painting showing a black saviour or messiah caught in the chain of death (Magaziner, 2010). The 1980s was a period of ungovernability in South Africa (Twala, 2018). During this decade, commemorations of the Sharpeville Massacre took the form of protest marches and boycotts. Therefore, observances of Sharpeville did not occur just for the sake of memorialising the massacre, but rather to launch resistance and re-dedicate to the cause of the liberation struggle against apartheid (Rand Daily Mail, 1980). From the early 1980s to the 1990s, when the liberation movements were unbanned and exiled members returned to the country, rivalry in political ideology began to manifest in the commemorations of the Sharpeville Massacre, with the day being observed along political lines. Post-1994, the hegemonic impulses of the governing African National Congress have overridden

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local concerns (Rachel, 2016). Furthermore, the advent of the democratic dispensation was marked by a ‘memory boom’ characterised by physical markers of past violence, repression and memories of struggles for liberation (Hlongwane, 2008, p. 136). It further manifested itself in other ways, including the popular annual commemoration of Human Rights Day, formerly known as Heroes Day or Sharpeville Day, on March 21. Alongside the Human Rights Day celebrations, there has been the emergence of commemorative spaces and places declared as heritage sites. These ‘bricks-and-mortar’ testimonies have become a major feature in processes that reclaim and humanise public spaces in African townships— one of them being Sharpeville and its environs. As alternatives to government-­ sponsored concerts and festivals, counter-memories on Sharpeville Day take on a number of forms. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) continue to hold rallies as in the pre-1994 format. In these political rallies, Sharpeville Day becomes Heroes Day and a source of inspiration for new struggles whilst also providing a platform to criticise and mobilise against the policy directions of the ANC government. The commemoration of Sharpeville Day has given rise to questions about the direction of the continuing liberation process in South Africa. It allows people to vent their frustrations about the shortcomings of the current dispensation. At the same time, the commemoration is a symbol of healing and reconciliation with the painful past. People commemorate Human Rights Day to mark the triumph over the dark days of the past and resolve that what South Africans went through should never be repeated again (Hlongwane, 2008).

Human Rights Day Celebrations: 2020 The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a public health emergency on 30 January 2020. The organisation declared it a pandemic on 11 March 2020 and called upon world governments to scale up emergency response mechanisms as preventive and mitigatory measures (Chisita et al., 2022). On 15 March 2020, 365 cases were confirmed in 25 African countries, and the mortality rate stood at 2% on that day (Makurumidze, 2020). In an attempt to curb the spread of the virus and minimise the loss of life, governments around the world imposed their versions of mandatory self-isolation by implementing lockdown regulations (Greyling et al., 2020).

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In South Africa, COVID-19 emerged later than in other parts of the world (Naidu, 2020). From one single case on 5 March 2020, the number of cases increased rapidly (Dube, 2021). Soon South Africa became one of the global and regional epicentres of infections and the most affected country in Africa. The rapid rise in infection and mortality forced the South African government to swiftly react and place the country under severe movement restrictions for six weeks (Stiegler & Bouchard, 2020). By 31 March 2020, police had killed three people, the same number as COVID-19 victims at that time (Levine & Manderson, 2020). These severe measures were however based on epidemiological projections data from China and Italy (Kiconco, 2020). The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had devastating effects on the Sharpeville Massacre commemorations. Even more challenging was the fact that 2020 marked the 60th anniversary of the massacre, thereby disrupting the main state-led Human Rights Day celebrations at the Colesberg, Umsobomvu Local Municipality, Northern Cape Province (Velaphi, 2020). The provincial state-led commemorations were to be held in the contextual location of Sharpeville. As was the tradition in the pre-COVID-19 era, survivors and victims’ relatives formed an integral part of the commemorations as they were paraded by political parties. As part of the build-up to the twenty-first, survivors staged a week-long Imbawula (brazier) story-telling session in the streets of Sharpeville. During these sessions, they articulated their living memories as part of their healing process. For the 60th anniversary of the massacre, these survivors were touted to be part of either the official Human Rights Day celebrations or the counter-commemorations, depending on their ideological persuasions and political allegiance. On 12 March, as part of the build-up to the celebrations, the Vaal University of Technology in partnership with the Gauteng Department of Sports, Arts and Recreation hosted a memorial lecture to mark the 60th anniversary of the massacre. During this event, survivors performed a play about how events unfolded on that fateful day. They further held a candle-lighting ceremony. Different speakers also shared common sentiments about creating awareness and ensuring that the youth know about the history of Sharpeville (Zondi, 2020). The government declared a national state of disaster, an executive proclamation providing for the suspension of the normative order when the security of the state was endangered on 15 March, six days before commemoration day. All political parties and cultural institutions heeded the

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government’s call to suspend planned activities (Kotzé, 2020). In dismissing the government’s cancellation of the Human Rights Day celebrations, AZAPO issued a statement in its newsletter, AZAPO Voice. Vol.3 Iss.3, stating thus: ‘We may blame the low-key commemoration, no, actually the non-commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre, on the fatal Coronavirus, which is wreaking havoc around the globe. But that would be disingenuous.’ AZAPO further stated that when the state of disaster was announced by the government, there were no major activities taking place around Sharpeville warranting cancellation. According to the newsletter, there were no mass media campaigns planned around the 60th anniversary, which was an indication of the strategy of the ANC government to whittle down Sharpeville by renaming the day Human Right Day. According to some critics, also, the government’s position had more to do with the fact that Sharpeville Day is associated with the PAC (Azapo Voice, 2020). At the same time, the annual Human Rights Festival scheduled to take place at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg was cancelled. Likewise, the University of Witwatersrand, in partnership with the Robert Sobukwe Trust and the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), had planned an exhibition on the Sharpeville Massacre, which was cancelled. Also cancelled were the screening of a documentary by Thabang Molibedi titled ‘Echoes of My Past’ and a panel discussion involving the PAC veteran Joe Thloloe and a young activist from the Khulumani Support Group (KSG). In place of these events, the Iziko Museum in Cape Town hosted a virtual public discussion on Zoom in commemoration of Human Rights Day titled ‘What Does Human Rights Day Mean in the Times of Covid-19 and Post-apartheid South Africa?’ The discussion centred on the meaning of human rights as well as how such rights have been impacted by the pandemic and the restrictions in the form of lockdown within South Africa. The museum also announced that its doors would be open to visitors on 21 March, with all COVID-19 protocols observed (Iziko Museum, 2021). Situated within Sharpeville’s memory landscape is the Phelindaba Cemetery. This is a ‘site of conscience’ where victims were buried. It includes the Sharpeville Memorial Garden with key elements such as a memorial wall, an amphitheatre and a flower garden. This cemetery has since 1994 become an integral part of the spontaneous individual and calendar-driven collective memory, where the public memorialisation process takes place. It is also a central site for commemorative gatherings. Despite the objections that emerged within some sectors of the Sharpeville

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community as the pandemic raged on, the local authority re-opened the cemetery to bury COVID-19 victims. Some expressed concerns that no distinction was being made between the Sharpeville Massacre victims and those who had died of the COVID-19 virus. In this case, the Covid situation (the need to bury the dead of the pandemic) led to a re-actualisation of the commemorative nature of the site. Others feared being infected in the course of grave visitations as part of their spontaneous memorialisation process. By 20 March, the COVID-19 virus had infected 119 people in Sharpeville (Sedibeng Ster, 2020). Despite the rate of infections, the PAC conducted a low-key memorialisation ritual of wreaths- and pebble-laying, as well as prayers with decedents and family members of some of the victims. It further unveiled a refurbished plaque in its memorial as a replacement for the one that was vandalised earlier in the year before the 60th anniversary. Sabine Marschall argues that the PAC’s memorial derives its legitimacy from the presence of the actual bodies in the cemetery (Marschall, 2008); however, this year there were no processions along the streets of Sharpeville, a standard commemoration tradition, and the heavy artillery of historical commemoration capable of mobilising entire communities and aggregation of walking participants engaged in individual embodied acts of remembrance. Jennifer Lowe, Bruce Rumbold and Samar Aoun observe that due to COVID-19 regulations, memorialisations across the world have become individualised and replaced the state-sponsored rituals that were normal social practices. However, there is evidence that even before the pandemic, a number of people were entrenching memorialisation in their everyday lives more than in shared public events (Lowe et al., 2020).

Online Commemoration and Grassroots Initiatives COVID-19 restrictions altered long-standing traditions on Human Rights Day. Orli Fridman and Sarah Gensburger contend that COVID-19 restrictions, such as social distancing, have had the effect of ‘unlocking’ opportunities for grassroots commemoration and empowered both new and existing memory actors (Fridman & Gensburger, 2023). On his part, Marthoenis Kabir argues that the morality behind social distancing by governments across the world was not to limit socialisation but to augment physical distancing in order to mitigate the spread of infection. However, people were able to, and free to, socialise online rather than offline (Kabir, 2020). Jeff Clyde Corpuz contends that although

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COVID-19 has had a profound impact on death-related aspects, little attention has been paid to memorialisation processes in times of crisis. According to him, the concept of commemoration of the dead has been largely overlooked and remains unexplored during times of pandemics such as COVID-19 (Corpuz, 2021). Corpuz further contends that there is evidence from previous pandemics that suggests that people are willing to adopt practices that meet the symbolic, social and emotional needs of the original ceremonies and practices, while the affected communities themselves are involved in the formulation of any projected changes. Indeed, severe limitations on public life in many countries, following the spread of COVID-19, affected cultural institutions. Visitations to theatres, cinemas and museums were prohibited, thus creating an urgency to go online (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021). Within Sharpeville, the Sharpeville Human Rights Precinct is a ‘lieu de mémoire’ (site of memory), and within its landscape is the exhibition centre which showcases an array of items collected from victims’ houses. Here, pilgrims are able to access the history of the massacre, engage in educational activities and watch live re-enactments of the massacre by a group of young people. It is also a site where public ceremonies, such as cultural cleansing of the blood of the victims, are physically performed. Drawing from Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, establishing the presence of the past is a key element of modern-day commemorations, and happenstances with the physical sites of a massacre and with survivor testaments seem to produce such presence effects (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021). Whilst COVID-19 dramatically accelerated the pace of change across the digital ecosystem and at the same time ushered in advances in the virtuality of art and identity on a global scale, there was little of the digital to be seen at the Sharpeville Exhibition Centre. Tula Giannini and Jonathan Bowen contend that COVID-19 has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation such that museums will need to be more prepared than ever to adapt to the current unabated technological advances set in the midst of a cultural and social revolution. They call for an inclusive integrative museum model between physical and digital reality (Giannini & Bowen, 2022). However, Lucky Matolo, the curator of the site, stated that no plans were in place to move the artefacts to an online platform as there was neither the infrastructure nor expertise to do so. Usually, in the build-up to 21 March, the mainstream media (both print and broadcast) play a significant role in sensitising the public to the contributions of the Sharpeville Massacre to the struggle against apartheid

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and its centrality to the cultural heritage. On the morning of 21 March, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and a private television station, NewsAfrica, commemorated Human Rights Day by hosting, on their morning breakfast show, ‘Zoom’ platform interviews with the PAC and Julia Nzimande, daughter of Nyakane Tsolo, the Sharpeville PAC branch leader who led a demonstration on 21 March 1960. During the interview, Nzimande reflected on the enduring legacy of her father. With official commemorations cancelled, it was an opportunity for marginalised voices in the grand narrative of the massacre to come to the fore (Fig. 10.1). On 18 March 2020, with the use of hashtags such as #YourViewOn405 #Newzroom405, Onkgopotse J.J.  Tabane expressed his views on the

Fig. 10.1  Walls that talk exhibition advertisement on social media Clique Concepts Facebook page. Facebook post 1 can be accessed on the link below: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02yMVifDcoofSEv9HQC DB 5u6fk Z g 9K z b rGw F Q S t n N Rp F 6 S a D C 7 Vw 6z 7L z y v nM G dc KN l &i d=100000020695299&sfnsn=scwspmo&mibextid=iujhyo. Facebook post 2 can be accessed on the link below: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pf bid02NH2DGBwUtNnk1TMiboHaBRXR1ZAKZQdbbc4u7bEUYHkNxRcA28Ew3ZSyauJshSPBl&id=1600410546901231&mibextid=Nif5oz. Both Facebook posts were published by the Director of Clique Concepts, Semakaleng E. Moeketsi

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Sharpeville and the Marikana massacres by drawing parallels between the two (Tabane, 2020). The interview was posted on YouTube under #SABCNews, Human Rights Day—Remembering Nyakane Tsolo. It received 883 views. The Newsroom405 conducted interviews with survivors and the curator of the Sharpeville Exhibition Centre on the legacy of the massacre and the general feel of the community about the contested name change from Sharpeville Day to Human Rights Day. This YouTube post received 13,622 views. The Nelson Mandela Foundation’s ‘Remembering Sharpeville: Scene from Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’ documentary hit 13,958 views on that day. The still footage from the Reuters News Archive of the Sharpeville Massacre by Adeyinka Makinde was viewed by 1936 people (South African Broadcasting Corporation, 2020). His post, ‘Anti-Apartheid Protest at Trafalgar Square: 10th Anniversary of Sharpeville Massacre, March 1970’, had received 583 views as of 28 August 2020. Reddebrek YouTube depicts collected 84 views of Zambians demonstrating against the Sharpeville Massacre and the United Kingdom for supporting the racial policies in Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) and South Africa (Reddebrek, 2020). In Sharpeville, three memory activists, namely Mojalefa Nicho Ntema, Lerato Mokubung, and Semakaleng Moeketsi, leveraged other forms of the Sharpeville Massacre observance by embarking on an innovative digital commemoration project (Fig. 10.2). These activists fall within the description of Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg, who argues that they ‘strategically commemorate the contested past outside state channels for the purpose of influencing public debate and political discourse or to either challenge or to protect dominant views on the past and the institutions that represent them and that their goal is mnemonic change or to resist change’ (Gutman & Wüstenberg, 2021, p. 1). Gutman further notes that memory activists operate in local locations where violent events in the past have occurred, where they arrange tours of ruins, designate space with signposting, rehabilitate the physical environment, and print maps and tour guides in order to chronicle and develop information about the past (Gutman, 2017). Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg frame memory activists as discrete actors or a group of people organised formally at various levels of informality (Gutman & Wüstenberg, 2021). Memory activism, on the other hand, creates a civil space of observance that challenges official narratives of the violent past, democratises one-sided national accounts and strives for the inclusion of unheard voices (Dubrovskiy et al., 2019,p. 36).

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Fig. 10.2  Director of Clique Concepts, Semakaleng Moeketsi among attendees at the ‘Walls That Talk’ exhibition, which illustrated the names of the deceased victims including the history behind the massacre. The exhibition was mounted inside the walls of the old Sharpeville Police Station Cells. Photo courtesy of Nicho Ntema dated 21 March 2020

On Human Rights Day, all cultural institutions were closed to the public, with no plans for engagement with the audience online whereby heritage products could be accessed and consumed remotely; however, at the old Sharpeville police station, where the killings were executed and which is currently a heritage site, gates were opened to the public. Here, these memory activists hosted the ‘Walls that Talk’ exhibition. The idea of staging an exhibition was conceptualised and organised immediately after the cancellation of mass gatherings due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The exhibition was planned to take place at the police station where the massacre occurred in order to give visitors a first-hand experience of what happened on that day (Interview with Nicholas Mojalefa Ntema, Old Sharpeville Police Station, March 21, 2019). The exhibition opened on 20 March and continued till the end of the month. As one of the organisers puts it: ‘We initiated a virtual experience as a way to raise awareness and educate the youth in particular and the community at large about the importance of the day in developing a matured historical consciousness, identity, and heritage preservation through the accessible medium of social media. The youth are exposed to different forms of digital platforms. We felt it was important to push physical commemoration alongside digital

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project together with its online activities’ (Interview with Semakaleng Moeketsi, Old Sharpeville Police Station, March 21, 2019). Visitors were greeted by activists and offered a guided tour of the police cells, where names of the victims were hung on the walls. Under each name, a short narrative was provided, which took the visitor down memory lane to what happened on that day (Interview with Semakaleng Moeketsi, Old Sharpeville Police Station, March 21, 2019) (Fig. 10.3). During their guided tours, the history of the massacre was presented in a way Yifat Gutman describes as a knowledge-based effort for consciousness-­ raising and political change (Gutman, 2017). Visitors were able to have a non-mandatory, informal talk with some of the survivors on Human Rights Day, while activists infused the physical presence of the visitors with mediatised forms of the virtual experience. The visitors also had an opportunity to take photos (selfies) of themselves, which were then uploaded and published on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Fig. 10.3  Left to Right: Lamin Ntema, Lerato Mokubung (co-founder of Clique Concepts), Gladys Qabukile Nzimande-Tsolo (widow of Nyakane Tsolo, who led the 21st March 1960 anti-pass laws demonstration in Sharpeville. Despite Gladys being part of the vulnerable group to COVID -19 infections, she defied the imposed restrictions by attending the exhibition), Nicho Ntema (Organiser of exhibition) and Julia Nzimande (daughter of Nyakane Tsolo) with her son Dumiso. Photo courtesy of Nicho Ntema dated 21 March 2020

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These platforms became virtual commemorative spaces for hashtagged social media memory. On the Facebook pages, for instance, activists used hashtags such as #FutureSharpevilleBeyond2020, #Lestweforget, #Sharpevilleday, #69Names, #Musiciandart, and #Azaniadeservesbetter. In the days that followed, there were further posts uploaded on Facebook, and comments in the form of emojis increased. The use of (#)hashtags as a mnemonic practice has become prominent in the increasing display of online commemoration and online memory activism and that they, however, do not always complement rather than substitute onsite activism and onsite commemorations (Fridman, 2022) (Fig. 10.4). On 17 April 2020, Julia Nzimande published an article in which she reflected on 21 March 2020 commemorations. In the piece, she asked why her father, Nyakane Tsolo, remained an unknown figure in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, noting also that in the official telling of the event of the Sharpeville Massacre his name is not even mentioned (Nzimande, 2020). She argues that the African National Congress (ANC) and the government, by extension, have played a big role, whether envisioned or not, in allowing this gross denialism and historical obliviousness. In terms of state-led commemorations of Sharpeville, Nzimande notes:

Fig. 10.4  Representation with names of victims on canvas mounted on the inside walls of the old police station cells in Sharpeville, turned into an Exhibition Centre. Photo courtesy of Nicho Ntema dated 21 March 2020

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These annual, pompously decorated state ceremonies, publicized and splashed all over media, have become repugnant spaces of no particular significance, void of any historical substance. They are events where the painful history of our struggle becomes sanitized… Our current approach to how we tell narratives about apartheid is selective and partisan, demonstrating that we have no inclusive approach to historical remembering. We remember selectively and we forget collectively. The denialism and distortion demonstrate how we choose to commemorate our past, how we tell stories, and how we re-member or dis-member events. (Nzimande, 2020)

A week after 21 March 2020 Human Rights Day commemoration, South Africa went into full-scale nationwide lockdown (van Heerden & Roos, 2021). Findings suggest that South Africa was the hardest-hit country in Africa in terms of the number of confirmed COVID-19 infections and those who died from the virus. It was one of the countries in the world where movement restrictions were much more severe, highlighting how the emergence of COVID-19 disrupted all aspects of life globally and severely impacted observances of the Sharpeville Massacre commemoration. Restrictions on movement as throughout the world posed a challenge to the observance of this day, as it is normally based on the personal experience of presence in lieux de memoire, where memory crystallises, manifests itself and a sense of historical continuity perseveres.

Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has caused some of the harshest human restrictions in recent memory. Around the world, including in South Africa, public health restrictions, caused by the pandemic, led to the downscaling, postponement or, in some cases, outright cancellation of mass gatherings. The most distressing aspect of the government’s response to the pandemic has been the abrupt curtailment of social gatherings for rituals associated with personal grief, bereavement and funeral services. The chapter demonstrates that there has been a shift in tradition, changes and continuity— through a comparative analysis—in how the Sharpeville Massacre was commemorated before the advent of democracy. This commemoration tradition was marked by sombre activities such as prayers and visitation of graves. It also constituted a platform to re-dedicate to the struggle against apartheid. In 1994, Sharpeville Day was renamed Human Rights Day. From 1995, it was officially observed as Human Rights Day, with

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celebrations taking the form of contested festivities, music spectacles and other forms of celebrations; yet other political parties, social commentators and Sharpeville residents felt that the day had become de-politicised. In 2020, with the onset of COVID-19 and a few days before the 60th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre, which coincided with the Human Rights Day celebrations, the South African government was faced with complex and difficult choices which triggered shifts and changes in the way that the Human Rights Day celebrations would be observed. The government’s amendments to the usual commemoration, made during the 60th anniversary, can be seen as a delicate balancing act between protecting the lives and livelihoods of the citizenry and acknowledging the memorial priorities of bereaved families and victims of the massacre. Not to be defeated or disillusioned by the government’s cancellation of mass gatherings, local memory activists explored and kick-started a grassroots-­ inspired onsite/virtual alternative memorialisation and commemoration exhibition tagged “Walls that Talk” at the old Sharpeville police station, where the massacre took place on 21 March 1960. The exhibition was transmitted on social media platforms and live-streamed for the benefit of people who had been forced to self-isolate. By following the COVID-19 guidelines, such as hand sanitisation and social distancing, Clique Concepts, a grassroots memory activism forum, reached out to locals to come through and view the exhibition. With no official or counter-commemorations by the PAC or AZAPO, local memory activists utilised social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to reflect on the memory of Sharpeville without the political rhetoric that often characterises this day. The chapter further demonstrated that COVID-19 brought about non-access to memorial sites, thereby presenting social media as a new memory ecosystem. These new modes of commemoration, imposed by the restrictions of the pandemic and engendered by digital platforms, made it possible to replace social distance with a form of mediated proximity that transcends physical borders.

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PART III

Memorial Museums and National Days: Did Digital Practices Transform Commemoration in Times of the Pandemic?

CHAPTER 11

“Le goût d’un jour de fête”? Commemorating the End of the Second World War on Twitter During the Lockdown: A Comparison Between France and Italy Frédéric Clavert and Deborah Paci

Introduction On 9 March 2020, the Italian government ordered a national lockdown, extending measures already applied to some regions that had already been under quarantine for several days. Three days earlier, in France, the president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron and his wife went out to the theater, encouraging French citizens to go out despite the confirmed outbreak of the pandemic in Italy, but also in France, since an evangelical

F. Clavert (*) University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected] D. Paci Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_11

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gathering in Alsace had caused the virus to spread widely (Le Monde, 2020b). However, on March 16, President Macron finally announced a national lockdown, which started the following day. These two confinements were progressively lifted in May and June 2020. In a way, Italy, early hit by the pandemic, was a subject of incomprehension in France and then its model. Beyond the difference in the timing of the pandemic, Italy and France had in common the fact that the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, on April 25 and May 8, respectively, was held in strict lockdown. What has the pandemic changed about the echoes of this online commemoration? To answer this question, we used a corpus of tweets that have been collected over a long period of time. It constitutes the raw material of a research project led by Frédéric Clavert, professor at C2DH in Luxembourg, and Deborah Paci, at the time professor at the University of Bologna. The #covid19fr research project was initially launched for the French language only (Clavert & C2DH, 2020). However, it was soon extended to Italian. Its aim was to observe a memory in the making, that of the pandemic. This long-term project is based on a massive collection of tweets and hopes to capture, over the years, the evolution of the perception of the pandemic and its memory on Twitter. This project therefore goes far beyond the scope and time frame of this edited book. It does, however, allow us to ask some related questions. In this chapter, we will explore the online echoes of the commemorations, their possible digital aspects, the practices that can be derived from them and the perceptions that the populations of both countries—or at least the part of these populations active on Twitter—may have had on these two dates. How does an online commemoration fit into a wider commemorative tradition? Does it fit in the same way in both countries? Did lockdown-related practices, possibly based on older traditions, play a role in the commemorations and are they commented and reported on social media? To address all of these questions, we will first outline our methodology, look at the traditions of commemorating the end of the Second World War in both countries, and then analyze what these traditions have become on Twitter during the lockdowns.

