East-Central Europe as “Mutter aller Geschichtsregionen” (Troebst 2010), as a historical in-between territory, in contrast with the container thinking of national-states, merges traces of different national, ethnic memories. In East-Central Europe “the movement of borders over people” (Brubaker 2015) and the layering of maps as political representations resulted in the displacement and the reframing of static spaces and their inhabitants. The intersections and divergences of the concepts of country border and homeland create the geopolitical space as a symbolic texture “constructed by images and narratives” (Feischmidt 2005). This statement written by a sociologist indirectly also stresses the role of artistic works in relation to understanding spaces, territories, and their histories.

 

In my paper firstly, I will focus on the floating imaginary geography of East-Central Europe created by literary texts of Ádám Bodor, Péter Esterházy, Yuri Andrukhovych, and Andrzej Stasiuk. As multilingual literatures “they convey an inherently dialogical notion of literacy, as opposed to the monolingualism of monocultural works” (Beáta Thomka, 2009). Through the depicted borderlands regions, floating island imaginaries, and river-discourses (e.g. Danube, Dnipro) East-Central Europe is marked as a permanent mobile and shared coexistence of the existing, transformed, and missing cultures, languages, ethnics. By multilingual poetical imaginary East-Central Europe as “a space of indeterminacy and suspendedness” (Jagoda Wierzejska, 2017) serves traces to missing cultures, absent peoples once belonged to the region, consequently its totality could be imagined just through their absence.

Secondly, I will examine how this multilingual (imaginary and poetic) legacy as a “movable memory” (Yuri Andrukhovych, 2018) of East-Central Europe appears and is transformed in contemporary visual culture. I will explore the figures of “the movement of people over borders” (Brubaker 2015) created by “accented cinema” (Naficy 2001) in connection with East-Central Europe. Analysing contemporary movies (e. g. Melissa de Raaf and Răzvan Rădulescu dir. First of all, Felicia, 2009, Roland Vranik dir. The Citizen, 2016, Maren Ade dir. Toni Erdmann 2016, Marian Crişan dir. The Campaign, 2020, Cristian Mungiu dir. R.M.N, 2022) on the one hand, I will search into how multilingualism is localized as a multi-ethnic heritage of a region, on the other hand, how it is economically capitalized by global capitalist conditions.