Page 36 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 13(1) (2025)

was interpreted as the strongest stance of the
crowd taking over the power. Also, the remov-
al or the replacement of the statue is another clue
as to how the symbolic and spatial focus of So-
viet squares shifted in the 1990s. One can com-
pare what was added and removed before and
after the protest to read into the facts that un-
folded in only a few hours, but set the direction
of a country.
A detailed examination of these factors
opened a deeper understanding of the multi-lay-
ered nature of urban square transformations
36 during decommunisation efforts, which are not
merely physical alterations but also reflections of
changing societal values and historical contexts.
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 13 (2025), številka 1 / volume 13 (2025), number 1
The photographic documents, combined
together, offer an idea of the embodiment of
Figure 10: Yerevan and the 2020 Protests – November/ the protest, allowing drawings to freeze ephem-
December 2020, axonometric view, authors. eral actions that survived in the memory of
post-Soviet societies. In this way, those fleeting
processes, and underlying reasons, all of which events that marked a stage of political self-aware-
have been intricately shaped by their respective ness gain the same level of visibility as the built
topographies and spatial configurations. The environment.
transformation of these landscapes of three-di- The idea of dissonance suggested in the in-
mensional physical spaces has its origins in the troduction is rendered in a new format, in which
ideological realms and the morphological char- the drawing overlaps the built environment, de-
acteristics of the assembled crowds. This ini- signed on paper by an autocratic government,
tial phase of transformation is further augment- with the disruptive uses enacted by collective
ed and reinforced through the narrational and unrest.
political reproduction of a collective memory of Finally, we have highlighted the importance
decommunisation. Architectural studies gen- of non-human actors in shaping the protest. Riv-
erally represent state buildings erected by auto- ers, trees, streets, cars, and surrounding build-
cratic regimes in their pristine forms after the ings became part of the crowd’s tactic to gain its
inauguration. At that stage, which corresponds maximum level of visibility in front of the seat
to the design that was drafted on paper, public of power. The multi-layered and multi-tempo-
space is a materialisation of the propaganda ma- ral snapshots proposed in this article allow for
chine (Resta 2019). In this article, we have ana- the investigation of urban spaces during specif-
lysed the very opposite: the stage of crisis of the ic incidents, blending history with journalism.
monumental square against the rage of the pro- Through such a forensic approach to the imagery
testing crowds. of the protest and its spatialisation, we can open
The cross-analysis of textual, photograph- new frontiers of historical and political studies
ic, and video sources helped us reconstruct the in which drawings combine information that
geometry of fleeting moments against the sta- written sources can only partially communicate.
bility of architectural edifices that were built to At the same time, this is a common ground in
embody an immutable cornerstone of the state. which architectural history and heritage studies
The violation of its skin, like in the case of Baku, can communicate with different disciplines.