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Studying a Digital Commemoration The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on 8 May and 25 April 2020 celebrations can be analyzed within a theoretical framework that is provided by digital memory studies to which part of this book contributors belong. To make it short, and as Andrew Hoskins rightly put it: the culture of “post-scarcity” has ended up using the term “memory” improperly because it has associated it with “something that can be derived from capture and recall, hence the notion of ‘total recall’ ” (Hoskins, 2011, p. 271). This has led to the emergence of what Hoskins has defined as a “connective turn”, that is, “the massively increased abundance, pervasiveness and accessibility of digital technologies, devices and media, shaping an ongoing re-calibration of time, space (and place) and memory by people as they connect with, inhabit and constitute increasingly both dense and diffused social networks” (Hoskins, 2011, p. 271). Studying Digital Memory This study lies in the context of research carried out by Hoskins into the “mediatization of memory” (Hoskins, 2009) and by Andrea Hajek, Christine Lohmeier and Christian Pentzold into “memory in a mediated world” (Lohmeier et  al., 2016). Platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook all play an active role in constructing a “new memory ecology”. As outlined by Steven D. Brown and Andrew Hoskins, “the construction of memory in our new memory ecology is ‘imbricated’ in digital recording technologies and media but also in the standards and classifications resulting from their growth that inevitably and often invisibly regulate our sociotechnical practices” (Brown & Hoskins, 2010, p. 96). Tweets referencing memory represent a paradox making them particularly interesting for a study on digital memory: by organizing the past and presenting it in a particularly linear manner, they tend to simplify it while, at the same time, presenting it as something complex and “uncensored” (Sumartojo, 2017, p.  404). The “connective turn” (Hoskins, 2017, p.  1) has freed memory from the stifling confines of the traditional archive and of the institution responsible for its preservation, distributing it in the internet through a sort of connectivity operating in both the public and private contexts of anyone connected in the so-called digital infosphere (Floridi, 2014).

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Social media respond to a logic that is the complete opposite of the logic of traditional archives, which propose a representation of events while memory practices in social media tend to emphasize the way events integrate with daily life, ending up by creating “transnational and transcultural networks of mnemonic entanglements” (Liebermann, 2021, p. 713). As outlined by Yvonne Liebermann, “the memory ‘of the multitude’ changes “the parameters of the who, what, when and why of remembering” (Liebermann, 2021, p.  717). This post-scarcity culture based on open access, freedom of information, and immediacy of search jeopardizes the mechanisms of memory: moreover, there is a sense of trust in the use of big data and in the participatory faculty within this memory ecology (Hoskins, 2017, p. 3). In addition to the aforementioned studies, there are two further studies that contribute to framing our research topic: the first is a pioneering work carried out by Robin Wagner-Pacifici (Wagner-Pacifici, 2017) that provides the analytical tools to interpret what is involved during the unfolding of an event; the second is a recent article by Mario Mazzucchelli and Mario Panico that offers interesting food for thought on the concept coined by them regarding “pre-emptive memory,” in other words, “an act of— unwitting—anticipation, pre-figuration, and re-combination of the future cultural memory of an ongoing event in the present” (Mazzucchelli & Panico, 2021, p. 1414). These works suggest that it is not only possible but right to investigate collective memory “in the making”, even in the realm of memory studies, without disguising a “clear preoccupation […] in bounding events in time and space” (Wagner-Pacifici, 2017, p.  5). Therefore it is not necessary for an event to be concluded in order to gather information and embark upon a preliminary reflection on the data. We will see how memories of past events—not just the pandemics of past centuries but also, and above all, the events of the Second World War— have been used to interpret the Covid-19 crisis. Social Media and Twitter To study the memory of the end of the Second World War online and in lockdown, we use data from a particular platform, Twitter. Twitter is a social network as defined by Boyd and Ellison (2007, p. 211): We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system,

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(2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.

After signing up, Twitter allows its users to follow other accounts or to be followed by other accounts. This relationship, unlike Facebook, for example, can be asymmetrical: following an account does not oblige that account to follow you back. The central functionality of Twitter is to publish a tweet, a short text of 280 characters (140 before 2017). In this tweet, the author account can mention another account (by prefixing its Twitter handle with an “@”) and, in addition to text, insert images, videos and web addresses. It is possible to reply to another account’s tweet or to quote it “as is” (retweet) or with a comment (quote). Finally, it is possible to insert a hashtag, that is, a keyword preceded by a “#”, into this tweet. The uses of hashtags are diverse: participating in a discussion involving many other Twitter accounts, insisting on or ironizing a word, and so on (Cervulle & Pailler, 2014; Fridman, 2019). Retweets and hashtags—features that were originally invented by users (Burgess & Baym, 2020)—are cardinal to understanding Twitter: these two features allow information to be disseminated almost instantaneously, sometimes at high frequency, during what Dominique Boullier has called “vibrations” (Boullier, 2016). This high-frequency circulation of information typical of social media and more particularly of Twitter can affect collective memory or commemorative phenomena. Thus, during the commemorations of the Centenary of the Great War (Clavert, 2019), different types of phenomena were observed: the specific temporalities of commemorations on Twitter, scandals and controversies, but also memory practices typical of these social media. In this chapter, we will adopt a quantitative data-­ focused approach. This approach, though, complements others, more qualitative, such as the one adopted by Taylor Annabell in this book and elsewhere in Sumartojo (2017) or, in a different field, in Ruddock (2012). Building Our Corpus We built our corpus thanks to the use of the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) in its version 2 (APIv2). An API is a piece of software allowing, in our case, the collection of data from an application (Twitter) by a server-side application, in this case the twarc software

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(Summers et al., 2022). We thus had broad access to the entire history of tweets since the creation of Twitter in 2006 and hence could collect hashtags over more than a decade: any public and undeleted tweet at the time of harvesting containing the hashtags we chose were stored in our database. Thanks to this method, we complied with Twitter’s terms of service and GDPR-related legislation on the one hand, and we could carry out a retroactive and considered collection on the other. However, we do not have tweets that were published and then deleted, or tweets whose accounts were made “private” between their publication on Twitter and the moment of our harvesting. One likely effect is that, in our corpus, “vibrations”, those brief but dense moments of information flow often linked to a controversy or an episode of misinformation, may be attenuated. In Italian we chose to collect the hashtags #25aprile45, #25aprile1945, #25Aprile to which we added #RaccontiamolaResistenza. In French, we collected #8mai, #8mai1945, #8mai45. Our aim was to harvest hashtags that are comparable in both languages and allow for a comparison over time. However, and this is one of the conclusions of the article, the two corpora are not equivalent in volume. Thus, the Italian-speaking corpus contains 1,042,598 tweets (274,558 without retweets) and the French-­ speaking corpus 380,785 (75,613 without retweets). This difference is even more interesting as it is inverted in relation to the respective penetration rates of Twitter in each population: 14.4% of the population over 13 years of age can be reached by advertisers in France via Twitter, compared to 5.2% in Italy in 2021 (We are social, 2021, p. 170). The collection of tweets by hashtags has the advantage of a form of consistency: the Twitter accounts that issued the tweets in our corpus chose to insert one or more of the collected hashtags. We can therefore hypothesize that this choice reflects a desire to participate in a commemorative event. However, this method of data harvesting underestimates the conversational aspect of Twitter (D’heer et al., 2017). Thus, a reply to a tweet in our corpus that does not contain a collected hashtag will not be present in our corpus. To analyze the two corpora, we use distant reading techniques (Moretti, 2007). Distant reading consists of using the computer to read a corpus that is so massive that it is materially impossible for a researcher to read it themselves in full. In practice, we use text mining methods, via the IRaMuTeQ software (Ratinaud & Dejean, 2009), which is based on the theory of lexical worlds (Reinert, 1993). More particularly, we use

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hierarchical descending classification, which, based on word collocation, groups tweets into clusters and extract from those clusters the most significant lemmatized terms. This analysis allows us to identify the main topics that are present throughout our corpus, but also to study their evolution over time.

Commemorations with Different Statuses The Political and Cultural Meanings of 25 April In Italy, the antifascist discourse acts as a “bond for public memory and national identities”, through the deployment of an intricate complex of forms that are spatial (monuments, museums, place names), ritual (commemorations, civic celebrations) and communicative (speeches, photographs, advertising, radio, television) (Ridolfi, 2021, p. 199). As early as 22 April 1946, 25 April was declared a national holiday to mark Liberation Day by Prince Umberto II, at the suggestion of Alcide De Gasperi, the then prime minister, who was in turn advised by Giorgio Amendola, the Communist Under-Secretary to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. Amendola drew attention to the importance of a symbolic gesture with a two-fold meaning: on the one hand, the aim was to commemorate the sacrifices made by those fighting against Nazi-­ Fascism, while, on the other, it was a direct message to the Allies made for reasons of expediency at a time in which they were drawing up a peace treaty with Italy. The Italy emerging from the war was closely tied to the Anglo-American alignment and sought to exploit the Resistance so as to present the ventennio fascista as a break in the country’s history and as a negligible phenomenon, ignoring the fact that it had been supported by a mass consensus. As Filippo Focardi has pointed out, there was a “denial of the existence of a popular consensus for the regime and the claim that there was a perfect line of continuity […] between the Resistance opposing fascism during the ventennio and the final battle engaged against it after 8 September” (Focardi, 2013, p. 53). While other European countries, including France, all chose 8 May— the German surrender—as their commemoration date, in Italy it was decided not to link the commemoration to 2 May, that is, the end of the war in Italy, but to 25 April, a date recalling the nationwide uprising called for by the National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy in order to free the main Italian cities, “resembling the French 14 July in terms of its

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scope and traditions” (Ridolfi, 2021, p. 203). As Maurizio Ridolfi has suggested, “by using that event as an anniversary to place at the centre of the ‘celebration policy’ for the new Italy, anti-fascist powers legitimized its historic relevance and transformed it into a myth that could be used to define the codes of political rhetoric and the contents of public memory” (2021, p. 201). The choice of 25 April as a symbolic date was tantamount to recognizing the political legitimacy of those who had actively participated in the Resistance, the Communists, in particular, who were faced with the task of laying the foundations of a new Italy in complete discontinuity with the monarchy and the army. The division into two camps in the wake of the Cold War and the exclusion of the Communists and Socialists from government in May 1947 had tangible effects upon the 25 April celebration, which became “an event subject to the debate and negotiations of the political struggle” (Ridolfi, 2021, p. 211). In 1948, the government forbade the display of party symbols during the commemorations, and between 1948 and 1953, a series of trials were held to prosecute ex-­ partisans: Democrazia Cristiana (DC), the ruling party, sought to reduce the insurrectional scope of the memory of the Resistance in the name of pacifying Italians (Dogliani, 2006, p. 92). Between the 1950s and 1960s, faced with the growing influence of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), a neofascist movement belonging to the “destra sociale”, and the entry of the Socialists into the center-left coalition, there was a renewal of the memory of the Resistance, an adhesion to the anti-fascist discourse by the younger generations as well as the participation of partisan associations in addition to the institutions (Ridolfi, 2021, pp. 218–220). Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, the 25 April celebrations entered the media and television circuit. However, the memory of the Resistance clashed with the “memory of the defeated”, of the “repubblichini di Salò”, collaborators of fascist Germany, despite various attempts at pacification made by various political figures. They include the gesture made by President of the Republic Oscar Luigi Scalfaro who, on 4 November 1996, paid homage to the fallen “from all the belligerent parties”, thereby including the repubblichini di Salò (Dogliani, 2006, p. 118). And in 1996, Luciano Violante, in his inaugural speech as the president of the Chamber of Deputies, mentioned the so-called ragazzi di Salò, inviting his audience to commemorate all of those concerned, from the Resistance fighters to the repubblichini (Radicale, 1996). However, no one did more than Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the then president of the Republic, to transform the

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Resistance into “constitutional patriotism”, adopting, from the time of his election in 1999, “a ‘French system’ of nationalization of the Resistance” (Dogliani, 2006, p. 118). During the 25 April ceremonies at the Quirinale, Ciampi therefore gave out awards for bravery to people not included in the memory constructed by the anti-fascist parties, in other words, soldiers, prisoners from concentration camps, the so-called silent resistance (Dogliani, 2006, p.  118). According to historian Pietro Scoppola, such attempts at pacification excluded, there has been a tendency to trace 25 April back to a rationale of “party affiliation” instead of placing it within a narrative framework of a “shared sense of belonging” (Scoppola, 1995, p. 28). Over the past three decades, in the wake of the crisis affecting the Communist cultural hegemony and the waning of the political myth of anti-fascism (Cooke, 2011), the 25 April celebrations ended up by sidelining ethical and civic aspects (Ridolfi, 2021, pp. 227–228). The date of 25 April became a sort of “memory of joy” (Mazzucchelli & Panico, 2021, p. 1419), that is, a collective social celebration experienced by most people as a motive for national pride and hope and, at the same time, the confirmation of the Italians’ innate ability to overcome difficulties collectively. The Contested 8 May The status of 8 May in France is different from that of 25 April in Italy. In France, the history of the Second World War highlights the divisions between resistance and collaboration, between the France libre and the Vichy Regime (Rousso, 1986). The French memory of the Second World War is thus fragmented and has been the subject of regular public debate, particularly since the 1990s (Conan & Rousso, 1996). This fragmentation results in a plethora of commemorative dates. Thus, the calendar of national days (calendrier des journées nationales) includes the Appeal of 18 June; the Liberation, which begins with the D-Day landing (6 June 1944) with many local key dates; the liberation of the death camps, particularly Auschwitz (25 January 1945), the Vel d’Hiv roundup (16–17 July 1942); and the surrender of Germany on 7 and, above all, 8 May 1945. The 8 May 1945 is also marked by another event: the massacres of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata in Algeria, which was then colonized (Pervillé, 2006), but which does not appear on the official calendar of national commemorations.

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This multiplicity of commemorative days may explain the history of 8 May as a day of commemoration. In 1946, the Sunday following 8 May (or on the 8 May if it was a Sunday) was immediately declared a day of commemoration by the Fourth Republic. In 1953, 8 May itself, at the request of the veterans’ associations, became a public holiday. The Fifth Republic reversed this decision in 1959 and changed the commemoration day to the second Sunday in May. In 1968, 8 May became an official day of commemoration again, though remaining a working day. In 1974, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, elected president of the Fifth Republic in 1974, replaced it with a Europe Day celebrating Franco-German reconciliation. In 1981, his successor, François Mitterrand, reverted to the situation of 1953 and again established 8 May as a public holiday. Since then, the president of the Republic reviews the French Army under the Arc de Triomphe before reviving the flame of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Commemorating the End of the Second World War: The 2020 Context in Italy and France From the very beginning, the pandemic was subjected to a process of semiotic construction transforming it into an ongoing event “to be remembered”: we are referring to a memory of the present (Mazzucchelli & Panico 2021, p. 1418). In this pre-emptive memorialization, the memories of the Second World War have been largely referred to. In Great Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson drew parallels with the efforts made by the British people during the Second World War, while Donald Trump compared the pandemic to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, drawing attention to the “yellow peril” (Erll, 2020, p. 866). I taly: Incentives to Commemorate Online In Italy, the media narrative has brought about the osmosis of two discourses: the one relative to the ritual of 25 April celebrations and that of the emergency, an event that “has to do with their uncertainty, their indeterminate quality” (Wagner-Pacifici, 2017, p. 22). We are faced with the proposal of updated memories that interact, overlap, and recombine with what we might define as “anticipated (future) memories” (Mazzucchelli & Panico, 2021, p.  1416). In the present case, an analogy was made between the Resistance against Fascism, symbolized by the date of 25 April and what was qualified as “resistance against the virus”. The media narrative therefore saw the virus as the “enemy” from which the entire

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Italian population, without any political distinctions, had to defend itself, like a “victim” seeking the means to resist just as the partisans did during the Second World War. The date of 25 April is traditionally a moment distinguished by celebrations. It has become customary for people to go out to meet friends in order to celebrate, attending concerts and events involving politicians and civil society. By making forms of aggregation impossible, the lockdown promoted a new form of collective celebration, bringing about “the positive potential of this memory of joy” (Mazzucchelli & Panico, 2021, p. 1419). Observing 25 April 2020, we can mention a number of initiatives aiming to recreate a form of sociality, albeit virtually. Shortly before the celebration day, a Facebook profile with the username “Raccontiamo la Resistenza”1 was set up by the Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri di Milano, the Istituto Cervi, the 65 historical institutes of the Resistance, and “Paesaggi della Memoria”, the network of Italian places of memory. The presentation of the initiative ran, “Today, as in 1945, Italy is facing a difficult challenge. We will need patience and courage. The social campaign #RaccontiamolaResistenza will run from 29 March to 2 May, culminating in a major digital event #25aprile2020 on 25 April” (translated by the authors). By 1 March 2022, the event had attracted 7069 “likes” and 7712 followers. In 2020, users were invited to participate actively in a kind of social marathon in which they could either tag the page (#Raccontiamola Resistenza #25aprile2020) or publish a post about it, after subscribing and choosing a “nom de guerre” (war alias). All the subscribers to the Facebook page could participate, telling their story, publishing texts or singing “Bella Ciao!” In the twitter infosphere, all of the comments were strictly related to the initiative. This was at least partially due to the fact that the creation of this virtual place for the 25 April celebrations was an initiative promoted by a national institution which, according to its Facebook profile, “even in the difficult current situation caused by coronavirus […], seeks to promote the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Liberation with an even louder voice that will echo in the squares which, this year, will not be able to fill up with people.” This social campaign was launched on 29 March (the date of the constitution of the insurrectional triumvirate of the National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy) and ended on 2 May (marking the German surrender in Italy). 1

 https://www.facebook.com/RaccontiamolaResistenza.

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Another equally significant initiative was the appeal launched by the national association of Italian partisans (ANPI) inviting everyone to sing “Bella ciao” from the balconies of their homes at 3 pm, on 25 April. It claimed the ban on meeting people should not stop Italians from expressing a collective sentiment that transformed itself into a renewed commemoration. As Nicolas Demertzis and Ron Eyerman have noted, in order to overcome the Covid-19 trauma, in many countries there were proposals for “new forms of artistic expression, such as online concerts, musical and theatrical performances, humorous offline and online creations” (Demertzis & Eyerman, 2020, p. 432). The proposal of a sort of “memory positive” triggers a consoling process that allows us to overcome the trauma, by motivating the sacrifice of remaining confined to our homes as an obligation toward society and the tangible testimony of civic duty. This “memory positive” acts as an “emotional booster” (Mazzucchelli & Panico, 2021, p. 1421). The collective singing so widely practiced in Italy had a social function, giving strength to Italians who found themselves forced to tolerate the legally sanctioned loss of forms of sociality. The Resistance ended up becoming a sort of bridge between past and present. The date of 25 April, the symbolic date of the Resistance and of the liberation from the Nazi-Fascist enemy, served to convey consoling messages, “using memory not as a lesson to be learned but as something to try to repeat” (Mazzucchelli & Panico, 2021, p. 1425). The pandemic has transformed the 25 April celebrations into an occasion where the anniversary was no longer a divisive event pitting the “left-wing” portion of society identifying with the values of the Resistance against the Italians on the right or center-right.  rance: Is Online Commemoration a True Commemoration? F In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s expression “nous sommes en guerre” (“We’re at war”) can also be seen as an implicit reference to the Second World War, understood here as the French “latest catastrophe” (Rousso, 2012). However, this symbolic framing does not seem to have guided the 8 May commemoration in 2020. Despite the strict lockdown, commemorations in “physical” places were organized, but without audience (Presidency of the French Republic, 2020). Emmanuel Macron first laid a wreath at the feet of the statue of Charles de Gaulle, Place Clémenceau, before doing the same under the Arc de Triomphe and then reviving the flame of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in the presence of two former presidents of the Republic, the presidents of the two

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Chambers of Parliament, the prime minister, the minister of the Armed Forces, the state secretary for Veterans, the mayor of Paris, officers, some soldiers and veterans. The Champs Élysées, the Place de la Concorde and the streets of Paris and all French cities were empty. The exceptionality of this commemoration was expressed in a message from the president of the French Republic: “This 8 May does not look like an 8 May. It does not have the taste of a celebration day.” He continued: “It is in the privacy of our homes, by decorating our balconies and windows, that we summon this year the glorious memory of those who risked their lives to defeat the scourge of Nazism and reclaim our freedom” (translated by the authors). This message does not mention the possibility of commemorating online (Macron and French Presidency, 2020). However, there have been online memory initiatives, including by public institutions: the web series Comme en 40 (10 episodes), produced by ECPAD, the communication service of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, was published from 28 May 2020 until the following November—after 8 May (ECPAD, 2020). The Ministry of the Armed Forces also issued a call to “commemorate in a different way”, but only on 19 November 2020 (Éducation Nationale et de la Jeunesse, 2020). While the conditions of the commemorations of 8 May 2020 may have generated a political controversy (Le Monde, 2020a), the prospect of the restriction of the commemorations of D-Day, on the following 6 June, gave rise to a greater mobilization outside the political sphere, with a call to ring churches’ bells (Aujourd’hui en France, 2020). The date of 8 May 2020 was therefore marked by a “traditional” commemoration but without an audience.

Commemorating on Twitter During the Lockdown Commemorating on Twitter is not a new phenomenon in 2020. For example, several research projects show that online commemorative activities during the centenary of the Great War were diverse and that Twitter played a central role in it (Sumartojo, 2017; Severo, 2021; Clavert, 2019). However, drawing a parallel between the two national situations is of particular interest as it allows for an empirical investigation of several issues often considered implicit. Tweets are regularly seen as an expression of “civil society” as opposed to an “official word”. The question here is that “is digital memory or more precisely the presence of memorial evocation on Twitter structured by the existence (or not) of a prior public impulse?”

