The ludic lives of memoryscapes: Skateboarding post-Soviet peripheries

Abstract

Post-Soviet cities vary dramatically yet share common elements desired by skateboarders and filmers as ‘spots’; assemblages of objects, obstacles and surfaces offering the chance to perform difficult skateboard tricks in public space. Memoryscapes are desired as spots for their scale, smooth surfaces, in-built obstacles and aesthetic appeal on video. As more skateboarders travel to post-Soviet cities in Central Asia and the Caucuses, their reinterpretation of memoryscapes reveal the ludic lives of memoryscapes, the interplay between memory and place, and the tension between hegemonic memory practices of state and state-like agents and the seemingly apolitical reinterpretation by skaters. This article explores two contrasting post-Soviet memoryscapes as seen on skate video, Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) and Sukhumi (Abkhazia) to make three arguments. First, while battles are fought over public memory online and offline, skaters approach the landscape as ludic space; as playgrounds for unsanctioned performance, capture and circulation. Second, these memoryscapes are enrolled in global circulations of skate culture, giving memoryscapes an adjacent existence online detached from their intended meanings and counter-meanings. Third, in some cases the friction between ludic approaches and the power of memory unravels the singular focus on spots, even for skaters with limited knowledge of the context.

Keywords

memorials memoryscapes post-Soviet skateboarding video

Street skateboarding depends on finding ‘spots’; assemblages of objects, obstacles and surfaces nestled in the urban landscape. As skateboarding has become more popular in cities throughout the former Soviet Union, urban landscapes have become playgrounds for skateboarders, mostly visitors drawn to post-Soviet cities for the abundance of spots and the aesthetics of these landscapes on video. In this article I focus on cities in Central Asia and the Caucuses, peripheries of the Soviet Empire (Clowes, 2011: 8−10), and now part of the trail of skate spots that re-maps Asia/Eurasia from ‘below the knees’ (Vivoni, 2009). Despite dramatic variation in post-Soviet urban development and economic fortunes, many post-Soviet cities, especially in Central Asia and the Caucuses, share particular assemblages centred on memorials. These memorials are usually positioned in open plazas with smooth surfaces, ledges, stairs, handrails and other obstacles desired by skaters. By focusing on skate video captured in post-Soviet cities this article makes three arguments. First, while battles are fought over public memory in urban space, skaters approach the landscape as ludic space; as playgrounds for unsanctioned performance. Second, the tricks (manoeuvres) performed by skaters at these sites and captured and circulated digitally as image and skate video, enrolling patches post-Soviet urban landscapes in global circulations of skate culture, giving these memorials an adjacent existence online detached from their intended meanings and counter-meanings. Third, in places where memoryscapes have limited resonance in everyday life, there is little attempt to stop skateboarders from repurposing these sites. In contrast, in some post-Soviet landscapes, Sukhumi in Abkhazia in this case, public memory is overbearing and unravels the singular focus of skaters on spots. Despite limited knowledge of the events being memorialised, collective memory remerges for the skaters, particularly when reinforced by local residents.

I begin with an outline of skate spots as assemblages in urban landscapes and their centrality in skate culture, especially skate video. The second section discusses Soviet urbanization in Central Asia and the Caucuses and the elements that produce desirable skate spots with a particular focus on memoryscapes. The third section focus on skate videos captured in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) and describes the ludic life of these memoryscapes as captured and circulated digitally. The final section focuses on an ill-fated trip by a group of skaters to Sukhumi (Abkhazia) where the urban landscape is a repository of traumatic memory forcing skaters to consider the limits of ludic geographies.

