About
Accessing Campscapes is an outcome of the HERA funded project “Accessing Campscapes. Strategies for Contested Pasts” (2016-2019) led by the University of Amsterdam (prof. dr. Rob van der Laarse), in a consortium with Staffordshire University, Freie Universitat Berlin, the University of West Bohemia, IBEC Barcelona together with relevant associated partners. Envisaged as a flagship research project on European contested pasts and competing memories, ICACCESS analyzed the history and memory of Second World Nazi concentration camps and communist spaces of repression. These dot the landscape of Europe today and represent a significant heritage for European politics and policies of cohesion. In this role, they are painful reminders of that history on which Europe was built. As spaces of memory, however, their afterlives have seldom gone unchallenged. Different groups relate in various ways to these markers of memory, these histories are considered valuable or problematic and they are often at the centre of historical revisionisms, political appropriations and political polarization. These features also apply to the spaces themselves, as some are now canonical heritage of Europe and the world, while others lie hidden, despite their social significance. Given these complexities, ICACCESS developed as an interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together historians, archaeologists, collective memory scholars, digital heritage specialists and public history specialists. The team worked together to understand the layers of history of such spaces, how they have been used and reused over time, their memorial afterlives and their contemporary political and social significance. Central to the project has been the public access to these histories and spaces for a broad audience. The project also aimed at responding to the main challenge in understanding such spaces, the gradual disappearance of witnesses.
More about the project: website
Design: Calibro
IT support: Silvain Smit (UvA), Pedro Omedas (IBEC), Sytse Wieringa (IBEC)