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Commemorating 25 April 2020 on Twitter As can be seen from Fig. 11.1 in the period 2009–2015 there was a noticeable increase in the number of tweets related to the April 25 anniversary (Fig. 11.1). This is because in that three-year period the Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italy, as an umbrella association of Italian Resistance Institutes, organized and proposed a series of events to retrace, the years of the Resistance to the Nazi-Fascists, from the armistice of 8 September 1943 to the Liberation of 25 April 1945. By carrying out a lexicometric analysis of tweets from the 2009–2021 period using IRaMuTeQ software, we were able to identify nine thematic classes (Fig. 11.2). If we project those clusters through time (Fig.  11.3), to understand which clusters are more representative of the 25 April celebrations during the pandemic, particularly in 2020, we can see that class 4 (singing from balconies) dominates, and is in relation to class 1, which regards activities typically carried out during this holiday. Given their isolation and the impossibility of socializing with others, twitter users spoke about the possibility of engaging in alternative activities, first and foremost, singing on balconies, which presents itself as an alternative to the traditional activities that Italians usually carry out on this particular day. In other words, the diachronic analysis of our corpus demonstrates that the pandemic did

Fig. 11.1  Tweets per day, Italian corpus

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Fig. 11.2  Hierarchical Descending Clustering (HDC), Italian corpus

change the commemoration and its social practices. Moreover, the tweets reveal how that divisive memory can be reconciled in the face of an invitation to interpret 25 April as an occasion of “resilience”. In fact, in 2020 and 2021, Resistance and resilience were often associated: “Più che Resistenza. Resilienza”  – “More than Resistance. Resilience”, 25 April 2021; “In un mondo di RESILIENZA finalmente un giorno di RESISTENZA”  – “In a world of RESILIENCE finally a day of RESISTANCE”, 25 April 2021; “76 anni di Libertà e resilienza in attesa di liberarci da questo virus maledetto Un nemico invisibile da combattere e vincere, Buon Italia!” – “76 years of Liberty and resilience as we wait to free ourselves from this damned virus. An invisible enemy to fight and defeat, Buon’Italia!” 25 April 2021. Resilience implies adopting forms of behavior intended to help us resist and engage in the common fight against Covid. The memory of the resistance and reference to resilience can become a means of pacification. If Nicole Loraux (Loraux, 1997), referring to ancient Greece, can suggest turning to oblivion to settle the

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Fig. 11.3  Chronological projection of the Italian corpus’ HDC

conflict and overcome the drama of the civil war, we might claim that the divisive memory arising out of party identification should make way for pacification in the name of a common, collectively experienced battle. An unforeseen, external factor like the pandemic, far from canceling 25 April, ended up by resignifying it. Commemorating 8 May 2020 on Twitter Our corpus of harvested tweets shows, since 2009 and until 2021, an irregular but certain increase in the number of tweets issued on 8 May. As in the Italian case, a peak is recorded on 8 May 2020. In France, as in Italy, Covid has changed the quantitative presence of the commemoration on Twitter. Is a qualitative change comparable to that recorded in Italy also found in France? (Fig. 11.4). By using the IRaMuTeQ software, our lexicometric analysis of the French corpus reveals ten clusters of tweets (Fig. 11.5). We then projected

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Fig. 11.4  Tweets per day, French corpus

those clusters through time (Fig. 11.6). On 8 May 2020, the most pertinent clusters were the classes 3, 5, 6 and 7. Those clusters, which are rather typical of all 8 May through the years despite some variations, are dealing with the homage to WW2 soldiers, resistants, prisoners or deported, with a striking presence of colonial troops. This tribute can relate to particular people or can be a general tribute (clusters 6 and 7) related to the courage of WW2 actors or to their fight against Nazism. These tweets express gratitude toward a generation, to which specific values are associated (“honneur”, “courage”, etc.). Those clusters (3) are also made of tweets that describe the object of the commemoration of 8 May in France (German capitulation, the Allies’ victory) with a strong French prism. Some clusters are less representative of 2020. Among them (8 and 9), those grouping tweets related to the commemorations and their organization, for instance, which seem logical, as 2020s commemoration were organized with no public. Some clusters that are more political (4 and 10) are also not significant for 2020: they relate to former controversies under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. They remind us that lots of commemoration, at least for their digital avatars, are controversial (Clavert, 2022). Nevertheless, those controversies, despite the lockdown (and its controversies in France, around masks, for instance), did not happen to be significant on 8 May. Finally, minority voices seem less present in 2020 than in the previous year. It appears to be, in the case of the 8 May commemoration, a trend

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Fig. 11.5  HDC, French corpus

that started before the Covid crisis, but, though not fully absent, the “other 8 May”—the massacres of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata in the then French Algeria—is not significantly typical of 2020. A strong difference with Italy is the absence of a cluster that would be typical of 2020 – like the balcony songs cluster in Figs. 11.3 and 11.4. But both corpora have in common to show a “back to basics” trend. In a sense, the concept of resilience is key to understanding this movement: in a time of crisis, controversies, unprecedented measures such as lockdowns, commemorations and their online echoes are going beyond what can be a divisive memory, becoming a sign of resilience.

Conclusion This brief survey of the commemorations of the end of the Second World War in France and Italy reveals significant differences between the two countries, thanks to our diachronic analyses of two corpora of tweets, and

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Fig. 11.6  Chronological projection of the French corpus’ HDC

helps us understand changes in commemoration during the Covid-19 crisis and mostly lockdowns. Italy and France were two interesting cases: both commemorated the end of the Second World War during their lockdown, but national institutions implemented two very different policies toward digital commemoration, Italy trying to invest the online world in contrary to France. Furthermore, in both cases, the activity on Twitter has raised in 2020 during the commemorations. The case of Italy shows the strong link and synergy between “in real life” and online commemorating activities: the most striking clusters of tweets for 25 April 2020 mention the balcony songs. In fact, lots of tweets refer to activities in physical and public places. This is a striking difference with France, in addition to a by far smaller Twitter activity: with few, if not none, digital official initiatives, a commemoration day that has less historical legitimacy than 25 April, tweets from 8 May are less anchored in public spaces activities. Nevertheless, there are common points between both countries, including less

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controversies, more consensus than previous years. In 2020, in both countries, commemorations were meant to be a tool of resilience There is a strong opposition between the French “ce n’est pas un jour de fête” and the Italian “positive potential of this memory of joy”. These two quotes, from the French president and two Italian researchers (Mazzucchelli and Panico), show the greatest difference between the two countries: on the one hand, lockdown has somehow sterilized commemoration or at least hindered the participation of a broad public in commemorations that remained framed in a kind of standard May 8 scheme; on the other hand, there have been attempts to “deconfine” commemoration of April 25 by paradoxically adapting to the constraints of lockdown, including through the use of social media. How can these strong differences be explained? The status of the two commemorations in the two countries has long been very different, between April 25, widely recognized as a major date of commemoration, and May 8, which is in competition with other national dates for examples of local relevance and even with other national commemorations (the feast of Joan of Arc in Orléans). The Italian initiatives to keep April 25 alive were also more numerous. Finally, we can put forward the hypothesis that certain traditions  – the popular song in Italy, for example –were better suited not only to lockdown but also to confined commemoration. These few considerations reinforce the idea that online commemoration fits into broader traditions of “in real life” commemorations, as we have already shown for the Centenary of the Great War (Clavert, 2019), which does not imply that original online commemorative practices cannot emerge but that they appear in relation to a pre-existing commemorative framework. In the French case, the authors of this chapter cannot help but ask the following question: why were no lessons drawn from the online experience of the Centenary of the Great War (2014–2018) to help organize a commemoration that would have considered the constraints of containment by relying on the many possibilities of online commemoration? It is surprising that after the Centenary and the citizens’ participation to it (Gilot et  al., 2018) there was no awareness of the possibility of “commemorating differently”, that is, notably, online. Couldn’t 8 May 2020 have been a “day of celebration”? One hypothesis can be put forward: in attempting to identify the state actors responsible for French memorial policy, Sarah Gensburger (Gensburger, 2023) shows to what extent the number of actors/institutions involved in memorial issues within the state

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is large and, above all, without any real coordination and competing with each other. France has not learned any lessons from the Centenary because it does not have an organization within its state capable of or willing to do so. In the end, the most centralized state of the two studied in this chapter revealed being the less apt in commemorating online under a strict lockdown. The Italian unitary but decentralized Republic lets more space to “intermediary bodies” – regions but also associations – and hence seems to fit better the affordances of the connective turn and of our networked world. This chapter is the result of a collaboration between the two authors. They both thought and discussed together all the sections. Specifically, Frédéric Clavert wrote “Social media and Twitter”, “Building our corpus”, “The contested 8 May”, “France: is online commemoration a true commemoration?” and “Commemorating 8 May on Twitter”. Deborah Paci wrote “Studying digital memory”, “The political and cultural meanings of 25 April”, “Italy: incentives to commemorate online” and “Commemorating 25 April 2020 on Twitter”. Other parts are the result of a balanced common work.

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CHAPTER 12

#Hashtag Commemoration: A Comparison of Public Engagement with Commemoration Events for Neuengamme, Srebrenica, and Beau Bassin During Covid-19 Lockdowns Victoria Grace Walden and Mykola Makhortykh

The year 2020 was an unprecedented year for commemoration. As the year began, institutions were busy planning for commemoration events related to the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, such as the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camps and that of the British internment camp for Jewish detainees in Beau Bassin, Mauritius, and the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. What made these events

V. G. Walden (*) University of Sussex, Brighton and Hove, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Makhortykh University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_12

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particularly distinct, however, was that for the first time they had to be at least partially held remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions. Given this situation, we hypothesised that there would be more reliance on social media to promote and even perform commemoration events. With this increased reliance on social media, we expected to find high visibility, activity, and engagement across the accounts of institutions leading online commemoration work and emerging approaches to digital commemoration practice. However, whilst there has been much public hype suggesting that the shift to remote engagement has digitally transformed society, our empirical research demonstrates that in relation to memory practice, such transformation is overstated. Andrew Hoskins has argued that social media diminish “the authority of former gatekeepers of memory” (2018, p. 89) and that there exists a “bifurcation of memory culture in the digital age: one emerging and fragmentary, the other, organised, and institutional” (2014). Wulf Kansteiner, however, claims that in spite of institutional presence fading online, long-­ standing institutionalised approaches to commemoration still linger across the majority of public posts (2018, p. 117). To empirically examine the significance of this debate in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, it seemed pertinent to explore the relationship between posts by organisations dedicated to commemoration and wider public posts on social media using the same hashtags/keywords. In doing so, we ask if the pandemic changed the balance and the interactions between the two memory cultures. In this chapter, we examine the work of three memory institutions and related commemoration events: (1) Neuengamme Gedankstätte, Germany, and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camps. (2) Remembering Srebrenica, UK, and the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica. (3) The Beau Bassin Jewish Detainees Memorial and Information Centre (through their partner organisation, The South Africa Holocaust and Genocide Partnership) and the 75th anniversary of the liberation from Mauritius, where the Beau Bassin internment camp detained Jews who had fled Nazi Europe and were deported here from British Mandated Palestine. We collected data from the three platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and adopted a mixed-method approach to our analysis. We identified three themes that emerged as significant points of comparison across our corpus: historical detail, memory media, and appropriation. Before we present our method and analysis, however, we situate this study in the

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existing literature. Whilst we do not have space within the limitations of this short chapter to present a longitudinal study of social media practice before and during Covid-19, by situating our narrow investigation within the existing literature about pre-Covid commemoration, we hope to highlight the continuation of practices before and during Covid. Our core claim in this chapter is that despite the pivot to remote engagement during the pandemic, digital practices by memory organisations neither particularly divulged from non-digital traditions nor were particularly successful as specifically digital interventions. By specifically digital in the case of social media, we refer to networked communication, virality, participatory practices, and other paradigms which have come to define distinctions between digital and broadcast era communication models.

Commemoration on Social Media The majority of scholarship about commemoration on social media has focused on the Holocaust and user-generated content. Tobias Ebbrecht-­ Hartmann and Lital Henig argue that Web 2.0 has enabled a new commemorative mode of “self-witnessing”, which “inscribes the participant-filmmaker into this memory” whilst documenting their visit to a memorial site (2021, p. 231). Such practice has been criticised as being more present—than past-orientated (Walden, 2015); more concerned with affect than historical detail (Łysak, 2021); and serving as “individual appropriation” of the past (Bareither, 2021, p. 69). Nevertheless, it has also been noted that user-generated content often reiterates existing tropes and norms of Holocaust representation (Dalziel, 2016; Commane & Potton, 2019) rather than offering something entirely distinct from established concepts of commemoration (Kansteiner, 2018). Whilst there have been some observations regarding the engagement of Holocaust institutions with the participatory dimensions of social media, this tends to be limited to the dominant voices of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum (Zalewska, 2017; Dalziel, 2021), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem (Pfanzelter, 2015). Nevertheless, Pfanzelter recognises that even in 2015, “official entities [were] not at the forefront of innovative [or] creative” uses of digital technologies for memory work (2015, p. 215). If anything, over time, we have observed less experimentation with the affordances of social media by such institutions, and more acceptance of a broadcast-style mode of address, the more

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routine the use of these platforms becomes within organisations’ communication strategies. In contrast, literature about the Bosnian genocide and Srebrenica memory online foregrounds vernacular, diasporic, and countermemorial projects, such as “cyber villages” (Halilovich, 2014) or “hashtag memory activism” (Fridman, 2022); photo-sharing between tourists and locals (James, 2013); and discussions in YouTube comment threads (de Smale, 2020). Such memory spaces are illustrative of the wider shape of memory culture related to this genocide, which often relies on diasporic organisations (e.g., Remembering Srebrenica), individual and collective protest actions against commemoration bans (e.g., White Armband Day), transnational art projects (e.g., Što Te Nema), or crowdsourced material from victims (e.g., War Childhood Museum). As Sabina Tanovic (2022) argues, at an official level, there is a “slow memoricide” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, thus rather than a clear “bifurcation” between institutional and fragmentary memory, the latter is desperately trying to resist the forgetting and denial at more official levels (e.g., Fridman & Ristić, 2020). As yet, we have discovered no literature on digital memory culture related to Beau Bassin, which is still emerging. Did the pandemic change the ways these memory institutions and wider social actors, including memory activists, interact? Tobias Ebbrecht-­ Hartmann argues that during the pandemic, “Holocaust Memorials began experimenting with the potential of social media for Holocaust memory [and] these experiments finally accepted the ongoing generational change and reacted to significant previous shifts in media consumption” (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020, p. 1095). He identifies three ways in which memorial sites in Germany used social media at this time, distinguishing these as “transferring”, “transforming”, and “translating” pre-digital approaches. Whilst Ebbrecht-Hartmann identifies some new initiatives, the examples in his article nevertheless highlight that there remains a reliance on both pre-digital forms of Holocaust memory (presentation of material evidence, site tours, and survivor talks) and pre-­digital logics (presenting an organisation’s work to an audience in the traditions of the one-to-many model of broadcast media rather than activating a memory community through a many-to-many, network model). Where participation was demonstrated, such as the answering of user questions during live Instagram tours, it replicated the kind of live participation available during in-person visits (Walden, 2020). Some organisations removed the participatory elements of offline activities such as tours, however, opting instead

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to share recorded videos on YouTube (POLIN) or promote existing 360-panoramas (Auschwitz Museum). Institutions were also often reluctant to enable participatory features of online platforms such as Zoom after instances of “Zoom-bombing” (Walden, 2021). As EbbrechtHartmann’s categories of transferring, transforming, and translating suggest, the remote access of the pandemic did not introduce new practices; rather it involved the replication of pre-pandemic activities through digital means. Lacking from the existing literature on Covid-time commemoration is the comparison between commemoration activities on public pages and posts and those created by memory organisations (see also Manca et al. in this book). Posts by non-institutional users – the focus of studies on self-­ witnessing – tend to attract far less engagement than public pages. For our research, we attended instead to publicly available pages (Meta platforms) and posts (Twitter) dealing with three commemoration activities noted above. To compare the memory practices of commemorative organisations with broader public memory online, we felt it was important to consider this vast overlooked, yet popular, dominion of social media content.

Method We asked three organisations: Neuengamme, Remembering Srebrenica, and the South African Holocaust and Genocide Partnership for the hashtags they used to promote commemoration of their associated anniversaries in 2020. Rather than make assumptions about hashtags, most active periods, and accounts, we were led by these organisations in terms of defining the parameters of our searches. This was important to our approach because we were as much interested in the digital literacies and awareness of organisations as we were in their content. For this initial study, we wanted to focus on three distinct commemorative events, which marked different historical dates and used social media distinctly. Neuengamme had created two Twitter accounts especially for the 75th anniversary (@75Liberation and @75Befreiung); Remembering Srebrenica complemented its main account with regional ones; whilst the Beau Bassin memorial did not have a social media presence beyond a Facebook page with few posts and relied on its partners to share information about its work beyond its immediate network. Whilst the official 25th anniversary events for Srebrenica were led by the memorial centre in Potocari in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we chose the UK-based Remembering Srebrenica because they presented a distinct

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approach to social media use in comparison with our other two case studies with their network of regional accounts. We collected posts from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter by the three organisations, and all public pages (Meta)/posts (Twitter) for the commemoration periods related to each anniversary (capturing a few weeks before specific events and a few days afterwards).1 These three platforms were used by all three organisations. We used CrowdTangle for the Meta platforms and elsewise Twitter API 2.0. We identified the popularity of posts by ‘Total Interactions’ on Facebook and Instagram, and by ‘Retweets’ on Twitter. We adopted a mixed-method approach to our analysis, first reviewing the measures of effectiveness based on popularity and virality, and then analysed the most popular posts from the generated content (Manca, 2021). We applied “distant reading” (Moretti, 2013) through text analysis using AntCon, which allowed us to see general trends in terms of word use across the data sets produced. However, to avoid making assumptions based on automated reports, we complemented this with close reading of the most popular posts. We initially identified the ‘most popular’ as posts with more than 1000 total interactions (Meta) and original tweets with more than 100 retweets as these parameters gave us a sample of posts to look at across Neuengamme and Srebrenica at least. However, these thresholds resulted in a rather small sample of content: whilst we were able to maintain the 1000/100 threshold for posts by Remembering Srebrenica, Neuengamme’s official counts on Meta platforms did not reach the same levels of interaction, so here we resorted to posts with more than ‘100’ total interactions. We only found 1 Instagram post, 5 Facebook posts, and 1 tweet related to Beau Bassin in total, and only 2 of these had more than 100 total interactions. From this sample, we identified three core themes, which emerged from the data sets and presented significant points for comparison, which we will discuss in the next section. There are of course limitations to our approach. CrowdTangle and Twitter API 2.0 provide extensive coverage of posts within the search parameters, which is far more comprehensive than the ad hoc approach of 1  Beau Bassin collection period: August 2–16, 2020 (Commemoration Date: August 12); Neuengamme collection period: April 1–May 15, 2020 (Commemoration Date: May 4, but Neuengamme participates in a commemoration period alongside other sites of former Nazi concentration camps starting in April); Remembering Srebrenica collection period: July 2020 (Memorial Week July 5–12).

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manually searching hashtags. Nevertheless, we cannot guarantee these data sets are complete, and we cannot view deleted content, which can affect access to contentious posts, and those espousing denial or distortion. We have not yet explored comments, which would illustrate the wider public discussions provoked by different posts. However, an investigation of comments takes us into the realms of big data and requires different methods and will take much longer to interrogate than was possible in the timeframe to provide this chapter.

Historical Detail The two most popular posts related to Neuengamme during the collection period were by other memory institutions: Le Mémorial de Caen and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). They both shared the same image of a young girl, Jacqueline Morgenstern, with information about her experience as a victim of medical experiments at the concentration camp. The USHMM post then links out to their Holocaust Encyclopaedia. These posts are illustrative of a long-established trend amongst popular posts to focus on individual stories. The major emphasis across posts that refer to the past was on individuals and specific instances of atrocities. Nevertheless, despite individualisation and specificity providing historical nuance across a diverse range of posts, our wider text analysis highlighted significant occlusions. We discovered an absence of specificity regarding victim groups, with the more general terms “prisoners” and “häftlinge” featuring highly across the board in favour of “victims”, including in posts from the Neuengamme official accounts. Even in posts about a specific individual, such as Jacqueline Morgenstern, it is not possible to detect that she is Jewish unless one clicks through on the USHMM posts and reaches her case study in the Encyclopaedia (about halfway down the page in a side box). Jacqueline Morgenstern was transferred to Neuengamme for tuberculosis experiments and was murdered in the massacre at Bullenhuser Damm, Hamburg, which aimed to hide the evidence of these crimes. The exhibition and memorial at Bullenhuser Damm are not mentioned in any of the posts circulating her image. Thus, whilst the trope of the child victim here could have been used to draw attention to lesser visited memorial sites, it was not. All images of victims in popular posts were of children suggesting an infantilisation of victims. Whilst most interactions tended to be superficial

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(i.e., just ‘likes’ or ‘retweets’), in the case of Jacqueline Morgenstern, the most popular post featuring her image reached 1018 comments, 2779 shares, 1184 angry, 3493 sad, and only 711 likes. Thus, she clearly provoked empathetic responses, which encouraged others to remark on and share her story. Jacqueline’s dominance in the popular posts, in terms of virality and popularity, and the diversity of responses to her story, suggests not only the reiteration of existing tropes of Holocaust memory (the child survivor as empathetic figure) but also the continuing elevated status of some memory institutions (notably USHMM here) over others (Pfanzelter, 2015). It is not necessarily the case that institutions only shared images of child victims; however, this trope was by far the most popular with users and provoked the widest ranges of interactions. Moving beyond established stereotypes associated with the Holocaust in public discourse thus remains a challenge for memory institutions. References to perpetrators or perpetration were also abstract, “SS” is used both by the official Neuengamme accounts and more broadly, but otherwise we only came across “faschismus” amongst the common words used in the wider corpus. Interestingly, however, “Gardelegen” appears as a popular term across all three platforms, suggesting that whilst historically problematic categories are not so common anymore (i.e., simplistic delineations of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims), there is some acknowledgement of incidents of violence which were not solely driven by the SS. Whilst “Gardelegen” appeared frequently across posts, it did not feature in any of the most popular ones. This discrepancy highlights the articulation of ongoing struggles on social media to draw attention to narratives which challenge existing tropes. The most popular posts by the Neuengamme official accounts, however, were less past-orientated and tended to adopt characteristics of self-­ witnessing: promoting the memorial’s events, sharing news, and uploading videos in which staff discuss the site. There were also posts commemorating specific survivors, who had recently passed away. Thus, the Neuengamme accounts were more likely to use terms like “survivor” than “victims”. The Neuengamme accounts referred more to individuals who have been part of the memorial’s contemporary community rather than identifying them in relation to their site-related histories. Thus, more present-­orientated posts tended to be the most popular. In contrast, posts about Srebrenica and the Bosnian Genocide, more broadly, were thin on detail. This was also noted across all the Beau Bassin

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posts. In both cases, there was a focus on quantifying the historical experience by focusing on the number of victims and their identities: In September 1940, 1,580 Jews managed to leave Nazi occupied Europe to British Mandated Palestine and were subsequently deported to the British Colony of Mauritius. Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre Facebook, August 11 2020

Like the other Beau Bassin posts, this one links to a resource, in this case a podcast where viewers can find out more. Remembering Srebrenica shared this text-only post: On this day in 1995, between 1,000-1,500 Bosnian Muslims were executed in the Kravica village. The mass executions occurred in the four separate warehouses that the Bosnian Muslims imprisoned in (sic). Remembering Srebrenica Facebook, July 14, 2020

Other users adopted a similar style on Twitter to highlight specific places, number of victims, and occasionally the perpetrators (e.g., “Serb Forces”, “Bosnian Serbs”) with reference to the inaction of UN troops often in short, text-only posts, which nevertheless do well in terms of total interactions. However, the motivation behind the killings as well as the larger historical context of the Yugoslav wars was mentioned scarcely. There was more focus on victims (“Bosnians”) and place (“Bosnia”) across the board, although “Muslim” was more likely to be mentioned in posts not by Remembering Srebrenica. The term “Bosniaks” did not appear in our wordlist analysis in AntCon, with international dignitaries and organisations using “Bosnian” to refer to language and people, and English being the dominant language in the popular wordlist despite us not filtering out any languages. There were occasional references to individuals by both Remembering Srebrenica (e.g., in reference to those victims to be buried in 2020) and across the wider corpus of popular posts (e.g., Ramo Osmanovic2), but most referred to collective suffering. Nevertheless, many of the most popular posts referred to perpetrators (although in general terms) and other complicit parties (UN) or individual victims and survivors; these posts also were more likely to refer to the victims’ Muslim faith. There is clearly significant interest in these specificities, even if most 2  Ramo was forced to call his son to surrender before they were both executed. A sculpture memorialises this moment in Veliki Park, Sarajevo.

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posts by public pages tend to be more guarded in their language, preferring passive descriptions of violence and non-specifics about victims and perpetrators (perhaps to avoid provoking denialists). Although there has been increasing visibility of Holocaust distortion and denial online, there is generally more consensus about the Holocaust than the Bosnian Genocide, where denial is more prevalent in political circles, and amongst non-Bosniak publics. Whilst we do not have space in this chapter to address this dissensus in detail, we can infer that the repetition of clear, precise, albeit brief details about the genocide and specific massacres online serves as a way to resist this denial by ensuring the same basic facts circulate across networks. The facts about Srebrenica and a few other events such as the mass murder in Kravica repeat in short soundbites across the platforms. It is difficult therefore not to acknowledge that atrocities took place in Bosnia against (Muslim) Bosniaks (albeit referred to as ‘Bosnians’ in our corpus) if one engages with hashtags related to Srebrenica. Whilst “genocide” tends to be near the top of all our text analysis lists, it is barely mentioned in comparison to the word “Srebrenica”.3 At the same time, the word “genocide” features more than “massacre”, suggesting acceptance of the genocide is more prevalent in public posts than denial narratives. Beau Bassin is barely visible on social media, thus whilst we recognise an emerging communication trend similar to that of Srebrenica, it is not yet prevalent enough to have much impact. In the case of the liberation of the concentration camps and Neuengamme in particular, there is a vast fragmentation of history. How problematic is the fragmented representation of the past? It is not a new phenomenon (Aguilar & Makhortykh, 2022); nevertheless it leads to a skewed treatment of historical details, in particular when contextualising the suffering and identifying the intentions of individuals and organisations. In contrast, the basic details regarding Srebrenica and the Bosnian Genocide are widely repeated, yet historical specificity is minimal. There appears to be a tension between balancing the need to ensure details about genocides are known and yet avoiding such a wide dispersal of specifics about people and places that the broad narrative 3  Mentions of Srebrenica and genocide on Remembering Srebrenica posts on Facebook: Srebrenica 384/genocide 150; public posts on Facebook: Srebrenica 1285/genocide 628; Remembering Srebrenica on Instagram: Srebrenica 151/ genocide 69; public posts on Instagram: Srebrenica 654; genocide 209; Remembering Srebrenica on Twitter: Srebrenica 408/genocide 182; public tweets: Srebrenica 55,840/genocide 7720.

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gets fragmented beyond coherence. Such fragmentation can go so far as to occlude the genocide itself (which by definition is the attempt to eradicate a whole people). Too much fragmentation then can splitter such a mass atrocity into individualised acts of violence. When commemoration activities are happening across a range of offline and online contexts, such fragmentation is perhaps less concerning, as, for example, a social media post might encourage an individual to visit a memorial site or participate in a commemoration event, both of which have the space and time to present complexity and nuance. However, when in-person activities were not possible during the pandemic, social media became one of the few channels for engaging the public.

Memory Media There has been much debate about whether digital media herald a new media age (Merrin, 2014) or simply “remediate” older media forms (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). This debate takes on a particular resonance during the pandemic, as public discourse about commemoration circulated suggestions of radical digital reforms that would shape a new, post-­ pandemic world. Nevertheless, as we have already highlighted, such transformation was overstated. Instead, we saw ample examples of remediation of non-digital media. Archival photographs dominated popular posts related to the liberation of Neuengamme, yet they were featured only in popular posts by official Neuengamme accounts as the automated complementary image to links to external content. The archival images were a combination of reports about the liberation, evidence of medical experiments on the Bullenhuser Damm children, or family photographs. In contrast, those from the memorial site’s official accounts tended to be more present-orientated, including contemporary photographs or videos of recent commemoration services, survivors, the memorial, or videos of staff marking the commemoration or sharing curational stories. Yet, these new digitally born recordings were far less popular. Similarly, to the official Neuengamme accounts, the images in posts related to Beau Bassin were automated by the shared external links. The content shared about Beau Bassin was digitally born: an online news story, a Facebook event, and a podcast. The emphasis on new content highlights the liminality between visibility and forgetting (although these posts received barely any interactions from users).

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In contrast, video addresses dominated in the most popular posts from Remembering Srebrenica accounts. Unlike Neuengamme, these did not refer to the organisation’s work but rather are statements from celebrities (e.g., Angelina Jolie) and politicians (e.g., London Mayor, Sadiq Khan). This style of commemoration is prevalent in the wider array of public posts on Facebook and Instagram too, albeit this time the video addresses are from political figures in countries with large Muslim populations, including Indonesia and Pakistan. The video addresses feel like short political broadcasts evoking the statement-like feel of the text-only posts detailing succinct facts of massacres. Archival imagery related to the Bosnian Genocide is presented in clips from television broadcasts or photo montages from news reports. Three out of the top ten most popular posts are by Al Jazeera, who have also provided broadcast reports for the virtual tour of the Srebrenica Memorial (created in partnership with Remembering Srebrenica). Whilst the posts in our collecting period for the 25th anniversary of Srebrenica achieved far greater total interactions than the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camps or Beau Bassin, there is nevertheless a sense that the basic facts need to be reiterated (very much like the ‘six million’ repeated mantra heard at an earlier stage in Holocaust memory) and thus repetition of the colour moving-images of television footage is still used to evidence that this happened not so long ago in contrast to black-­ and-­white still photographs as the dominant visualisation of the Holocaust on social media. Photographs of memorials also feature in popular posts about Srebrenica and in the Neuengamme context (although these tend to focus more broadly on ‘liberation’). All the images emphasise grey tones and depict elements of existent physical memorials. This commemorative aesthetic is suggestive of Kansteiner’s (2018) argument regarding an institutionalised traditional decorum about memory bleeding across social media commemoration. It is not only the accounts of memory institutions that share such photographs. Indeed, popular posts were by cultural, journalist, and political organisations. It is thus not necessarily memory institutions that define commemoration aesthetics and so-called institutionalised memory (Kansteiner, 2018). Rather, we must recognise that tropes established in public discourse emerge more broadly through political commemoration (such as national ceremonies) and popular culture (Ebbrecht, 2014). Whilst we have so far focused on how posts remediated other media forms, it is pertinent to address how the affordances of social media platforms themselves were used. There was little evidence of orchestrated

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participatory campaigns organised around specific hashtags in any of our three case studies. Whilst Neuengamme developed the @75Liberation and @75Befreiung Twitter accounts (initiated before the first lockdown), they achieved only 8 and 9 tweets with more than 100 retweets, respectively. These most popular posts retweeted tweets from the nine most popular accounts plus @AuschwitzMuseum.4 Thus, they furthered the support for already popular tweets, rather than provoking new content to go viral or activating a specific campaign across social media. Neither Remembering Srebrenica or the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre provided us with bespoke hashtags related to campaigns. Nevertheless, #LettersFromBosnia surfaced in several of the popular posts by Remembering Srebrenica on Instagram. These posts presented images of faux letters with page creases serving as a backdrop to typed snippets of survivors’ memories, creating a personal address between survivors and users. That this hashtag and campaign appeared as one of the most popular in our searches but was not listed by Remembering Srebrenica suggests the organisation does not have a systematic approach to monitoring social media campaigns. Like @75Liberation/@75Befreiung, this evidences some level of a specific campaign designed to mark this anniversary year on social media; however, neither exemplifies using hashtags to encourage user participation in commemorative practice. We do, however, see an example of this in January 2022 with the UNESCO/World Jewish Congress #WeRemember campaign. To briefly digress to this more recent example, the top three posts on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Instagram that year were from a German politician, an American-Jewish actress, and a German football team, but all contained an image of them holding a paper sign saying #WeRemember. We will critique the historical emptiness of these posts in a later chapter. However, we mention it here briefly to illustrate the distinction between applying a hashtag to posts to establish a network between a series of your own posts or a small, trusted group of users, and using a hashtag to encourage the dispersal of a message through virality. In our 2020 corpus then, despite the fact social 4  Nine accounts were responsible for the 19 original tweets with more than 100 retweets. Collectively, these accounted for 5215 of a total of 25,397 public tweets using any of the identified hashtags/keywords provided by the Neuengamme memorial team. These accounts were @GermanyinJapan, @GermanyNATO, @en_Germany, @dergazaetteur, @DiePolierer, @ NDRnds, @derechterand, @vvn_bda, @ravensbrueck.

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media were the main platforms for institutional memory engagement during this period of the pandemic, there is little evidence of any cohesion across a connective, networked memory culture on social media beyond the professional network Neuengamme’s campaign strengthened between memorial sites and other organisations. The tendency then was to remediate non-digital commemoration traditions rather than prioritise approaches engaging with the affordances of social media platforms in themselves.

Appropriation Commemorative practice on social media during Covid not only continued tendencies of fragmentary memory cultures and remediated non-­ digital media, but also offered no obvious change in memory politics. Whilst official posts by Neuengamme accounts either announced their activities or curated narratives about the past, the wider corpus using the #75Liberation and #75Befreiung hashtags and #8Mai demonstrated significant evidence of appropriation on three themes: (1) national narratives; (2) calls for 8 May to be a national holiday in Germany; and (3) enunciations in support of international, anti-fascism/socialism. Posts related to Neuengamme and liberation were overwhelmingly in German. However, there were a few exceptions, including those already mentioned referring to Jacqueline Morgenstern. Others included a repeated narrative across two of the most popular Facebook posts by the Danish Red Cross about the ‘white buses’ organised by the Swedish Red Cross and Danish government to rescue inmates from Neuengamme in the spring of 1945. One popular post by the Colourised WW2 account mentioned Britain and included an image of liberated British prisoners of war holding the Union Flag. Here then we see oft-repeated trends of narratives of rescue and patriotic soldiers. Some national sentiments were however subtle. The most prevalent was from German dignitaries, who either blurred distinctions between the German victims of allied and Soviet attacks on the nation’s cities and victims of Nazi persecution in the camps or presented the Holocaust and World War II as universal lessons (or a combination of both of these trends). In an Instagram post by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the image is blazon with text in German, which reads: Dass von deutschem Boden nie wieder Krieg oder Menschheitsverbrechen ausgehen dürfen, ist heute unverrückbarer Kern deutscher Außenpolitik.

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[The fact that war or crimes against humanity must never again emanate from German soil is today an immovable core of German foreign policy] May 8, 2020

Whilst implying some sense of German culpability and a need for lessons to be learnt at the official level of “policy”, the quote remains ambiguous. There is no mention of “genocide”; rather the words “war” and the more general “crimes against humanity” are used. Rather than attribute guilt to specific German actors, or indeed other international collaborators, the tragedy of the Nazi past seems to have “emanate[d] from German soil”. This remark depersonalises the very acts of perpetration it claims to ward against whilst simultaneously reiterating the notion of collective guilt on geographical principles. Further still, this statement in German is accompanied by English text, which states: No day has shaped recent history more than May 8, 1945 – the end of the Second World War. Our advocacy for a strong and united Europe, for human rights as a universal expression of human dignity, for rule-based international cooperation, the rejection of German special paths – all this is fed by the knowledge of the unprecedented crimes of Germany in the 20th century, which Holocaust have found their most monstrous expression” (sic).

In the English language, German culpability is mentioned (albeit as a nation) with reference to the Sonderweg argument of the Historikersteit and suggesting the Holocaust was an evitable conclusion to a long, specifically German political and social tradition, rather than an aberration in the nation’s history. However, here we see the “foreign policy” hinted at in the German-language caption more fully  – it is not so much about Germany’s actions towards the world but rather advocacy for “universal” and “international” approaches to human rights and cooperation. Thus, the message articulated here at the official, national level from Germany regards the Holocaust, Nazism, and World War II as offering universal lessons from the past, which Germany will lead the world in learning now and in the future. The nuances of the past including German perpetration and the multiple different actions of a wide range of German citizens are obscured. On Facebook, on May 8, the German Consulate General Hong Kong shared a black-and-white composite image, juxtaposing a bombed urban

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landscape with a close-up of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin with roses lying on one of the stellae (the roses are the only element in colour). In the centre of the image are the words “The END May 8, 1945 A BEGINNING”. The post reiterates tropes of physical commemoration services but makes a clear visual link to a specific past (albeit details of the time and place of the historical image are not shared so it stands as a symbol of the war, only). The lack of historical specificity here is not the only problematic link to the past. Rather, the bombing of an urban space in a post by the German Consulate, which only mentions Germany, and the juxtaposition of this image with that of the memorial in the nation’s capital imply that the archival photograph is of Berlin (although we suspect it is more likely Dresden). The German capital is here represented as a victim of war with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (although it is not named) representing commemoration of the historical victims. This association makes a troubling semantic connection between the commemoration of victims of the Holocaust and the destruction of German cities during the war. There are haunting similarities between such a suggestion and the extreme right contraposition between the Holocaust and the Allied air raids. The other two trends we observed offered alternative responses to the ambiguous, official messages. The call for May 8 to be a national holiday in Germany seems to emanate from a post by the relative of a survivor sharing their story and the petition. This particular post though was not the most popular; however, the virality of the campaign is demonstrated in a post by @dielinke which highlights a Zoom discussion about why it should be made a Feiertag. On this theme, one popular Facebook post by Laut gegen Nazis (April 11) reiterates a message we saw in the wider corpus, which situates the ‘Oath of Buchenwald’ made by a group of international antifascists imprisoned at the concentration camp as a foundation myth for the need for continuing political action. At times, the two narratives intertwine, as we see in one of the popular tweets which asks: Can we get 50,000 signatures by tomorrow evening, the 75th anniversary of the Buchenwald oath? How nice that would be?! @vvn_bda, April 18, 2020

Like the posts from government agencies, references to anti-fascism transcend national boundaries in recognition of the significance of the importance of international collaboration, as with the ‘Oath of

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Buchenwald’. Unlike official government posts, these ones are often situated in socialist discourse and express an urgency to better commemorate and educate at the national level through the calls to make May 8 a holiday across the whole of Germany. Whilst it is Holocaust memory which has been increasingly referred to, albeit controversially (Assmann, 2017 and Walden, 2022), as “transnational” (Levy & Sznaider, 2002), our corpus suggests this is truer of the memory of Srebrenica on social media. Despite adding no language filter to our searches, we were overwhelmed with German-language posts regarding Neuengamme (which is not surprising given that at least two of the search terms were German: 75Befreiung and 8Mai, nevertheless we also searched for their English equivalents). Whilst most of the popular posts were not in German, the language of expression often related to the national memory context. For Srebrenica, our searches were dedicated to variants on the place name with or without reference to the genocide and/or anniversary year. Here, we discovered posts in a diverse range of languages including those from the Balkan region, as well as Turkish, Arabic, Indonesian, English and others. Comparisons to other human rights issues and references to Islamophobia more generally were present, such as we can see in these two tweets: July 2020 marks 25 years since the #Srebrenica Massacre, the murder of over 8000 Bosnian Muslims & ethnic cleansing of over 20000 people. The world has a collective responsibility to ensure history is not repeated. What is happening in #IOJK and #Palestine is chillingly similar. @SMQureshiPTI (Foreign Minister of Pakistan), July 11, 2020 They buried us in the ground but they didn’t know we were seeds. * Aliya Izetbegovic * #Srebrenica genocide, the creepy dark side of Westerners who want to exterminate Muslims from Europe! * Don’t forget! Don’t forget! #SrebrenicaGenocide #Srebrenica. @yusufalabarda, July 11, 2020

Both posts politicise the Bosnian genocide with a sense of urgency, suggesting that it is illustrative of wider Islamophobic sentiment which the posters imply could lead to the same consequences. Other references to Islamophobia are more subtle, such as in the most popular Instagram post featuring a repeated story across our popular posts of a woman

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photographed next to a young man on his bicycle. The caption reads “Could I take a picture with you? You Look just like my son”. Beneath the post’s written details is a series of hashtags which includes #Islamophobia. There are also posts which make connections between the Bosnian Genocide and the Holocaust/World War II in different ways. A commonly espoused statement is that Srebrenica was the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II – a reminder that amidst the grand narrative of the Holocaust as the genocide in Europe, which we must guard against to ensure “never again”, has happened again in Europe. A popular, text-only Facebook post by British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan, however, blurs these two trends: 25 years ago this week, 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were massacred at Srebrenica. Many of them were blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white Europeans. Murdered by fellow white Europeans. But they were Muslim. Islamophobia kills. Islamophobia leads to genocide. #Bosnia #Rohingya #Uighurs                Mehdi Hasan, Facebook July 13, 2020

Hasan’s post adopts the Nordic idea of Whiteness (Dyer, 1997) as a tactic to encourage people to empathise with the “white” Bosnian Muslims. Hasan uses colonial-era pseudo-race science against the (Western) European audience he seems to be addressing in a post which offers a warning against Islamophobia. The problematic undertone to this message is that these people are just like you (as if that might make the user consider their lives more worthy). Yet, his use of hashtags extends the focus of the post beyond the “blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white European [Muslims]” so central to his core message to Rohingya and Uighurs, who suffer horrendous human rights violations today. In contrast to the political focus of several of the public posts about Srebrenica, especially on Twitter, Remembering Srebrenica mostly used the platform to thank local (UK) councils for making their commemoration visible. Thus, whilst political figures dominate many of Remembering Srebrenica’s posts, the organisation does not engage with the wider discussions about the political significance of the Bosnian genocide. These posts also adopt many of the characteristics of self-witnessing albeit, like Neuengamme, in a formal mode of address: video speeches by dignitaries thanking local councils for engaging in commemorations. It is their

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present-focused posts highlighting acts or markers of commemoration that tend to be more popular than their past-orientated ones. The main exception to this is the #LettersFromBosnia campaign on Instagram: three of such posts are amongst the six most popular from Remembering Srebrenica on the platform. We did not see any appropriation of Beau Bassin, but as we have highlighted, we observed barely any posts about the site and its history. If anything, then, we saw a dearth of engagement, which places it at higher risk of being forgotten than those histories which are decontextualised. Although when histories are detached from their specifics, we must ask if they are really being remembered at all.

Conclusion We sought to compare the use of social media by memory institutions with wider, public engagement with major commemorative events in 2020. We had hypothesised that the remote engagement imposed by the pandemic might have encouraged new digital commemoration practices for the major anniversaries of 2020. We sought to explore to what extent there remains a “bifurcation” of memory culture in the digital age (Hoskins, 2014) and whether it could still be claimed that memory institutions have lost their authority (Hoskins, 2018). Might the unprecedented circumstances of Covid have given memory institutions renewed authority online as they were forced to engage in the networked and participatory dimensions of digital culture? A quick answer to this question would be ‘no’; we found little evidence of change. A simple quantitative sorting of posts highlighted that institutions tended to be grossly underrepresented in the most popular posts using keywords related to their associated commemoration events. We then delved deeper into our corpus to study word frequencies across all the collected posts and the specific content of the most popular posts. The main conclusions from our research follow. Firstly, we observed a clear bifurcation of memory culture between content from memory institutions and the wider public. We also identified a clear demarcation between memory institutions focused on (a) an official form of self-­ witnessing, in which they talk about their work in the present, or (b) the curation of historical information with or without complementary archival evidence. This contrasts a wider public use of social media to engage in memory debates and campaigns and to use the past for contemporary

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agendas. These two cultures did not unify even though they both relied mostly on social media for public outreach during Covid. Secondly, we observed that the more a historical event was commemorated, the more messages about it were fragmented into a diverse range of distinct snippets, unlikely to be read together, which threatens the coherency of historical detail (as similarly identified in relation to Anne Frank memes: Aguilar & Makhortykh, 2022). There is more at stake with this fragmentation during Covid, as commemoration practices could only be accessed online (there was no possibility to use fragmentary messages to encourage viewers to visit more nuanced exhibitions). Thirdly, our research evidences that rules of decorum, memory politics, and the media forms and aesthetics established in pre-digital contexts continue to prevail online during Covid. Finally, we note that it is not simply that institutions are not being creative; it is clear from engagement data that old tropes are hard to break as these tend to be the most popular with users, and social media virality relies on the actions of the network, not just the organisation that posts. We would, thus, argue against any suggestion that the necessity to turn to digital forms of commemoration during Covid might help define a distinct “post-pandemic” approach, as if the lockdowns caused a seismic shift in memorialisation culture as some have been forecasting.

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Moretti, F. (2013). Distant reading. Verso Books. Pfanzelter, E. (2015). At the crossroads with public history: Mediating the Holocaust on the Internet. Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 21(4), 250–271. Tanovic, S. (2022). Augmented Sarajevo: Digitally reconstruction war heritage and the sense of place. In V.  G. Walden (Ed.), The memorial museum in the digital age. ReFrame. Walden, V.  G. (2015). New ethical questions and social media: Young people’s construction of Holocaust memory online. Frames Cinema Journal, 7, 2053–8812. Walden, V. G. (2020). Anne Frank virtual tour of Bergen Belsen. Digital Holocaust Memory [Blog]. https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/digitalholocaustmemory/2020/06/24/anne-­frank-­virtual-­tour-­of-­bergen-­belsen/ Walden, V. G. (2021). Understanding Holocaust memory and education in the digital age: Before and after Covid-19. Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 28(3), 257–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750490 2.2021.1979175# Walden, V. G. (Ed.). (2022). The memorial museum in the digital age. ReFrame. Zalewska, M. (2017). Selfies from Auschwitz: Rethinking the relationship between spaces of memory and places of commemoration in the digital age. Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, 18, 95–116.

CHAPTER 13

#DigitalMemorial(s): How COVID-19 Reinforced Holocaust Memorials and Museums’ Shift Toward Social Media Memory Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Tom Divon

Introduction Amid 2020, the unexpected implications of the COVID-19 pandemic have forced the total closure of all non-essential structures and activities. Falling under the criteria of the World Health Organization, museums could not open their doors to the visiting public and consequently had to amplify their digital activities while spreading cultural knowledge through digital means (Agostino et  al., 2020). This measure posed a particular challenge, as journalist P.  J. Grisar (2020) reminded the readers of the Forward in March 2020: “Museums are ultimately reliant on physical attendance and tours, but with no definite sense when they’ll be able to

T. Ebbrecht-Hartmann (*) • T. Divon Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_13

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reopen, those in the field are using the situation to innovate and to plan beyond the current crisis.” Due to the global spread of lockdowns, Holocaust memorials and museums had to close their facilities in the spring of 2020 as well. Therefore, memorials could not host any visitors or offer on-site guided tours, and the severe travel restrictions made it inevitable to cancel ceremonies that had been planned to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in the spring of 1945. Being part of an age-based high-risk group, Holocaust survivors were compelled to stay home and were prevented from traveling and attending commemoration events. As an effect of these challenges, the importance of digital communication technology and social media increased significantly. The intensified use of technology-driven initiatives served as a prosthesis for commemorating from a distance (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020a), a phenomenon Alison Landsberg (2004) once described as “prosthetic memory.” Accordingly, while acknowledging that the lockdowns and the consequential digital response were a shared challenge to museums around the world, in this chapter, we ask in which ways the pandemic had an accelerating effect on global commemorative practices and, more specifically, on Holocaust memory.

Commemoration on Social Media Before COVID-19 Long before the COVID-19 crisis, museums of all kinds have undergone enormous changes in light of the “connective turn” (Hoskins, 2017), translating into a “sudden abundance, pervasiveness, and immediacy of digital media, communication networks and archives” (p. 1). In the past two decades, as the online memory revolution offered individuals the ability to search, find, share, copy, and discuss the past in previously inconceivable ways, the participatory online culture (Jenkins et al., 2016) sparked forms of engagement radically altering ways in which museums engage with their audiences. On the one hand, museums’ onboarding to the digital realm expanded the accessibility, inclusiveness, responsiveness, visibility, and transparency for users (Besterman, 2006). On the other hand, it has recast enduring questions of control, authority, and ownership over the past in a realm inhabiting the public that is “different than the physical one with which museums have centuries of experience” (Wong, 2011, p. 98).

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The digital presence of museums focused on commemorative work enabled the past to weave through new vernaculars of features, practices, and aesthetics of digital platforms, affording its persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability (boyd, 2014). This has given rise to various grassroots commemorative digital practices of users that infused substantial tension in the authorized memory discourse as practiced and promoted by institutions. This tension is becoming even more evident regarding Holocaust-related institutions, as online platforms, and in particular social media environments, “leave institutionalized pathways and blur the boundaries to the private” (Pfanzelter, 2017, p. 137). Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook quickly became new-media environments for communicating visitors’ experiences at memorial sites, suffusing the visibility of new digital aesthetics like selfies that were often interpreted as disrespectful and trivializing gestures (Ebbrecht-Hartmann & Henig, 2021) and digital dialects like hashtags linking photographs and comments to heritage sites and shaping the perception of Holocaust commemoration on social media. When examining the use of #Auschwitz on Instagram, Commane and Potton (2019, p.  178) identified a “majority of positive engagements,” with users posting images relating to remembrance. Although they also found images and comments related to antisemitism, still, the user engagement with #Auschwitz on Instagram contributed to the site’s extension as a physical location, “with users (predominantly tourists to the camp) providing routes for these narratives into social media via visual means.” Similarly, Bareither (2020, p. 12) claimed that “digital self-representations at sites of difficult heritage can constitute complex practices of emotional engagement with the past,” and Pfanzelter (2017) emphasized that presentation and discourse about the history and memory of the Holocaust on websites is a cardinal example for transcultural mediation processes between history and memory, commemoration, technology, and culture. In addition, successful non-institutional commemorative projects like @ eva.stories, which uses Instagram’s grassroots aesthetics of “stories,” allow the inscribing of memories into social media networks and consider the audience as co-creators of this experience (Henig & Ebbrecht-­ Hartmann, 2022). For these reasons, a substantial number of Holocaust museums and memorial sites have started using social media platforms to “open space for debates, discussions, and remembrance” (Commane & Potton, 2019, p. 159) and allow a new memory ecology for commemorative initiatives to

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emerge. Hoskins (2016, p.  349) introduced this concept “as a holistic perspective for revealing and imagining memory’s multiple connections and functions.” Thus, memory ecologies comprise the “multiple forms, flows and iterations” of memory processes (p.  353). Social media can thereby augment the physical heritage sites and simultaneously constitute autonomous spaces of commemoration. In October 2009, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum became the first Holocaust-related institution to launch an official Facebook page. Manca (2021a), in her study on how the Auschwitz-­ Birkenau Memorial, the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington used social media to reach out to their communities before the pandemic, discovered that the three institutions were already quite active on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. While the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial was more active on Twitter, the USHMM used Facebook to communicate its content, and Yad Vashem primarily engaged with the public through YouTube videos. The three memorials also began actively using Instagram, with the Auschwitz memorial adopting the main strategy of advocacy of positive examples for commemorating the site with images (Zalewska, 2017, pp. 110–112). Manca (2021a, p. 13), however, still identified a “broadcast-mode use of social media” that followed a “mono-directional communication” of content. Correspondingly, Holocaust memorials and museums used social media platforms mainly as a tool for displaying pre-curated content and parts of their collections, or as Pfanzelter described it in 2017 (p. 140): “Museums and memorials are now engaged in the multilingual ‘feeding’ of different social networking platforms by representing their vast archival material and collections and by promoting their activities and publications online.” Corresponding with the museums’ digital turn in the mid-2000, the USHHM began showing documents from its collections and archives on Facebook in 2009 (Pfanzelter, 2017, p. 141), and in the following years, it made YouTube an important online environment for distributing its audiovisual content. On that platform, the USHMM, as well as Yad Vashem, shared (and continue to share) testimonies of Holocaust survivors, educational videos on Holocaust-related topics, and videos introducing specific objects in various playlists. Instagram especially proved suitable for the purposes of Holocaust memorials, as their social media

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departments usually posted digitized historical documents and photographs, often bearing signs that identified them as archival sources, accompanied by brief descriptions. Those descriptions served as historical contextualization of the visual document, offering information about related historical incidents. It should be noted that social media practices of commemorative institutions also coincided with the specific logic of platforms, for example, Instagram’s emphasis on highly personalized visual content (Highfield & Leaver, 2016). While most of the regular online activities were, as Manca (2021a) described, mono-directional, either showcasing specific collections or using social media to communicate content and activities, initiatives that were more interactive remained an exception. A reason for that, which seems to be specific to Holocaust-related institutions, is the widespread concern that increased user participation might also fuel Holocaust distortion, denial, or hate on social media platforms. While other kinds of art or history museums used the potential of user-interaction more frequently, many Holocaust-related museums and memorials were hesitant to fully explore the participatory and co-creative potential of digital media. The COVID-19 pandemic changed this situation. With our study, we aimed to better understand how Holocaust memorials and museums adjusted to the pandemic situation through the help of digital media and how they adapted social media communication strategies to enable commemoration from a distance. We traced, analyzed, and identified the institutionalized use of online platforms and digital formats on social media while unpacking various digital activities by memorials and museums. In coming parts, we expose unique possibilities to communicate with distant audiences, contributing significantly to the evolution of digital Holocaust memory.

Methodology In order to facilitate a rigorous, rich understanding of COVID-19’s impact on the culture of Holocaust commemoration, we adopted a mixed-­ methods approach to our study design. This method is based on a “procedure for collecting, analyzing, and ‘mixing’ both quantitative and qualitative data” (Ivankova et al., 2006, p. 3). To this end, we assembled a research corpus composed of two components: (a) an online survey and (b) a database documenting digital online project. By examining each of these components quantitatively as well as qualitatively and synthesizing

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them, we could build a solid analysis in which we draw “interpretations based on the combined strengths of both sets of data” (Creswell, 2014, p. 2). As our examined digital initiatives are social media-oriented, the mixed-­ methods approach also has a “potential value in social media research,” shedding light on the human meaning attached to the experiences with digital platforms (Snelson, 2016, p.  3). Building on this approach, our methodological design follows the explanatory sequential design, as our chapter “is structured with a quantitative portion first followed by a qualitative portion” (p. 9). In addition to the data collected in the survey and the database, we triangulated our findings with insights on the digital strategies of Holocaust memorials and museums as they were published in media reports and other research papers. As a first step, we analyzed the results of the online survey, which we conducted in July and August 2020, and that included the responses of 32 Holocaust-related institutions from nine countries in Europe, North America, and Israel (see Fig. 13.1). Those institutions were chosen as part of the study’s purposeful sampling process (Sandelowski, 2000), in which we addressed key players in the field of Holocaust commemoration and education. In accordance with our prior acquaintance with their robust online activities, this provided us access to an information-rich target group. The survey was completed by

Fig. 13.1  The online survey covered 32 Holocaust memorials and museums in Europe, North America, and Israel

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representatives of the institutions, such as social media experts or heads of education departments, and included 18 questions. Of them 6 were open-­ ended, in which the representatives had space to reflect on relevant experiences, and 12 were close-ended, offering nominal (9 questions) and ordinal (3 questions designed on a Likert scale) levels of measurement. As we were aiming for a better understanding of how the pandemic affected the institutions, in our questionnaire, we asked, among other topics, how the institutions continued their activities under the restrictions forced by the pandemic, which social media platforms and digital communication technology they used before and after the outbreak, and to what extent they produced new digital content in reaction to the pandemic. We were furthermore interested in the areas in which the institutions applied digital technology and online applications, as well as the intensity of usage. The representatives also shared information about their digital strategies and their use of pre-produced and new digital content during the pandemic. The survey also asked for information concerning traffic on the institutions’ websites and social media channels, including in comparison to online performance before the pandemic. The survey results were analyzed using descriptive statistics, which we found to be a useful strategy that allows reducing the data to a manageable form that summarizes the results into numerical and graphical techniques that are easy to interpret (Fisher & Marshall, 2009). All the data was presented in figures, highlighting the differences in terms of the frequency of responses. In order to move beyond mere descriptive practice and in line with our interpretive research approach, we deepened our survey analysis by carefully exploring the accumulated data in the open-ended questions, using the participants’ insights as a part of our qualitative observations. Furthermore, for the purpose of achieving profound validation of our data, we tied our findings to some related studies as supplementary secondary data (Johnston, 2017), in which Holocaust commemoration and education experts were quoted, reflecting insights into our study. The second component of our study corpus is the digital initiatives database we began assembling shortly after the pandemic reached Europe. As part of the process, we documented 45 digital projects initiated by institutions and accessible online on websites and social media platforms. In our database, we kept records of several aspects, like the institution’s origins, general information, format (online video/exhibition/VR tour/ web talk, etc.), publication date, and platform related to each digital project (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). The database also recorded

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projects launched and implanted before the pandemic started. This made it possible for us to trace and compare, to some extent, the increase in online projects that had previously appeared on digital platforms and those begun in reaction to pandemic restrictions. Special focus was given to hashtags used extensively by the institutions, which constituted much more than just a tagging system. Utilizing them as a methodological tool in our data selection process (Jackson & Foucault-­ Welles, 2015), we actively searched for those related to online commemoration. Gradually, we discovered various hashtags that institutions adopted, and we cataloged them according to their conceptual use, for example, hashtags used to interconnect different online projects (#digitalmemorial), to relate them to commemoration events (#75Liberation, #Liberation1945), or to indicate a direct response to the restrictions (#closedbutopen, #RememberingFromHome). We were particularly intrigued by this digital tool as a feature which, once it captures the zeitgeist of the remote commemoration culture, can be seen as a call for action to create a like-minded community of people and sustain a conversation that can also mobilize offline (Ince et al., 2017).

Responding to the Pandemic Through Social Media and Digital Tools Corresponding with the zeitgeist of remote work and online education, an abundance of worldwide museums and culture centers accelerated their digital reactions to the pandemic restrictions in an attempt to convey “their size, shape, colour, texture, materials and the spaces they occupy in galleries” (Giannini & Bowen, 2021, p.  2). Institutions offered remote access to exhibitions, performances, and live discussions ranging from art museums and national galleries (Noehrer et  al., 2021), natural history, science, and nature museums (Purbo & Darmajaya, 2020) to online theater and art (Timplalexi, 2020). Grisar’s (2020) review of Holocaust-related and Jewish heritage institutions indicated three levels of response to the pandemic that is applicable to museums of all kinds: “retooling online infrastructure, bringing programming to social media and launching outreach campaigns.” On March 27, 2020, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA, 2020) presented a list of online resources for remote Holocaust education, stating that “the current COVID-19 pandemic is posing a great challenge for people and institutions across the globe. Museums, educational

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institutions, and civil society organizations focusing on the topic of the Holocaust are also affected.” All resources flagged by IHRA contained pre-existing digital content available online for Holocaust education and research. Most of them offered information about the historical context (the USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, Wiener Library’s “The Holocaust Explained”), digital tools (the Mémorial de la Shoah Historical Atlas), or teaching materials (Yad Vashem’s Educational Videos, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure’s Online Course in Holocaust Studies), resources intended to help teachers and educators perform a smooth shift toward online teaching. However, most of these resources did not offer new forms of accessing memory from a distance to facilitate participation in remote commemoration practices. Based on the Holocaust institutions’ average monthly activities, 90.6% of the memorials participating in our study stated they had to close their memorial sites, museums, or exhibitions to visitors, and 96.6% reported that the pandemic mainly affected guided tours and resulted in the cancellation of such activities. Thus, a large majority of the institutions had to find different ways of offering access to sites. Accordingly, Holocaust-­ related institutions had to re-evaluate their digital portfolio in keeping with tools that enable connecting with distant audiences on multiple platforms, or as a museum representative stated in a survey: “Our digital activities have increased overall because of the pandemic and strict regulations” (Manca, 2021b, p. 24). In the first weeks of the global health crisis, institutions promoted digital videos on their websites and YouTube channels, featured online dictionaries and repositories, published podcasts, and launched virtual tours and online exhibitions. The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, for instance, teamed up with Google Arts & Culture, an online platform that exhibits high-resolution images and videos and allows for touring its partner organizations’ collections for its virtual tours. The platform allowed visitors “to view wall text and zoom in on images and objects” while visiting its online exhibitions (Grisar, 2020). Events and lectures originally planned on-site were now either pre-recorded and then digitally distributed or changed to hybrid formats, small live events that were then disseminated through online platforms. Concentration camp memorials in Germany were confronted with cancellations of commemorative events that were originally planned to mark the 75th anniversary of their liberation. While some decided to organize small ceremonies with only a limited number of physically present

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participants for broadcast on public television or online, other memorials created more interactive forms of commemoration and asked survivors, their families, and the general public to send documents, letters, or videos that were then displayed on-site. While hybrid forms emerged rapidly, some institutions focused primarily on virtual commemoration by creating websites dedicated to anniversaries. However, besides physical accessibility, especially concerning visits to exhibitions, the pandemic had a crucial effect on the educational sector. In 75% of the institutions, training seminars and public lectures had to be canceled. Thus, the pandemic’s effect on commemorative institutions was primarily concerned with exhibitions, guided tours, and education (see Fig. 13.2). Correspondingly, the institutions were compelled to identify digital tools and social media platforms that would help compensate for these effects. 35

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Fig. 13.2  The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Holocaust-related heritage sites based on the average of monthly activities in each area between March and July 2020

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A closer look at the specific areas in which institutions primarily applied digital technology fosters this conclusion. Although education (90.6%) and museums and exhibitions (81.3%) were—in comparison to archives and collections (50%)—the areas in which most institutions had already used digital tools before the pandemic, such usage further increased (see Fig. 13.3). Intensified use of digital tools and online applications in the field of education was reported by 80% of the institutions, and 40% mentioned an increase related to exhibitions. This is in comparison to a 16.7% increase in digital activities relating to archives and collections, demonstrating that the institutions particularly tried to improve possibilities for remote online access and distance learning.

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Fig. 13.3  The application of digital technology in different areas based on the average of monthly activities in each area between March and July 2020

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Hashtags, Features, and Digital Vernaculars in Pandemic Digital Memory The innovative substitutes for closed sites and canceled commemoration ceremonies demonstrated how quickly Holocaust-related institutions adapted or adjusted existing digital formats and began experimenting with online features while exploiting digital platforms’ affordances to ensure the persistence, spreadability, searchability, and visibility (boyd, 2014) of commemorative events and educational activities. Institutions enabled the past to weave through social media features, practices, and aesthetics, extending the institutional invitation for users to “become agents of (social media) memory” (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020a, p. 1097) in the absence of collective forms of on-site commemoration. The Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial produced short films with individual messages by survivors and relatives accompanied by additional contextualizing information on the biographies of the contributors. An edited version of these messages was accessed 20,000 times within one week (Groschek, 2020). The Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial offered an interactive virtual guestbook to the website dedicated to the 75th anniversary. The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial adopted the trending hashtag #75Befreiung, conceived by the Neuengamme Memorial, for linking video messages and related audiovisual materials that were hosted on the video-sharing platform Vimeo. The virtual commemoration website of the Concentration Camp Memorial Flossenbürg offered users the option to actively navigate through audio testimonies; information texts; videos; and a wall with photographs, text, and audiovisual messages that recalled the structure of interactive web documentaries (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020b). According to Iris Groschek, head of communication at the Neuengamme Memorial, the education and media teams quickly decided to implement digital formats in order to respond to increased remote interest in online activities following the decrease of analog visitors. The memorial particularly adopted the use of hashtags to tag, connect, and highlight diverse online activities such as #digitalmemorial, with short videos depicted at the heritage site; #Gegenstandsgeschichten, introducing historical objects; and #PrideUntold, focusing on the experiences and memories of queer prisoners (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020b). The memorial’s increased use of hashtags also contributed to the formation of a digital community based on the conceptual hashtag #75Befreiung. By offering this hashtag as a

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commemorative tool as well as a mnemonic tactic enabling the creation of alternative platforms for remembrance (Fridman, 2020), memorials and users were invited to post stories and share moments in a social-media-­ based communal commemorative context that reflects on the idea of “liberation” (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020a; see also Groschek, 2020). In order to better understand which specific digital tools and online applications institutions used, it is necessary to analyze how they continued their activities after the implementation of COVID-19 restrictions. The majority mentioned online activities as their main response strategy, with social media (96.9%), websites (96.9%), and e-newsletters (71.9%) being the most important formats for continuing commemorative and educational activities. In addition, 15.5% of the memorials reported that they ensured accessibility to a variety of content through mobile devices and online platforms. In comparison, 87.5% reported the development of new content that could be used after the end of the restrictions and 50% reported research as a significant area of activity during the pandemic (see Fig. 13.4). As in other sectors of cultural life, Holocaust memorials and museums executed a shift toward digital communication that, though not originally caused by the pandemic, was intensified by the unexpected global crisis (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020a). For heritage institutions, however, “the intersection of digital media and cultural heritage has raised a number of urgent questions and problems” for many years. Most challenging is the question of “finding new ways to engage visitors” with participatory or interactive digital formats (Brown & Waterhouse-Watson, 2014, p. 2). In particular, the “growing use of social media has been a natural response to the limitations posed specifically on in situ socialization, thereby giving impetus to a shift from complex onsite digital technology to online social media” (Manca, 2021a, p. 3; see also Manca, 2021b, p. 23). Correspondingly, the tools and formats institutions used to promote engagement with Holocaust memory remotely mainly reflect digital strategies that were already in use pre-pandemic. Most institutions mentioned educational videos and informational films (78.13%) as well as digitally curated stories and online exhibitions (75%) as formats specifically used in response to the restrictions, corresponding to the areas most affected by the pandemic: exhibitions and education. In addition, video testimonies (65.63%) and (online) lectures (62.5%) were already established formats in Holocaust commemoration and education. While testimonies were frequently used in the digitized and online-accessible form (Pinchevski,

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30 25 20 15 10 5

Small commemoration groups outside to site

Ensuring accessibility to all types of content in mobile devices

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Development of new content to be used after the revocation of the restrictions

Press releases

E-Newsletters

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Social media presence (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube...)

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Fig. 13.4  Continuation of institutional activities in reaction to the COVID-19 restrictions

2019; Shandler, 2017), the accelerated shift from physical lectures to online formats can be seen as symptomatic of the pandemic situation. Both formats, however, correspond to Ebbrecht-Hartmann’s (2020a) claim that many memorials transferred existing analog formats into digital tools and thereby adapted them to social media ecologies. As a prototype of such transferring of Holocaust memory, Ebbrecht-Hartmann also mentions virtual tours that were offered through social media environments, which were mentioned by 19 participating memorials as an engaging format for commemorating the Holocaust remotely. Iris Groschek (quoted in Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020b) explained that those virtual visits make it possible to transform physical places into digital environments. She also emphasized that the primary focus, however, is to reveal and communicate the history of the sites.

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Often streamed live through platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, those tours allowed participants to interact with a guide present on-site by posting questions in the comment section as well as responding to the tour with emojis as nonverbal cues encoded with an affective sentiment (Lo, 2008). Thus, the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial utilized Instagram Stories, and the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial harnessed Facebook and YouTube’s live streaming to enable access to the sites from a distance. The live tours were usually later posted on YouTube or archived on Instagram TV (IGTV), offering asynchronous access to the sites. The Neuengamme Memorial experimented with a variety of short video formats on Instagram, and the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial posted a series of videos introducing various spots in the compound on YouTube. With the help of mobile devices or small digital cameras, the guides could document places and thereby communicate various aspects of the sites’ histories. Some memorials also used 360° technology to offer remote access to their exhibitions or compounds, like the Neuengamme Memorial, and the Memorial and Educational Site House of the Wannsee Conference posted a 360° video offering a tour of its exhibitions on YouTube.

Digital Formats for Communicating Multimodal Memory The online media and tools featured by institutions in response to the pandemic specifically demonstrate the importance of audiovisual formats (see Fig. 13.5). Educational videos, online exhibitions, video testimonies, online lectures, and virtual tours are all characterized by multimodal forms of digital storytelling. The multimodal combination of image and text, seeing and reading, offers additional possibilities for recontextualization. Using the hashtag #digitalmemorial, the Neuengamme Memorial posted a series of short videos on Instagram that introduced particular stations in the memorial’s compound. The posts began shortly after the closure of the site in March 2020 and continued until mid-May. The first video, titled “Station 1— Surveillance and Escape,” opens with a close-up of a barbed-wire fence, followed by an ascending panning shot that stops after a few seconds, focusing on a watchtower before it continues as a loop. The accompanying text explains: “Despite the temporary closure due to #Covid19, we want to continue to make the site accessible to you. Get to know parts of the

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Fig. 13.5  Online media and digital tools promoted for engaging with Holocaust memory remotely based on the average of monthly activities in each area between March and July 2020

memorial via videos here on Instagram” (neuengamme.memorial, 2020). Starting with a detail that seems to be disconnected from context and functions as a moment of “digital irritation” (Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2021) on the personal feeds of Instagram users, the movement of the camera reveals the site-specific environment with the text finally offering additional information. While the videos deliberately decontextualize historical structures by moving too close, the additional text—similar to a caption in a newspaper or an explanatory text in an exhibition—puts the visually mediated place into perspective. In their interplay with the videos, the texts have mainly an augmenting function. They add historical information, but they also “speak” with the voice of a virtual guide. Hashtags added to the comments also connect the posts with other memorials. With the #digitalmemorial tour, the Neuengamme Memorial purposely introduced a shared hashtag that would relate to the online and social media activities of several institutions that were coping with the effects of the pandemic.

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Correspondingly, we found that the use of video-sharing platforms and social media environments that emphasize visual or audiovisual content increased in response to the pandemic restrictions (see Fig. 13.6). While the institutions’ websites—before the pandemic one of their most important tools for commemorative and educational activities—did not increase in importance, the use of photo and video-sharing social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube significantly expanded. Facebook, which had already been the most important social media platform for the institutions before the closures, is still leading, while Twitter did not gain the same importance as other platforms. Unsurprisingly, the video communication platform Zoom became one of the most important tools for Holocaust commemoration and education, similar to other social areas, such as higher education (see Joia & Lorenzo, 2021). Social media platforms and video communication tools enabled institutions to directly address and integrate users who were not able to visit the sites or attend

Fig. 13.6  Usage of social media platforms and digital communication technology based on the average of monthly activities in each area between March and July 2020

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educational programs or commemorative events in person. The Anne Frank Zentrum Berlin concluded: “[there were] more visitors in webinars than other formats of teacher training in the past and lots of visitors to memorial events via Facebook.” The institutions’ accumulated social media performance was impressive, showing high numbers via common digital engagement indicators: • The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York shows higher virtual engagement across platforms, counting 78,000 visitors to online events mainly via Zoom. • The USHMM had Facebook live events viewed nearly 2.1 million times compared to 770,000 views in 2019. • The Holocaust Museum in Houston received 231,832 page views after its closure in mid-March. • The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial witnessed nearly 1000 additional followers on Facebook after April 2020, with between 120 and 250 users attending live tours through Facebook and 18 videos of the tours on YouTube receiving roughly 100,000 clicks by the end of May 2020. • The Camp Sandbostel Memorial doubled its online access figures between April and May 2020. The broadcast from its ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation was watched online by approximately 1200 users compared to 500 expected participants to the planned on-site event. • Similarly, the digital commemoration website created by the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of liberation reached 5000 visitors per month in April and May 2020. • The Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam reported a massive increase in the number of followers on Facebook and Instagram (30,000) and 100,000 new subscribers to the institution’s YouTube channel. • The website of the Wiener Holocaust Library was accessed by 40,000 new visitors, with a slight rise in users aged 18–34 (5%). • In Israel, smaller memorials such as Beit Terezin also reported increased participation in online events and a more diverse audience, and for the Moreshet Holocaust & Research Centre, Facebook remained central during the pandemic.

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In general, social media and online communication, therefore, compensated for the lack of accessibility to physical sites. The USHMM shared with us the feedback of a teacher who emphasized that while her students could not visit the museum, these “digital tools bring the Museum and primary sources to them in a very authentic, manageable format.”

Doing Digital Holocaust Commemoration Our data sample of digital online projects clearly indicates an increase in digital initiatives since the pandemic began (71%) in comparison to earlier online activities by institutions (29%). The sample of projects that were launched in the first months of the pandemic confirms the impression that the platforms and applications that made particular use of visual elements and formats became the most popular (see Fig.  13.7). While websites (24%) and Facebook (17%) are still important, YouTube (21%), Zoom (21%), and Instagram (13%) constitute the environments for the majority of projects.

Fig. 13.7  Social media platforms and applications used for digital online projects in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data is based on a sample of 45 digital Holocaust memory projects

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Although Instagram had already been a popular app among visitors for sharing their experiences online at museums before the pandemic (Weilenmann et  al., 2013) and was used frequently to share content related to the Holocaust (Commane & Potton, 2019), the platform offered a suitable environment for social media experiments by Holocaust-­ related sites in response to the pandemic. Launched in 2010, the app offers users a variety of features for editing and manipulating photographs and adding captions and tags. As Leaver et al. (2020, p. 22) described, those features were not newly introduced by Instagram, but the app’s success resulted from the “successful integration and balancing of these elements,” as well as from the fact that it focused on the “social experience” based on “gaining likes and comments.” In 2016, Instagram introduced its Stories format. Based on the idea of ephemeral content, the format allowed for digital storytelling by adding short films or slides with pictures, texts, and other graphic elements and quickly added a Live Video feature (Leaver et al., 2020, p. 37). Facebook already added such an option in 2015, and it became a regular feature in 2016. The USHMM particularly engaged its audiences through weekly live events on Facebook during the first months of the pandemic. For virtual tours and remote visits, this option became instrumental, but also “ordinary” Instagram posts offered many possibilities for memorials to distribute content and display significant sights at the memorial sites or meaningful objects from their collections. As mentioned, among other popular hashtags, #digitalmemorial constituted an interconnected commemorative space on social media platforms during the pandemic. On Instagram, the hashtag helped establish a specific kind of virtual exhibition based on visual materials such as short videos, photographic depictions of Holocaust-related institutions, and historical photographs. The posts offer access to historical sites and introduce biographies of former prisoners and survivors. On April 1, 2020, the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial posted a photograph of David Arben on Instagram (flossenbuerg_memorial, 2020), who was born in 1927 in Warsaw. The picture was part of the series #25Gesichter25Schicksale (25 Faces 25 Fates). The #digitalmemorial also connected it to social media activities commemorating the 75th anniversary of liberation. Utilizing the sliding technique, Instagram users can discover Arben’s fate. The first photograph on the memorial’s feed shows him playing the violin in Flossenbürg, while the two hidden photographs reveal the story of his survival.

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The #digitalmemorial hashtag also connects a variety of digital initiatives, for instance, a virtual tour broadcast on Instagram’s IGTV by the Bunker Valentin Memorial in Northern Germany, commemorating “live” memories from German war crimes during World War II. While switching from a broadcasting mode to participatory platform logics, this example also demonstrates that smaller memorials were especially able to increase their visibility by using #digitalmemorial. Local German memorials such as Moringen, Gardelegen, Breitenau, and Brandenburg particularly used Instagram and Facebook to share content related to the 75th anniversary of liberation. The increased presence of institutions on Instagram during the first phase of the pandemic demonstrates the importance of visual formats for commemorating the Holocaust on social media. Correspondingly, YouTube also gained importance not only as a platform for educational videos or audiovisual documentation but also as an “archive” for live events, as mentioned. The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial used the platform for disseminating digital videos that focused on specific objects and places. For Martin Schellenberg (quoted in Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020b), former educational director of the memorial, the videos are “zoomed-in views” that offer a visit to the heritage site without interruption. The format of the video also allows the possibility to pause and repeat significant parts. The 15-part series “Perspectives on the History of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp” introduces a variety of places and objects, constituting a virtual memorial, and subsumes them under the hashtag #digitalmemorial on YouTube. The three-and-a-half-minute video “Oranienburg Concentration Camp—In the middle of the Town,” for instance, makes visible the history of the prison camp that preceded the later Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (Sachsenhausen Memorial, 2020). Standing next to an ordinary supermarket, a guide explains the functioning of the camp, while the camera zooms into a photograph displayed on a stele nearby. A series of slow panning shots then demonstrates that almost no traces of the former camp are left in the town center. With the help of the camera, the guide’s explanation, and additional visual sources, such as photographs that are presented to the camera, the video reveals layers of history that are no longer visible. The analysis of formats used in response to the COVID-19 pandemic proves the importance of audiovisual formats for online communication on social media and, in particular, their applicability for commemoration

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and historical storytelling (Bunnenberg & Steffen, 2019). Of the online projects documented in our sample, 19% are virtual tours and 17% are online videos (see Fig. 13.8). Online videos, some hybrids between digital-visual storytelling and virtual tours, became the most innovative field for experimenting with formats for commemorating the Holocaust on social media. The hashtag #digitalmemorial, in combination with video technology and digital storytelling, offered a possibility to interconnect Holocaust-related content on different social media platforms and thereby establish virtual memory ecologies.

Fig. 13.8  Digital formats used for online commemoration and education in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data is based on a sample of 45 digital Holocaust memory projects

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Conclusion: Toward Social Media Memory The challenges posed by the pandemic thereby offered new possibilities for Holocaust-related institutions. For Josh Perelman, chief curator of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the crisis was “clearly an opportunity”: It actually forces us to innovate and to make changes more rapidly than expected. That makes us a more accessible and far-reaching institution. This is just a moment where it’s fully transitioning from a physical museum to a virtual space. (quoted in Grisar, 2020)

Sarah Bailey Hogarty, from the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, endorses this view: It’s a pretty exciting time in a dark way, because there are a lot of new ways to engage audiences and to convert extant content into new and fresh modes of storytelling …. Most museums see far higher visitorship on their digital platforms than they do in their brick and mortars …. This is obviously a time to really evaluate the importance and impact of those online visitors which can reach across the world. (quoted in Grisar, 2020)

In accordance with these views, the respondents to our study also emphasized the momentum for digital innovation caused by an unexpected situation. A representative of the Wiener Holocaust Library respectively emphasized: “In many ways, COVID-19 has made activities that were always on the horizon to materialize.” Our study clearly indicates the intensification of digital and online activities initiated by Holocaust memorials and museums in response to the pandemic. Social media platforms especially provided suitable environments for commemorating from a distance and offering access to closed sites. Our sample clearly illustrates the increase in online commemoration in relation to the pandemic restrictions. In addition to other museums and cultural institutions, online formats offered Holocaust memorials, in particular, the only opportunity to commemorate publicly and collectively the significant 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. This graph shows the significance of commemoration events in Europe and Israel and their impact on the development of digital projects (see Fig. 13.9).

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Fig. 13.9  Digital online projects increase in response to the pandemic restrictions and in relation to commemoration events

Social media platforms played a significant role in this development. Many institutions began experimenting with digital formats and adapted them to existing commemorative forms and educational approaches so that the pandemic had a transformative effect on the evolution of digital Holocaust memory. To a certain degree, the pandemic ended the long-­ time hesitation to experiment with different formats on social media unique to Holocaust memorials and museums due to concerns about distortion and trivialization of related content. Those experiments, however, carefully took into consideration the particular paradigms of Holocaust commemoration and education, especially the important role of testimonies and of encounters with the historical sites. Accordingly, site- and object-related videos, digital tours, and videographed testimonies or Zoom conversations with survivors adapted popular digital and social media formats for learning and teaching about the Holocaust. Video formats were effective tools in this process, offering suitable ways of translating existing commemorative formats into digital environments—lectures and speeches could easily be recorded and used as a substitute for canceled events. Moreover, digital video enabled the sites to

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offer remote access to their compounds and highlight particular spots and objects, with video formats offering intriguing ways to explore the topography of the sites, add additional layers of information, and experiment with multimodal aesthetics. Visual and video-sharing platforms such as Instagram or YouTube increasingly gained special importance during the pandemic. The impact of digital video formats, however, also illustrates the importance of physical sites, in particular for Holocaust commemoration. Restricted access to the institutions not only did not lower but actually increased their importance as a significant part of the commemoration. As the representative of the Below Forest Death March Memorial emphasized in our survey: “With the Corona Pandemic and from now on, it’s more about communicating content digitally […]. Nevertheless, I want to emphasize the importance of the place. The pedagogical work here is something completely different than ‘only’ digital.” As an effect of pandemic restrictions, Holocaust-related institutions have moved toward a hybrid culture of commemoration. Digital online formats will at least partially stay in the media repertoire of the institutions and social media, and other online projects might continue to serve as a useful tool to augment visits to physical sites and extend them into the virtual realm of digital media. However, though the new formats do offer unique possibilities for keeping the sites accessible for distant audiences, they will probably not replace the physical encounter with former sites of atrocity.

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CHAPTER 14

Holocaust Remembrance on Facebook During the Lockdown: A Turning Point or a Token Gesture? Stefania Manca, Martin Rehm, and Susanne Haake

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically disrupted the social, professional and educational habits of billions of people. The early waves of lockdowns in the first half of 2020 resulted in closures of offices, schools and cultural institutions, affecting daily lives in unprecedented ways (Giuntella et  al., 2021; Zhang et  al., 2020). As traveling and physical

S. Manca (*) National Research Council of Italy, Genova, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. Rehm University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Haake University of Education Weingarten, Weingarten, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_14

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movement were increasingly restricted, digital media consumption increased dramatically (Barrutia & Echebarria, 2021). Indeed, many institutions have resorted to extensive use of digital technologies, and those in the cultural heritage sector have been no exception (Agostino et al., 2020). In the accelerated move to online access to information, museums were among the first to introduce new ways to experience cultural collections via digital channels. Each in its own way responded to social needs by making available to its online visitors digitally based initiatives such as educational material, live events and creative activities (Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2021; Samaroudi et al., 2020). Social media undeniably figured strongly among the digital technologies whose use took off during the lockdown. Museums adopted social media to present their collections, to integrate physical and digital reality (Giannini & Bowen, 2022). They implemented digital content in order to build communities through live and asynchronous events and adopted digital channels for strengthening partnerships and fundraising efforts, as well as increasing transparency and accessibility during temporary closures (Ryder et al., 2021). During the lockdown, a number of cultural institutions primarily used Instagram and Facebook in their attempts to increase social media engagement (Ryder et al., 2021). This trend was also noticeable in the field of Holocaust memory, where social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram provided the means through which the public could be engaged during museum and memorial closure. For example, during its several months of closure, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum made use of their Facebook and Twitter accounts to promote the institution’s online initiatives, such as its panoramic virtual tour, e-learning lessons and crowdfunding appeals (Dalziel, 2021; Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2021). A number of memorial museums in Germany offered virtual tours and online visits of specific locations at memorial sites, video messages from survivors with political and other representatives, Instagram live streams introducing specific aspects of the camp’s history or short clips aimed at offering social media users a virtual experience of the sites (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021). As one of the most recently adopted social media platforms for Holocaust remembrance, TikTok started to be adopted on a broad scale by Holocaust organizations to engage with younger generations and offer input designed to combat misperceptions, misinformation and distortion (Ebbrecht-Hartmann & Divon, 2022). Overall, this process of transferring activities online involved mediating

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simulations of objects, and this transformed the issues of authenticity, evidence and materiality, aspects at the basis of affective encounters with historical objects in a physical museum or memorial site (Walden, 2022). The pandemic also coincided with a major year in Holocaust memory: the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camps and the end of World War II in Europe. In the new scenario created by the restrictive measures, commemorative events related to the end of the World War II were also affected in unprecedented ways (Erll, 2020). In spring 2020, the lockdown meant that a number of events could only take place online. These included the 75th anniversaries of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in Western Europe, Victory in Europe Day1 commemorations, alongside Yom HaShoah,2 March of the Living3 and other annual events.4 Hashtags such as #RememberingFromHome, #ShoahNames, #DigitalMemorials, #ClosedButOpen and #Liberation1945 all became quite popular Holocaust commemoration ceremonies on social media. Furthermore, social media were used to engage people in collective remembrance practices, such as Yad Vashem’s broadcast of the Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah)5 Opening Ceremony on Facebook. These and other social media events are part of what Hoskins (2011) has named “connective memory”, that is, a sensitizing tool which highlights “the moment of connection as the moment of memory” (p. 272). In this sense, individual or collective remembrance was mostly facilitated by the 1  Victory in Europe Day is the day celebrating the formal acceptance by the Allies of Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, marking the end of World War II in Europe. This is an annual public holiday in several countries and is variously known as Victory Over Fascism Day, Liberation Day or Victory Day. In the UK, it is often abbreviated to VE Day, or V-E Day in the US, a term which existed as early as September 1944 in anticipation of victory (Wikipedia, 2022). 2  Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day or Yom HaShoah takes place on the Hebrew date of the 27th of Nissan and may fall in April or the beginning of May. One of the key ceremonies takes place at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem and is broadcast on TV. It is customary for the Israeli prime minister, president, and other national figures to give speeches. 3  The International March of the Living is an annual educational program, bringing individuals from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance and hatred (https://www.motl.org). 4  Other important dates are the liberations of the German concentration camps (e.g., Bergen-Belsen: 15 April; Buchenwald: 11 April; Dachau: 29 April; Neuengamme: 4 May; Ravensbrück: 30 April) and Liberation Day (Festa della Liberazione) on 25 April in Italy. 5  In 2020, Yom HaShoah was celebrated on 20 April. The dates for 2019 and 2021 were respectively 1 May and 7 April.

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flux of contacts between peers and groups on social media networks rather than through direct, on-site contact. Through the use of social media, traditional commemoration practices have shifted at the moment when local and institutional memory initiatives turned global and provided the opportunity for alternative memory-work (Adams & Kopelman, 2022). However, little serious study has been dedicated to the actions and initiatives launched by Holocaust museums and memorials via their social media channels during the pandemic lockdown. In this chapter, we focus on how Facebook was employed for Holocaust remembrance during the COVID-19 lockdown by a total of 12 Holocaust institutions: 4 Italian and 5 German Holocaust memorials/museums, along with 3 internationally relevant Holocaust organizations. Specifically, we analyzed their social media activities during the months of April and May, which, along with 27 January (International Holocaust Remembrance Day), are instrumental to celebrating the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of the World War II in Europe. In addition, we compared the quantity and variety of their social media activity carried out in 2020 with the same time span in 2019 and 2021 in order to analyze whether and to what extent their Facebook activity might have changed over the three years, and what type of content was predominantly published. As we shall see in this chapter, the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 seems to have triggered something of a shift in the Facebook activity conducted by the 12 observed accounts in terms of volume and type of content posted and in media strategies adopted. Nevertheless, this shift (brought about by highly exceptional circumstances present on a global scale) does not appear to constitute a truly significant change in the way the studied institutions consider and handle their social media presence, as perhaps might have been expected under the prevailing circumstances. On a broader scale, studies conducted on social media communication by cultural heritage institutions generally during the lockdown highlighted that, while heritage sustainability was supported through raising awareness of conservation and appreciation, there was scarce promotion of participatory initiatives (García-Ceballos et al., 2021). Generally, most museums used social media as a simple digital substitute for the physical exhibitions usually held on their physical premises (Ginzarly & Jordan Srour, 2022) rather than as a vehicle for attracting new audiences and engaging the public in new, alternative conversations: so, the opportunity to add multiple voices and stories to museum objects appears to have been lost (O’Hagan, 2021).

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These results are also in line with previous studies about Holocaust memory (Manca et al., 2022), which showed that levels of social media interactivity remain low, with account visitors more likely to engage on a superficial level and less likely to take part in post conversations. This confirms the perceived conservative attitude of Holocaust museums and memorials to social media, and their inclination to provide “carefully shaped, widely acceptable messages via social media” (Kansteiner, 2017, p.  324). Finally, differences and similarities in topic selections by the diverse museums and organizations seem to point to the co-existence of topics of discourse derived from transnational and national memories in the approach to commemoration events, thus confirming a complicated intertwining of agonistic and multidirectional memory (Cento Bull & Hansen, 2016; Rothberg, 2009).

Digital Holocaust Memory in the Times of COVID-19 Lockdown Digital Holocaust Memory has been defined as a digital phenomenon or intra-action between a multitude of actants, which “emerges through the meeting of operations, processes, sites, materials, and people, some of these have a direct relationship to this past and others less so” (Walden, 2021, p. 291). Due to technological transformation, digital memory has become transcultural, as media have made collective and individual memory timeless and spaceless, becoming “unanchored” from localized contexts (Hoskins, 2011; O’Connor, 2022). As stressed by a number of scholars, “new media technologies, especially the internet, have allowed for novel memory-making practices that transcend established boundaries of space, time and social experience” (Keightley & Schlesinger, 2014, p. 747). In this line, social media ecologies are opening new responsive spaces for remembrance, in which users are part of interrelated modes of media witnessing, as in the case of @Eva.Stories’ project on Instagram (Henig & Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2022). As the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated, the willingness of Holocaust museums and memorials to try out social media use increased. Ebbrecht-­ Hartmann (2021) identifies at least three ways established analog-based commemoration is translated into digital modes, producing new ephemeral, experimental forms of commenting, sharing, and remixing content for commemorating the Holocaust from a distance: (1) transferring (e.g.,

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interacting with testimonies on Zoom; virtual tours available via Facebook); (2) transitioning (e.g., virtual tours fashioned specifically to exploit the particular functionalities of social media platforms like Instagram; “Virtual Name Reading Campaign”; creation of paintings, users’ collages or films posted on Facebook and Instagram); and (3) transforming Holocaust memory into social media environments (e.g., the Digital Education project made up of short video clips adopting various digital genres; interconnected digital projects across various platforms). The modes of evolution have been observed in the area of Holocaust remembrance and may also apply to other areas of cultural heritage. So-called vernacular memory, the representation of Holocaust memory in user-generated online environments and user-generated content (UGC), is non-hierarchical, popular, informal, unplanned and sometimes subversive (Yadlin-Segal, 2017). This chapter focuses instead on institutionally sanctioned memory as propagated in Holocaust museums’ and memorials’ social media profiles. We concentrate in particular on the use of Facebook as the most popular platform adopted for such purposes (Manca, 2019; Manca et al., 2022; Oztig, 2023). More precisely, we consider how official institutions are seen as the main custodians of Holocaust memory during the lockdown. Holocaust museums represent one of the main agencies for Holocaust education, awareness-raising and memorialization (Oztig, 2023). Through online and on-site exhibitions, conferences and seminars, educational activities and social media strategies, Holocaust museums play a major role in disseminating awareness and knowledge of the Holocaust among broad segments of the population (Oztig, 2023). In fulfilling this role, they do not act as isolated actors but are embedded in Holocaust memorial cultures (re)constituted through the practices of international organizations, ceremonies and personal stories of survivors. Over the years, Holocaust memory has been increasingly conveyed via digital technologies to engage people in immersive, simulative or counterfactual memories of the Holocaust (Garde-Hansen et al., 2009; Kansteiner, 2017). This phenomenon has helped shape a global and universal memory of the Holocaust (Levy & Sznaider, 2006; Probst, 2003). As memory encompasses both individual and collective processes (Erll, 2010), museums act as carriers of cultural memory (Assmann, 2016) or “lieux de mémoire” as “symbolic elements of the memorial heritage of any community” (Nora, 1989, p. 7). As different communities construct the cultural memory of World War II in multiple different ways, following the

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increasing convergence of historical knowledge and commemoration practices that characterize Holocaust “musealisation” trends (Assmann, 2016), contemporary history museums “reflect the historical knowledge and the cultural memory of their time” (Jaeger, 2020, p. 10). However, today “transnational memory”, which refers to a broad range of historical phenomena surpassing national boundaries (Tyrrell, 2009), is what characterizes most of World War II museum representation (Jaeger, 2020). From this perspective, in this study, we also focus on the dynamic tensions in Holocaust memory that emerged during the lockdown through the theoretical lenses of global, transnational or universal memory, on the one hand, and local, national, agonistic (Cento Bull & Hansen, 2016) or multidirectional memory (Rothberg, 2009), on the other. Even though today Holocaust memory has become one of the strongest Western collective memories and identities (Pakier & Stråth, 2010), it was a profoundly geographical event, rooted in specific physical spaces, times and landscapes. In this sense, historical events may be viewed at various geographical levels with the presence of national and local memories that are still very strong, if not in opposition to each other. This can be seen in the example of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe (de Smale, 2020; Katz, 2016; Ray & Kapralski, 2019; Subotić, 2019) or in the countries of the Asian-Pacific war theater (Allen & Sakamoto, 2013; Hatch, 2014), where contested memories are still active. However, even in Western Europe, national memories of the events of World War II may still differ and focus more on one aspect than others, if only because of the diversity of the historical events that affected those countries (Echikson, 2019). In this chapter, we focus on two countries (Italy and Germany) which, although initially allied during World War II, later became enemies and today perpetuate different official and vernacular narratives of the Holocaust, mostly as part of intricate narratives of perpetration and victimhood.6 We also focus on three internationally relevant Holocaust organizations, each with its own distinct national identity but at the same time followed by an international audience. Although a nation’s history, culture and identity play crucial roles in how Holocaust meanings are constructed 6  When Italy surrendered in September 1943 and declared war on its former Axis partner, Nazi Germany militarily occupied half the country, marking the beginning of the armed resistance to the German occupation and the Italian Social Republic puppet state created by Benito Mussolini. It also marked the starting point of the deportation of Italian and foreign Jews to Germany and Poland.

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(Stevick & Michaels, 2012), we expect to find both similarities in Holocaust commemoration (transnational cultural memory) and differences, depending on the specific historical events that still today mark the remembrance practice of these specific countries (national cultural memory). Although social media may be considered the main arenas of mediatized memory, which is increasingly globalized and transcultural, we will see that tensions between national and transnational cultural memories of the Holocaust are still very active (Jaeger, 2020). Although memory tensions were observed long before the COVID-19 pandemic, we expect that changes in the use of digital media, and in particular social media, may have influenced or repositioned these tensions. We expect, for example, that acceleration in cultural globalization (Amankwah-Amoah et al., 2021) should also have affected digital mediatization of Holocaust memories. In this sense, we will focus on possible differences that emerged in 2020  in terms of local and global memory instances appearing on Facebook, compared to those posted in 2019, and whether any changes persisted in 2021. In this chapter, we analyze how Facebook was employed for Holocaust remembrance during April and May in 2019, 2020 and 2021 by the following entities: four Italian museums (Fondazione Fossoli, Fondazione Museo della Shoah, Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, Museo Nazionale dell’Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah); five German Holocaust memorials (Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen, KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme, Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück); and three major internationally relevant Holocaust memorial sites and museums, while having each their own national identity and agenda (Yad Vashem, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum). Facebook was chosen because it serves as the primary social media platform for this type of cultural institution and as the main digital space for social media events (Najda-Janoszka & Sawczuk, 2021; Manca et al., 2022). This study adopts a mixed-method approach (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017) based on the analysis of social media metrics and qualitative content coding using a framework for content analysis previously validated through a Delphi study (Manca, 2021a). This framework classifies published information in terms of Historical content of the Holocaust, Contemporary issues related to the Holocaust and Museum activities and communication, and comprises sets of categories and subcategories for each major dimension.

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Quantitative analysis based on social media analytics (Gerrard et  al., 2017) of content, interaction and popularity (Manca, 2021b; Manca et al., 2022) was applied to the volume of posts generated over April to May in the three years (2019: n=562; 2020: n=871; 2021: n=681) for a total of 2114 published posts. Specifically, we analyzed the number of posts, the number of responding comments, the number of reactions7 and the number of shares, with a view to gauging whether any differences emerged between the three years. We also investigated whether there was any change in the use of national language to detect processes of internationalization and globalization.8 In addition, we analyzed user activity in terms of user-generated posts, reactions and comments by the various institution’s Facebook account to users’ posts. Qualitative content analysis was applied to a subset composed of the five institutional posts9 that generated the highest user post interaction per memorial/museum (n=174) to grasp which content attracted users’ attention most.

Changes and Continuities As shown in Table 14.1, the analysis of social media metrics related to the investigated Facebook accounts reveals that there was a general increase in the volume of activity from 2019 to 2020 in terms of published content (more posts—562  in 2019 vs. 871  in 2020), interactivity (more comments—25,271 in 2019 vs. 61,603 in 2020; more reactions—280,668 in 2019 vs. 758,928 in 2020) and popularity (more shares—99,026 in 2019 vs. 191,644 in 2020). By the same token, we also see a decrease from 2020 to 2021  in the number of posts (N=681) and comments (N=59,810), while the number of reactions (N=1,263,707) and shares (N=218,752) continued to grow although at a slower pace. However, if we consider the average number of comments per post, there was a statistically significant increase from 2019 to 2020 and a steady increase in variation over the three years (2019: 29.0±50.5; 2020: 47.6±98.0; 2021: 50.8±120.9). Similarly, we discovered a steady increase in the average number of 7  By “reactions”, we mean the total number of icon-based responses (like, love, ha-ha, thankful, wow, sad, angry) to posts published in the selected period. 8  We considered Italian as the national language of the four Italian museums, German as the national language for the five German memorials, and English as the international language used by the three internationally relevant organisations. 9  An exception is the Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen, for which only four posts published in 2021 were available in total.

Popularity

Interactivity

Content

7

0

4

2

10

2021

Comments on 2019 posts by fans 2020

2554

3758

1894

2020

2021

711

1400

565

0

0

2019

0

0

Shares

0

0

Fans’ posts 2019 with reaction 2020 by page 2021

0

0

2021

2

2

25

2020

5

11392 3942

2021

5

16966 6795

2020

3157

8975

270

2019

371

2021

613

258

25

2019

Posts by fans

Reactions

440

2020

100.0

218

100.0

100.0

2019

100.0

98.4

Content in 2019 national 2020 language (%) 2021

Comments

100.0

217

2021

45

238

2020

28

127

2019

Posts

354

402

1013

0

0

0

59

0

1

12

2

14

2859

3296

5927

187

112

153

100.0

100.0

100.0

31

41

44

353

435

492

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1406

2255

1693

48

49

40

100.0

100.0

77.8

35

68

27

487

1050

507

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

2682

3002

2462

67

127

53

100.0

93.5

100.0

43

31

34

68

719

468

0

0

0

113

27

1

13

15

2

194

2624

2192

3

87

192

100.0

100.0

100.0

4

26

36

Fonda Fondazione Memoriale Museo Gedenkstätte Geden zione Museo della della Shoah Nazionale Buchenwald kstätte Fossoli Shoah di Milano dell’Ebraismo BergenItaliano e Belsen della Shoah

393

493

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

2303

2204

0

739

638

0

81.4

95.5

NA

86

22

0

KZGeden kstätte Dachau

416

942

266

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1873

3005

1067

42

108

28

57.9

64.9

83.8

57

57

37

325

909

148

0

0

0

0

39

3

5

22

3

1291

3963

807

30

131

14

50.0

57.6

100.0

44

99

39

41868

14582

11129

0

0

0

0

734

31

0

110

29

198010

80008

37578

9308

5737

3525

100.0

98.4

100.0

97

62

44

163125

157903

72840

35

23

8

285

804

30

295

383

130

995585

603817

192954

46926

50959

18537

100.0

100.0

100.0

11

149

121

8758

9051

9044

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

42170

30993

23856

1819

2602

2253

100.0

100.0

100.0

31

33

25

KZ-Geden Mahn- und Auschwitz- USHMM Yad kstätte Gedenkstätte Birkenau Vashem Neuen Ravensbrück Museum gamme

Table 14.1  Analysis of social media metrics related to the investigated institutions’ Facebook accounts 2019–2020–2021

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reactions (2019: 3306±515.4; 2020: 584.1±1165.7; 2021: 1075.5±2567.3) and shares (2019: 111.4±193.2; 2020: 145.2±302.3; 2021: 190.8±425.4) per post. The first conclusion of our study is that the Holocaust Museums did go more digital during the COVID lockdown and that their “community” responded actively to this impulse (Table 14.1). However, investigation of metrics related to users’ activity in terms of posts and reactions and comments by the institutional account to users’ posts and comments revealed that, with a few exceptions (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has the highest number), interaction remains scarce or non-existent. To some degree, the COVID-19 pandemic quantitatively changed memory institutions’ use of Facebook to speak to the world and engage with visitors to their Facebook pages. But what can we say from a qualitative perspective? In terms of language use, our results highlight that Italian museums tended to publish only in Italian (98.8% overall over the three years), while German museums increased their use of other languages (mostly in English and French, but also Polish and Italian) in 2020 and 2021 (95.2% of posts only in Germany in 2019 vs. 82.3% in 2020 and 77.9% in 2021), and the three internationally relevant Holocaust institutions adopted English almost exclusively (99.8% overall over the three years). Results of qualitative analysis applied to each of the 12 institutions’ five posts that generated most interaction over the three-year period (Fig. 14.1) show that these tended to focus more on “Contemporary issues related to the Holocaust” (macro-category B) than on “Historical content of the Holocaust” (macro-category A). However, the proportion between these two types of content changed over the three years: the number of posts focused on historical content increased from 30.9% in 2019 to 50.0% in 2020, while content related to contemporary aspects slightly decreased both in the transition from 2019 to 2020 and from 2020 to 2021 (89.10%, 86.70% and 83.10%, respectively). Finally, content related to the publicizing of events or communications concerning the museums’ functional activities (macro-category C) remained stable from 2019 to 2020 but decreased significantly from 2020 to 2021 (43.60%, 41.70% and 25.40%, respectively). Some differences are, however, noticeable within the group of 12 institutions (see Fig. 14.2). Data have been analyzed using, for each category, a logistic model that encompasses data on year, country and their interaction as predictors. We observe lower odds for macro-category A in year

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100.00 89.10

90.00

86.70

83.10

80.00 70.00 60.00 50.00

50.00 40.00

47.50

43.60

41.70

30.90

30.00

25.40

20.00 10.00 0.00

A. Historical content of the Holocaust

B. Contemporary issues related to the Holocaust 2019

2020

C. Museum activities and communication

2021

Fig. 14.1  Qualitative analysis of 12 institutions’ five top Facebook posts across the three years (percentages) 100.00 90.00

92.00

86.67

85.00

80.00

76.00

80.00

88.00 80.00

73.33

93.33 80.00

70.00 60.00

53.33

50.00

40.00

40.00

10.00

56.00

50.00

56.67

35.00 36.00

36.00 28.00

30.00 20.00

46.67

35.00

40.00 28.00

26.67

16.00

10.00

20.00

2019 A. Historical content of the Holocaust

2020

International

Germany

Italy

International

Germany

Italy

International

Germany

Italy

0.00

2021

B. Contemporary issues related to the Holocaust

C. Museum activities and communication

Fig. 14.2  Qualitative analysis of institutions’ Facebook posts across the three years and per country (percentages)

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2019 as compared to 2020 (p < 0.05) and 2021 (p < 0.05), and higher odds for international institutions than German (p < 0.001) or Italian ones (p < 0.001), while no statistical difference was observed for macro-category B and macro-category C. In terms of “Historical content” (macro-category A), all three groups’ posts were related to local or transnational places, almost exclusively focused on the 1941–1945 time span, and on the agency of Murdered, Survive, Combat, Resistance and Liberation. As for the Group subcategory, Italian museums focused on both Jews and Political Opponents, German memorials dealt with Jews and Roma and Sinti, while the three international museums focused prevailingly on Jews. In terms of Holocaust stages, Italian museums primarily focused on Persecution and Deportation, German memorials on Liberation and Aftermath, while international museums treated almost equally the stages of Persecution and Deportation, Mass murder or “Extermination” and Liberation and Aftermath. War and German occupation in Western and Eastern Europe was the main topic for Italian museums, while International museums focused more on individual stories of the Elderly, Women and Children. All three groups emphasized fates of individuals over broad topics of discourse, and photographic and filmic evidence was provided in the majority of cases. These results seem to be in line with the general approach followed by museums and memorials in different countries, particularly Italy and Germany, beyond the context of digital communication, which tend to favor their local or national history and their specific mission and identity. As for “Contemporary issues related to the Holocaust” (macro-­ category B), testimonies and their lessons for the present was the most common category in the three groups, also with an emphasis on iconic places or people. Both Italian and international museums also focus on antisemitism, racism and hate, while German memorials place more emphasis on countering Holocaust denial and distortion. Remembrance and commemoration were equally present in the three groups, with Italian museums also focusing on public discourse about various aspects of the Holocaust in the press and other media. In terms of contemporary representation of the Holocaust, Italian and international museums used historical photographs, while German memorials dealt mostly with digital representation. Finally, museum events were prevalent in the macro-category C (“Museum activities and communications”), with Italian museums also emphasizing collaborations and endorsements with and by other local and national institutions.

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What Does the Change in Commemoration Mean? The analysis of quantitative and qualitative data showed an increase in Facebook activity in 2020, both in terms of content generated by the various institutional profiles and in terms of user interaction and page popularity. Undoubtedly, the lockdown has resulted in increased use of social media communication to compensate for the inability to organize onsite commemorative events in spring 2020. This trend of increased activity was only partly confirmed in 2021, since museum and memorial facilities reopened, albeit still partially. What’s more, a certain degree of user interaction remained, at levels comparable to 2020, if not higher. This result shows that, despite a decrease in content posted on the pages, the community of fans/followers continued to follow and interact on a constant basis, in line with the increased audience that all Holocaust institutions in general attracted at that time (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021). This expansion of user communities was accompanied by increased use of English on the part of some German memorials, which often went hand in hand with the production of posts in several languages (the typical format was German-English-French). This trend of internationalization demonstrates an effort to enable a wider audience to read and understand their contributions, thus setting out to continue with a major investment in social communication (Bartolini, 2015) and a trend of digital globalization encouraged and accelerated by the pandemic. Even some important memorials, such as the Treblinka memorial in Poland, hitherto absent from the social media scene, started to use Facebook during the first lockdown,10 although a survey conducted at the beginning of 2021 highlighted that smaller institutions express concerns about social media use, mostly because of potential conflicting roles and lack of resources (Manca et al., 2022). In terms of posted content, the most significant result is the increase in historical content in 2020, which remained stable in 2021, although at a slightly lower rate. It seems that, compared to before, museums felt a need to provide more educational-oriented content, for example, explaining historical events; that said, only a thorough analysis of the whole Facebook account activity could tell us if this was in response to a perceived shift in

10  The Facebook page was created on 17 March 2020, see https://www.facebook.com/ MuzeumTreblinka.

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(new) user preferences (the posts analyzed in detail were those that generated the most interaction). Although the analyzed data do not allow general conclusions to be drawn, we can assume that Holocaust remembrance institutions’ use of social media was indeed impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown. The use played the dual function of compensating for the impossibility of on-site visits and also supporting the user community to celebrate important anniversaries marking liberation of the concentration camps and, in particular, the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. This explains both the increase in historical content and a relatively stable level of content related to contemporary Holocaust issues. However, when analyzing the differences between the three groups of institutions (Italian, German and international), this increase was particularly evident for the international ones, which are traditionally more focused on aspects of historical content rather than concentrating on commemoration and remembrance (Jaeger, 2020). The differences in terms of choice of topics can be explained by both the nature of these institutions and their mission and geographical characterization. Although transnational memory is a common core in Western European countries, differences in terms of historical specificities were found in the Facebook posts of the various museums. The difference in the historical events surrounding two countries such as Italy and Germany is also reflected in their respective Holocaust narratives pervading social media accounts based in those countries (Jaeger, 2020). In the same way, stories of liberation involving single individuals are a prerogative of national museums and memorials, while the liberation of entire nations or large portions of survivors is the focus of international institutions such as USHMM. Indeed, the role each country played during World War II impacts not only on memorialization processes and the extent to which historical events were perceived as significant and included as collective memories, with all their shadow and light, but also on what is prevailingly taught about the Holocaust in a country’s schools and how (Eckmann et  al., 2017). For instance, in the countries which were occupied by Nazi Germany, the helplessness and suffering of the local population is often emphasized over the decimation of the Jewish population. From this point of view, for example, it emerged that the Facebook posts of Italian museums emphasized above all acts of political resistance alongside the memory of the deportation and extermination of Jews (but also of political prisoners). By contrast, German memorials focus more on the events of the

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deportation and persecution of Jews as well as on the episodes of the liberation of the camps. From the moment the war ended, Italy has struggled with two antagonistic public memories: one developed by the Resistance movement, whereby Italy is presented as the victim of a war perpetrated by Mussolini and Hitler, and the other developed in opposition to antifascist rhetoric and marked by widespread anti-Communist attitudes. More than half a century after the end of the war, Italian government commemoration and remembrance events still tend to focus on German rather than Italian guilt while highlighting the role of the Italian resistance movement and the numerous massacres of civilians perpetrated by the Germans (Sierp, 2012). As far as Germany is concerned, after a long-lasting social amnesia followed by early efforts of public commemoration stimulated by the Allied Powers, Germany has engaged in a process of remembrance during which it has built dozens of memorials, as well as museums established at former concentration camps and other sites throughout the country (David, 2017; Kampe, 1987). Furthermore, Germany has taken a strong official stance about its responsibility toward the darkest period of its history (Echikson, 2019; Kaiser, 2014), although the foundation of the separate states of East and West Germany after the war generated two competing views of history, which were reflected in the education programs of teaching about the Holocaust (Benz, 2015). However, the reunification of the country challenged the dominant historical narratives of both East and West Germany, and a difficult debate concerning a culture of memory emerged, in some cases also allowing a comparison between National Socialism and Stalinism, “thereby reframing the Holocaust from a specific problem unique to German history to an example of totalitarianism from which important lessons could be drawn about human rights” (Meseth, 2012, p.  13). Moreover, recent trends (Bajohr & Löw, 2015; Plessow, 2015) suggest the need to embrace an increased transnational perspective, which has not necessarily been taken into account in past research, and which is probably best reflected in a global approach to the memory of the Holocaust in the social media profiles of German memorials. In this sense, the pandemic has contributed to increasingly intensive use of social media and a hitherto less significant multiplicity of historical content, with digitization helping to foster digital globalization and internationalization (at least in memorials in Germany). However, the fact remains that each country has retained its specificities in terms of local and transnational cultures of memory. Besides, apart from emphasizing that

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these were initiatives taken in response to restrictions imposed by the pandemic, or providing information on the lockdown, the posts do not make specific comments on the pandemic and its ongoing consequences, nor do they refer to the ongoing debate between political forces and civil society as a whole. In this sense, the pandemic seems to have transparently crossed the ordinary habits of museums and memorials, or at least there is no trace of it in the debate on social media. Differences among the three groups are also reflected in the treatment of historical events that occurred either locally or transnationally. While location is an important aspect in the commemoration of the Holocaust (e.g., the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum), Holocaust museums that are located in countries which were not directly affected by the Holocaust, such as the USA (e.g., USHMM), Australia and South Africa, tend to reflect the internationalization of the Holocaust memorial culture and to deal with global human rights concerns and acceptance of the universality of the experience (Duffy, 1997; Oztig, 2023). Further distinctions are revealed in the narratives of major international Holocaust organizations, highlighting the still national narrative they promote while being international in their audience: for example, while Yad Vashem in Jerusalem focuses on Israel’s continued consolidation as a nation-state as one of the solutions to the problem of antisemitism worldwide and the Holocaust is narrated in a historical continuum with attention given to Jewish experiences both before and after the war (Oztig, 2023), the USHMM focuses on a narrative that presents the Holocaust in the context of fascism, racism, prejudice and intolerance and emphasizes American democratic values and religious tolerance (Hansen-Glucklich, 2014; Young, 1994). Another sign of continuity compared to the pre-pandemic period is that in all museums and memorials focus on victims’ stories was found, as has long been the case in Holocaust remembrance practices. While it is generally true that memorial museums tend to articulate collective memory from the prism of victims’ perspectives (Oztig, 2023), the role of personal stories (i.e., fates of individuals) is at the core of Holocaust representation in emphasizing individual experiences and memories to express the authenticity of witnessing and highlighting the function of history as a form of remembrance by adding an ethical orientation (Assmann, 2016; Jaeger, 2020). While this humanization of the victims is particularly clear, for instance, in the daily publishing of a short note about an Auschwitz prisoner who was born or died on that day in the Twitter profile of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, this humanizing of Holocaust statistics was

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common to all the museums’ and memorials’ Facebook profiles that were investigated. Investigation of the institutions’ most popular Facebook content thus confirms visitors’ preferences, without new pandemic-related themes or themes that previously remained in the shadows taking over.

Conclusions This study provides some preliminary findings of how the COVID-19 lockdown affected the social media use patterns of a cohort of Holocaust museums and memorials. While the pandemic has certainly accelerated the experimentation of social media use for Holocaust memory purposes in many respects, it is still an ongoing process and has not induced a real transition from the “era of the witness” (Wieviorka, 2006) to the “era of the user” (Ebbrecht-Hartmann & Henig, 2021; Hogervorst, 2020). Nor can we witness a real “paradigm shift”, as called for by many authors (Kansteiner, 2017; Walden, 2021). Dealing with controversial content for this type of museum still appears to be a complex and sensitive issue and a major challenge, with the ever-present fear of trivialization or distortion, or the risk of harboring conflicting memories (UNESCO, 2022). On the investigated Facebook pages, the type of user interaction was limited, consisting mainly of likes and shares. This highlights the general “passivity” of Holocaust institutions (Kansteiner, 2017) and a lack of engagement with social media users (Manca et  al., 2022; Walden, 2022). Despite the changes found in many Holocaust remembrance practices (see Ebbrecht-­ Hartmann, 2021), the memorials and museums we studied appear to adopt a conservative stance in terms of the topics and themes they address with their audiences. Also, the transition to Facebook-based communication does not seem to have resolved the tensions between local and global memories of the Holocaust, despite a drive toward internationalization demonstrated by the increased use of English. From this point of view, the pandemic seems to have changed little in the framework of memory policies pursued on social media by museums and memorials, despite an increased drive toward digitization and the growing use of digital media. However, if the Holocaust is to continue to be a reference point in the history of the twentieth century also for new generations, it will be important “to find constructive ways to negotiate between necessary security measures and still encouraging critical thinking and networking within and beyond these events” (Walden, 2022, p. 268). We are starting to see the emergence of new, creative and necessary kinds of testimony, along

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with experimentation with social media platforms such as TikTok, which are progressively involving Holocaust museums and younger users as well (Divon & Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2022; Ebbrecht-Hartmann & Divon, 2022). Addressing younger generations is particularly vital today as their knowledge about the Holocaust, as verified through educational contexts, highlights a limited understanding of “who the victims of the Holocaust actually were, an even more limited understanding of its perpetrators, and a similarly compromised sense of its geography” (Lawson, 2017, p. 345). More generally, as also recently stressed in the authors’ guidelines and recommendations to counter Holocaust distortion on social media (Manca et al., 2022), there are still a number of limitations that prevent effective use of social media by Holocaust museums and memorials, such as a mismatch between scholarly debates and public knowledge, limited bi-­ directional interaction with social media users and adoption of materials not generally suitable for younger generations. Given that these results are limited to the selected platform, Facebook, there is ample scope for further investigation and for comparing different platforms. In this light, expanding historical knowledge of the Holocaust, investigating users’ preconceptions and biases, further promoting the digital culture of remembrance and actively involving the follower/fan communities are measures that Holocaust museums and memorials may adopt to encourage the development of forms of Holocaust knowledge and remembrance that are participatory, innovative and critical, but above all that can contribute to keeping Holocaust memory both relevant and up-­ to-­date almost 80 years after the end of World War II. Acknowledgments  This work was supported by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) under grant no. 2020–792 “Countering Holocaust Distortion on Social Media. Promoting the positive use of Internet Social Technologies for teaching and learning about the Holocaust”. Special thanks to Marcello Passarelli for his support with the processing and analysis of statistical data.

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CHAPTER 15

Epilogue: Did the Pandemic Change the Future of Memory? Orli Fridman and Sarah Gensburger

As early as 2020, Astrid Erll wondered if Covid-19 would “become part of collective memory.” This book explores, and endeavors to begin answering, that question. The pandemic has been among the most documented global events in history and, more importantly, has been documented both from the very start and while underway. As memory studies have shown, the existence of testimonies and documentation may not be a guarantee that collective memory forms but is certainly necessary for that to occur. And diverse actors are now using the heritage and collections of testimonies produced during what we are calling the “Covid-19 memory boom” in their professional work. Archives including A Journal of the

O. Fridman (*) Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK), School of International Training (SIT), Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected] S. Gensburger French National Centre for Scientific Research - Sciences Po, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5_15

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Plague Year have been incorporated into teaching materials (Jiménez Frei & Carlson, 2021; Sequeira & Dacey, 2020), for example, and some countries are considering the creation of Covid-19 museums, memorial days, or monuments (Spennemann, 2021).1 Indeed, there is no doubt the pandemic will be remembered, and will become part of local, national, and transnational memories, as some researchers have already highlighted (Öner et al., 2022). Whose stories will these pandemic memories tell, though? When the Covid-19 crisis was at its peak, some observers framed memory as a tool of collective resilience, survival (Kola, 2020), and wellbeing (Niziurski & Schaper, 2021). Remembering together was meant to help overcome the crisis. However, the contributions in this book encourage us to be more skeptical. First, they underscore the extent to which preexisting social frameworks, from gender to social class to religion, have served as the main frameworks for the memorialization of Covid-19. Not surprisingly, studies have already demonstrated that age also strongly influences remembrance of the period, with older adults recalling “more positive aspects” (Ford et al., 2021; Aizpurua et al., 2021) and teenagers—especially from lower-income families—forming anxious and negative memories of the crisis (van de Groep et al., 2020; Vandentorren et al., 2021). Authors featured in this book also show that the unequal participation of people in crowdsourced archiving initiatives was related to their social attributes. In other words, people have not been equal within memory dynamics during and of Covid-19. As Cynthia Enloe pointed out at the dawn of the pandemic in a March 2020 feminist critique, even by then, militaristic analogies had produced a non-neutral political narrative around the crisis. As she put it: Today, one can imagine that waging “a World War II-type war” against a fast-spreading disease is a desirable strategy only if one willfully ignores the findings of feminist historians and refuses to absorb the crucial political lessons they have taught us about the actual costs of turning any collective civic effort into a “war.” (Enloe, 2020)

The very act of telling one’s own story, through diaries, photographs, curated exhibitions, or objects, turned out to be much more difficult, and sometimes impossible, in societies with crumbling health services, corrupt 1

 See Harris (2022).

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regimes, and populist leaders. In these places, people in poverty and with low levels of education, or those working in essential economic sectors, have been among the most deeply affected by the pandemic and are thus key witnesses to its everyday impacts; but relatively few of their voices have been heard. In Nigeria, as a case described in this book illustrates, it took an initiative of scholars in oral history for the voices of some of the most marginalized Nigerians to be preserved. The fact that the Covid-19 memory boom was decentralized from the beginning and was so focused on individual and bottom-up/grassroots initiatives means that traces of private and intimate experiences were often curated. Yet, paradoxically, a reliance on volunteerism may have contributed to marginalization that reflected systemic and political dimensions of the crisis. Accordingly, and significantly, very few collections have dealt with the public space, a public space that the second section of this book reveals to be an important point of observation in order to gain perspective on protest and conflict in the context of commemoration during Covid-19. The Covid-19 memory boom can, in many ways, be seen as one more indicator that memory studies remain focused on the Western world. From the United States to Western Europe, commentators almost universally described the pandemic as “historic,” offering almost no acknowledgment of the many Asian and African countries that had confronted viruses like SARS and Ebola in the very recent past and with little international support. In the United States, some Native American spokespeople noted that the pandemic had revived memories of the widely forgotten (or erased) fact that American colonization was in some ways facilitated by viruses brought to the continent by early European settlers. Meanwhile, the narratives of some US politicians and political elites vis-à-vis Covid-19 remain unsettled (Freer, 2021), raising the question of who will be framed as the heroes and villains of the crisis in the future? After all, the social and geographic inequalities that framed the pandemic have also framed the Covid-19 memory boom itself. Even if different parts of the world took part, they did so on very different bases, both qualitatively and quantitatively (Bastias Sekulovic et al., 2022). Some may characterize the most important legacy of the pandemic as the lessons learned from it. If so, Covid-19 memory will certainly matter in the future. Still, “history matters” both during and after the “time of coronavirus,” and studies completed in its midst invite us to be somewhat critical regarding how effectively any lessons of the pandemic have been

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learned (Gensburger & Lefranc, 2020). It is striking to note, for instance, that public health, education, and welfare policies have not been dramatically altered by governments around the world, even after the crisis exposed an urgent need for their profound transformation. Reflections on the antagonistic nature of some pandemic memories (Alliegro, 2020) have also highlighted the linkage between commemoration and protest, and the second section of this book therefore calls for a focus on the way pandemic memories may trigger political conflict in the future, starting with a look at China in the present. There, families traditionally visit the tombs of their loved ones on the Day of the Dead (Qingming) on April 5, and this ritual commemoration made it clear to the public that official numbers of Chinese victims of Covid-19 were a far cry from the truth. In this case, ordinary memory inadvertently became a subversive tool against an authoritarian regime. Nonetheless, the question remains whether Covid-19 has really changed the way people remember collectively in a broader sense. Will there be a “before” and “after” when it comes to how commemorations are practiced? In so many ways, it is easy to see the pandemic as a time of memory that has led to transformation and innovation in the way we commemorate. But did the Covid-19 crisis really cause commemoration to change in an ontological and political sense? Again, contributions in this book encourage some caution before declaring either the final digitalization of commemoration or an inherent relationship between commemoration and collective resilience. Without a doubt, lockdowns created unprecedented opportunities for counter-memory activists, but they did not lead to a complete transformation of the structure and impact of commemorations. Early lockdowns and other extreme measures clearly posed significant and new challenges to commemorative events and the work of memorial centers and museums (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021). However, as the third section of this book demonstrates by tracing changes in commemorative practices and commemorative tactics, the crisis was merely another milestone in advancing the already ongoing digital turn in memory studies. Rather than something that was planned or enabled, this development was an imperative that allowed commemorative events to take place, through digital interaction with audiences and the public. In some cases, as Manca et  al. have found, levels of social media interactivity were low for these

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events, but in others, quite a few people interacted (Fridman & Gensburger, 2023) or followed along. This reinforces the argument that online commemoration fits into broader traditions of “in real life” commemorations, as Clavert and Paci have asserted, yet may allow larger audiences to engage, especially in highly contested events. This book shows that the unprecedented growth and intensification (as Ebbrecht-Hartmann and Divon indicated) of mediated commemorative practices, especially as documented in empirical evidence from the spring 2020 lockdown period, did leave a legacy that will be possible to trace in analyses of continuations and changes in commemoration across the twenty-first century. While it may be said that there has been no real “paradigm shift” in the framing of memory during covid (as Manca et  al. argued), as an inclusive and participatory platform, this book draws attention to the ways that memory during covid built on pre-covid trends and became yet another important landmark in the digitalization of memory studies, shaping knowledge production in our field, empirically and methodologically alike. In combination, the chapters of this book tell a nuanced story of collective memory during and of Covid-19, seeking not to de-­ exceptionalize one memoryscape or another but to emphasize the new possibilities and innovations that have emerged in commemoration, and to situate them within the broader memory boom and mnemonic labor discussed in the introduction and throughout the book. Despite some expectations, no pronouncements or celebrations occurred to mark the “end” of the pandemic. If anything, one crisis has followed another, and with the start of the next phase of war in Ukraine in early 2022 (the first being 2014), its escalating and unfolding global consequences have almost pushed the pandemic completely from the headlines and from public interest. There is space once again for war and for re-emerging geopolitical divides in a new world order. Yet, the pandemic is not completely behind us, even if the Covid-19 virus has been contained. The consequences and legacy of this period of crisis are still apparent, and as this book shows, more empirical evidence is needed to assess the impact of this memory event. The two threads we bring together in our Introduction and explore in this book – memory of and memory during the pandemic – set the analytical stage for further engagement to continue grappling with the meaning of the Covid-19 memory boom, the implications of the pandemic on commemoration, and whatever the future holds in the aftermath of the crisis.

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Bibliography Aizpurua, A., Malen, M., & Aranberri, A. (2021). Prospective memory and positivity bias in the COVID-19 health crisis: The effects of aging. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 666977. Alliegro, E. (2020). “Agenti patogeni, etnostrabismo e memorial divide Una lettura antropologica dell’emersione del virus SARS-CoV-2 e della pandemia CoVid-19” [Pathogens, ethnostrabismus and memorial divide: An anthropological reading of the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the CoVid-19 pandemic]. EtnoAntropologia, 8(1), 11–46. Bastias Sekulovic, M., Gensburger, S., & Gabrysiak, L. (2022). Collectes et archives du Covid dans le monde hispanophone [Covid collections and archives in the Spanish-speaking world]. Working paper, ArchiCOVID project. https:// archicovid.huma-­num.fr/s/ArchiCOVID/page/publications Ebbrecht-Hartmann, T. (2021). Commemorating from a distance: The digital transformation of Holocaust memory in times of COVID-19. Media, Culture & Society, 43(6), 1095–1112. Enloe, C. (2020). COVID-19: ‘Waging War’ against a virus is NOT what we need to be doing. Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom. https:// www.wilpf.org/COVID-­1 9-­w aging-­w ar-­a gainst-­a -­v irus-­i s-­n ot-­w hat-­ we-­need-­to-­be-­doing/ Erll, A. (2020). Will Covid-19 become part of collective memory? In R. Rittgerodt (Ed.), 13 perspectives on the pandemic: Thinking in a state of exception (pp. 46–50). De Gruyter. Ford, J.  H., Garcia, S.  M., Fields, E.  C., Cunningham, T.  J., & Kensinger, E. A. (2021). Older adults remember more positive aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychology and Aging, 36(6), 694–699. Freer, J. (2021). Selfless sacrifice or failed by the state? Remembering nurses who have died from Covid-19. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 113, 103736. Fridman, O., & Gensburger, S. (2023). Unlocked memory activism: Has social distancing changed commemoration? In Y. Gutman & J. Wüstenberg (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of memory activism (pp. 35–41). Routledge. Gensburger, S., & Lefranc, S. (2020). Beyond memory: Can we really learn from the Past? Palgrave Macmillan. Harris, M. (2022, November 9). Imagining a memorial to an unimaginable number of Covid deaths. New York Times. Jiménez Frei, C., & Carlson, S. (2021). Surviving, learning, and striving in the times of pandemic: Teaching with a journal of the plague year: An archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY). Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, 17(3), 255–266.

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Index1

A Anniversary/anniversaries, 10–12, 144, 158, 163, 176, 178, 185, 199–214, 222, 228, 231, 232, 234, 245, 246, 249, 250, 256, 257, 260, 261, 263, 268, 275, 276, 278, 284, 286, 287, 289, 297, 309 Archive/archiving, 2, 4, 6–9, 23, 30, 35, 43–60, 53n3, 67, 68, 70, 72, 83, 117, 118, 161, 223, 224, 268, 270, 277, 287, 320 Art, 2, 89, 91, 93, 111, 114–116, 127, 186, 207, 248, 271, 274 B Black Lives Matter (BLM), 9, 110, 114, 124, 125 Black people, 121, 200

Bosnia-Herzegovina, 12, 248, 249 Brazil, 7, 9–11, 65–85, 175–194 C Camp concentration camp, 12, 229, 245, 246, 250n1, 251, 254, 256, 260, 268, 275, 289, 297, 297n4, 298, 309, 310 internment camp, 245, 246 China, 7, 10, 88, 100, 153–159, 166, 171, 179, 204, 322 Citizen/citizens, 2, 8, 44, 50, 55, 58, 70, 145, 146, 153–156, 158, 160, 162–168, 170, 171, 221, 240, 259

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 O. Fridman, S. Gensburger (eds.), The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34597-5

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328 

INDEX

Collection/collecting, 2, 4, 7, 9, 44, 46–58, 60, 67, 68, 71–73, 76n11, 80, 83, 88, 89, 93, 96, 97, 104, 117, 134, 201, 222, 225, 226, 250n1, 251, 256, 270, 271, 275, 277, 286, 296, 319, 321 Collective memory, 5, 7, 8, 25, 45, 46, 49, 53–55, 59, 89, 90, 92, 93, 111, 117, 118, 127, 134, 135, 142, 144–148, 156–158, 205, 224, 225, 301, 309, 311, 319, 323 Commemoration April 25, 222, 223, 227–232, 234–236, 239, 240 Beau Bassin, 245–264 joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day, 9, 12 May 8, 222, 223, 227, 229–230, 232, 233, 236–240, 261 Nakba Day, 12 Neuengamme, 245–264 Sharpeville Massacre, 11, 199–214 Srebrenica, 245–264 Tiananmen, 11, 155–158, 164, 169, 171 Conflict, 37, 157, 180, 181, 193, 236, 321, 322 Covid/Covid-19, 1–14, 23–38, 43, 65–85, 88–104, 110, 133, 153–171, 175–194, 199–214, 223, 245–264, 267–291, 295, 299–303, 319 Crisis, 1–3, 5–11, 13, 24, 27, 37, 38, 43–60, 66, 89, 90, 92, 95–97, 103, 104, 110, 113, 143, 149, 163, 176–184, 188–190, 192–194, 207, 224, 229, 238, 239, 268, 275, 279, 289, 320–323 Cultural institution, 8, 204, 207, 210, 289, 295, 296, 302

Culture, 13, 26–28, 34, 37, 44, 47–52, 48n2, 67, 91–93, 104, 113, 120, 123, 160, 223, 224, 246, 248, 256, 258, 263, 264, 268, 269, 271, 274, 291, 300, 301, 310, 311, 313 Curating/curator/curatorial, 47, 51, 54, 66, 69, 69n4, 72, 117, 120, 127, 207, 209, 289 D Day (memorial day), 320 Demonstration, 10, 124, 133–149, 156, 200, 202, 208, 211 Digital digitalization, 2, 3, 11, 13, 322, 323 digital turn, 11, 270, 322 #hashtag, 269, 274, 278, 281, 282, 286–288 E England/English, 44, 47, 49, 50, 53–58, 93, 253, 259, 261, 303n8, 305, 308, 312 Ethnography, 92, 93 F Facebook, 14, 28, 48, 51, 94, 145, 191, 211, 212, 214, 223, 225, 231, 246, 249, 250, 254n3, 255, 256, 258–260, 262, 269, 270, 273, 281, 283–287, 295–313 France, 2, 13, 72, 221–241 Future, 4, 5, 7, 8, 27, 33, 34, 43, 45, 46, 55, 57–59, 71, 74, 79, 89, 93, 97, 104, 111, 114, 115, 117, 120, 127, 135, 136, 143, 155, 178, 179, 192, 224, 230, 259, 319–323

 INDEX 

G Gender, 8, 9, 26, 320 Genocide, 10, 245, 248, 254–256, 254n3, 259, 261, 262 Government, 6, 9, 29, 70, 84, 88, 89, 93–101, 103, 104, 110, 133, 142, 154–159, 161–163, 165–170, 176–179, 181, 183–185, 183n5, 187, 188, 190–194, 203–206, 212–214, 221, 228, 258, 260, 261, 310, 322 Greece, 10, 134, 135, 138, 143, 144, 235 H #Hashtag, 12, 13, 48, 53, 54, 58, 183, 190, 192, 208, 212, 225, 226, 245–264, 269, 274, 278–282, 286–288, 297 Heritage, 44, 46, 48n2, 49, 57, 112, 113, 117, 203, 208, 210, 269, 270, 274, 276, 278, 279, 287, 296, 298, 300, 319 History/histories, 2, 7–9, 13, 23–38, 44, 55, 65, 67, 70, 85, 89–92, 95, 112, 113, 116, 118, 119, 122, 125, 144, 177, 178, 180, 193, 200, 204, 207, 210, 211, 213, 226, 227, 229, 230, 252, 254, 259, 261, 263, 269, 271, 274, 280, 281, 287, 296, 297n3, 301, 307, 310–312, 319, 321 Holocaust, 13, 14, 67, 247, 248, 252, 254, 256–262, 267–291, 295–313 Home, 26, 29, 30, 33, 34, 38, 53, 72, 77, 82, 111, 113, 119, 123, 124, 134, 136, 138, 167, 190, 191, 232, 233, 268 Hong Kong, 10–11, 153–171

329

I Identity, 26, 45, 55, 71, 74, 157, 181, 200, 207, 210, 227, 253, 301, 302, 307 Image, 7, 23, 30, 31, 34, 36, 47, 48, 51, 53–56, 58–60, 66, 69, 72–80, 76n11, 83, 111, 116, 119, 121n5, 122, 125, 145, 164, 167, 179, 188–193, 202, 225, 251, 252, 255–260, 269, 270, 275, 281 Instagram, 7, 8, 24, 28–32, 34, 35, 37, 44, 47, 48, 51, 53–58, 60, 214, 246, 248, 250, 254n3, 256–258, 261, 263, 269–271, 273, 281–287, 291, 296, 299, 300 Interview, 11, 24, 28–30, 32, 36, 44, 47, 69, 75, 82, 89, 91–93, 97, 155, 178, 183, 185, 189, 208, 209 Israel, 12, 270, 272, 284, 289, 297n3, 311 Italy, 13, 204, 221–241, 297n4, 301, 301n6, 307, 309, 310 L Labour, 24–26, 33–35, 38, 133–149 Lessons, 2, 98, 193, 232, 240, 241, 258, 259, 296, 307, 310, 320, 321 of history, 58 Lockdown, 2–11, 13, 14, 23, 29, 31–34, 36, 37, 44, 47, 48, 50–53, 56, 57, 82, 88–101, 103, 110, 116, 120–123, 133–138, 140, 142, 144, 147, 166, 168, 176, 179, 188, 190, 203, 205, 213, 221–241, 257, 264, 268, 295–313, 322, 323 London, 3, 8, 23–38, 170

330 

INDEX

M Massacre, 11, 12, 200–202, 204, 207–211, 214, 229, 238, 246, 251, 254, 256, 310 Sharpeville Massacre, 11, 199–214 Memorials, 2, 4, 9, 11–14, 45, 66, 69, 70, 83, 88–104, 111–116, 118–127, 204–206, 214, 233, 240, 247–249, 251, 252, 255, 256, 257n4, 258, 260, 267–291, 296–300, 302, 303, 303n8, 307–313, 320, 322 Memory memory boom, 3–9, 23, 111, 112, 203, 319, 321, 323 memory during the pandemic, 4, 323 memory of the pandemic, 4, 7, 67, 90, 93, 100, 103 ordinary memories, 4, 322 pre-emptive memory, 2, 224, 230 unlocked memory, 3 Methods/methodology, 13, 28, 37, 46–48, 57, 58, 65, 89–93, 115, 117, 120, 122, 201, 222, 226, 246, 249–251, 271–274 Museums, 4, 7, 11–14, 45, 57, 66, 68, 117, 159, 205, 207, 227, 267–291, 296–303, 303n8, 305, 307–313, 320, 322 N Nakba Day commemoration, 12 Narrative, 6, 8, 9, 24, 26–28, 31, 44–47, 54, 55, 66, 67, 74, 75, 89–103, 111–113, 117–120, 127, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 149, 157, 158, 177, 185, 187, 208, 209, 211, 213, 229, 230, 252, 254, 258, 260, 262, 269, 301, 309–311, 320, 321

National Covid Memorial Wall, 3 New York, 9, 110, 112, 284 Nigeria, 88–104, 321 O Oral history, 7, 65, 70, 90, 91, 118, 122, 321 Outside, 29, 32, 37, 76, 82, 154, 185, 191, 209, 233 P Palestine, 261 Pandemics/pandemic, 1, 5–14, 23, 43, 65–85, 88, 109–127, 133–149, 154, 166–169, 176, 199–214, 221, 246, 267, 274–281, 295, 319–323 Photograph, 24, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56–58, 67, 68, 71–73, 77–79, 122, 145, 191, 227, 255, 256, 260, 269, 271, 278, 286, 287, 307, 320 Picture, 53n3, 71, 82, 138, 144, 145, 154, 262, 286 Picturing Lockdown, 8, 23, 31, 43–60 Platform, 3, 5, 12, 24–30, 33–38, 66–68, 70–74, 79, 80, 83, 89, 93, 94, 154, 169, 202, 203, 207, 208, 210–214, 223, 224, 246, 248–250, 252, 254, 256, 258, 262, 263, 269–276, 278, 279, 281, 283–291, 296, 300, 302, 313, 323 Politics, 5, 6, 9–11, 13, 88, 100, 127, 155, 160, 162, 169, 170, 178, 185–187, 258, 264 Practices, 2–6, 8, 10–14, 24–31, 37, 43–53, 55, 57–60, 65–67, 69, 80, 90, 97, 112–115, 126, 127, 135,

 INDEX 

137–142, 146–149, 154, 159–161, 166, 178, 200, 206, 207, 212, 222–226, 235, 240, 246, 247, 249, 257, 258, 263, 264, 268, 269, 271, 273, 275, 278, 297–302, 311, 312, 322, 323 social practices, 206, 235 Protest, 6, 9–11, 110, 111, 113–117, 119–124, 127, 133–149, 153–156, 158–160, 163, 164, 167–170, 178, 179, 184–186, 188–191, 199, 200, 202, 248, 321, 322 Q Quarantine, 29, 82, 90, 133–149, 175–194, 221 R Remembrance, 1–14, 27, 45, 55, 73, 74, 116–118, 126, 154, 206, 269, 279, 295–313, 320 Resilience, 7, 27, 96, 110, 113, 115, 124, 126, 235, 238, 240, 320, 322 Rio de Janeiro, 10, 175, 180, 184–188 S Social distance, 214 Social media, 12–14, 24, 25, 27, 29, 36, 37, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53–59, 68, 94, 110, 112, 116, 117, 138, 145, 148, 154, 161–163, 179, 183, 187, 189–192, 208, 210–212, 214, 222, 224–225, 240, 246–250, 252, 254–258, 261, 263, 264, 267–291, 296–300, 302–304, 308–313, 322 Social networks, 5, 27, 45, 66, 69, 115, 223, 224

331

Solidarity, 5, 6, 93, 113, 123, 125, 126, 201 South Africa, 10, 11, 89, 90, 199–214, 311 Spanish flu, 2, 5, 113 Speeches, 70, 124, 144, 159, 169, 186, 227, 228, 262, 290, 297n2 Stories/story, 11, 30, 30n1, 31, 33–35, 37, 59, 88–104, 110, 116, 117, 119, 121, 161, 162, 213, 231, 251, 252, 255, 260, 261, 269, 279, 286, 298, 300, 307, 309, 311, 320, 323 Students, 9, 70, 73, 90, 96, 100, 101, 109–127, 137, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 165, 184, 189, 201, 202, 285 Survey, 13, 73, 84, 93, 168, 238, 271–273, 275, 291, 308 T Temporalities, 25, 46, 80–83, 127, 177, 178, 192, 225 Testimony, 2, 7, 9, 65–67, 74–80, 83, 84, 186, 187, 189, 203, 232, 270, 278, 279, 281, 290, 300, 307, 312, 319 Tiananmen, 11, 153–171 Twitter, 13, 48, 51, 94, 211, 214, 221–241, 246, 249, 250, 253, 254n3, 257, 262, 269, 270, 283, 296, 311 U UNESCO, 46, 257, 312 United Kingdom (UK), 23, 29, 37, 43–60, 168, 209, 246, 262 United States (US), 2, 3, 72, 109–111, 114, 123–126, 176, 178, 297n1, 311, 321

332 

INDEX

University/universities, 7, 69, 70, 72, 83, 111, 112, 119, 121, 157, 162, 165, 184, 188, 201, 202 V Violence, 11, 90, 97, 110, 121, 125, 126, 176–178, 182, 183n5, 186, 188–192, 194, 203, 252, 254, 255 W Wars Second World War, 2, 12, 13, 28, 44, 44n1, 46–48, 50, 57–60, 221–241, 245, 258, 259, 262, 287, 297, 297n1, 298, 300, 301, 309, 313, 320

Witness/witnessing, 8, 31, 33, 67, 68, 84, 118, 299, 311, 312, 321 Women, 8, 23–38, 82, 90, 91, 93, 99, 111, 121, 124, 125, 188, 192, 200, 261 Work/workers, 2n1, 4, 7, 11, 13, 23–38, 47, 49, 51, 56, 57, 70, 74, 75, 78, 90, 97, 103, 104, 111–113, 115–117, 119–124, 126, 127, 133–149, 156, 165–167, 193, 200, 224, 241, 246–249, 256, 263, 269, 274, 291, 319, 322 Y Youth/young people/young women, 8, 9, 23–38, 82, 156, 157, 171, 204, 207, 210