Skate spots, skate video

A spot is an assemblage of objects and surfaces that offer skateboarders the opportunity to perform tricks. Spots are not made for skateboarders, unlike designated skate-parks or contest arenas (Howell, 2008). At its core, street skateboarding depends upon spots ‘naturally’ occurring in the urban landscape (Chiu, 2009). For highly skilled skateboarders the best skate spots enable what Snyder (2017: 70) calls ‘the ethos of progression’, the opportunity to ‘increase the degree of difficulty at existing spots or by finding new spots that meet a specific criteria for a specific trick’. Therefore, skaters, filmers and photographers are ‘constantly scrutinising public space and imagining how it could be skated’ (Snyder, 2017: 71). The most coveted spots are made from smooth surfaces and contain some arrangement of obstacles such as: ‘open space, ledges, bumps, banks, stairs, gaps, manual pads, flat bars and handrails’ (Snyder, 2017: 64). Skaters scrutinise this space with a specific gaze, a gaze shared by skaters across the world. This gaze is what Vivoni (2009: 133) calls the ‘below the knees method’ of reading urban space; a way to witness and experience ‘ordinary acts of spatial appropriation’ by skateboarders on their skateboards and the traces they leave behind. Vivoni argues that it is the scuffed surfaces, the waxed ledges below knee height that ‘represent an alternative vision of the city in which the market value of built forms is contested by the emergence of new urban experiences’ (Vivoni, 2009: 133).

Spots present skateboarders with opportunities to execute tricks by reinterpreting the built environment. In his landmark work on skateboarding and the city, Borden (2001: 237) argues that skateboarding ‘involves a critique of the processes of exchange and consumption in the modern city, and. . .purposes a reassertion of use values as opposed to exchange values’. Skateboarders and filmers rarely care how the spot is created; what matters is whether it can be skated, for how long, the risks of getting busted, and how it looks on video or as image. Everything else is barely noticed, barely remembered. Skateboarding is a middle-finger to complex causality. Famous spots become subcultural landmarks, entangling material space with emotions, meanings and memories for skateboarders, even if they have never visited the spot itself. O’Connor (2020: 162) discusses the act of pilgrimage to iconic spots, ‘paying homages to locations and their histories’, underpinned by knowledge of the skaters that made them famous and/or the videos that captured these moments. There is a dual desire held by skaters to perform a difficult trick at an iconic spot, especially a trick that has never been done at that spot, and conversely, to find new spots to enrol in the ludic geographies of skateboarding. Woodyer (2012: 322) asks us to consider the ways play occurs throughout the life course as every day, embodied practice with ‘inwardly oriented politics and. . .more-than-rational/representational features’.

Along with the ludic aspects of skateboarding, the playfulness, livelihoods for skateboarders and filmers – as well as the brands that profit from their labour – depend upon footage captured at spots. More skateboarders require more spots; however, spots don’t last forever. They disappear in the degeneration and regeneration of urban space and are rendered un-skate-able by surveillance technology, police and private security guards and defensive architecture (Smith and Walters, 2018). As more spots disappear from cities in the West, the search for new spots has taken skateboarding all over the world. Asia, especially China, has become central to skateboarding in the past 20 years with seemingly endless spots generated through dramatic urban growth (McDuie-Ra, 2020). China’s centrality in the global flows of skateboarding opens adjoining routes connecting cities through Asia, including Central Asia and the Caucuses. This is a derivation of backroads globalization, what Knowles (2014: 191) terms an ‘alternative set of routes’ that depart from the ‘main roads’ of hegemonic globalization.

The cities of Central Asia and the Caucuses are new frontiers on these trails, lands previously untouched by skateboarding but where spots are assembled through Soviet urban planning, post-Soviet renewal (and decline), and the constancy of memorials; their presence, absence and removal, and aesthetics. Here, I depart from the uses of frontier as a particular territorial configuration and instead lean on the idea of frontiers as ‘imaginative’ zones. As Cons and Eilenberg (2019: 7) argue, conceiving frontiers as imaginative zones draws attention to the ways ‘material realties of place are inextricably bound to various visions of and cultural vocabularies for what the frontier might be’. In the cultural vocabulary of skateboarding, lands with no known spots, few skaters and slim prospects of capturing footage are frontiers. They are ‘in relation to’ but ‘at a distance from’ (Cons and Eilenberg, 2019: 13) other nodes on the skater’s map, the global cartography of spots. As frontiers, urban landscapes in Almaty (Kazakhstan), Baku (Azerbaijan), Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Tbilisi (Georgia) – along with scores of others – hold a special place in the imagination of intrepid skaters and filmers (see Wallner, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020). Enrolling new frontiers into skateboarding’s cartography flattens differences between cities by focusing on common patches of landscape as spots. In Central Asia and the Caucuses memoryscapes are the common patches. Wherever skaters go in the region, memoryscapes are guaranteed to yield spots. Furthermore, they look beautiful on video. As a result, skate videos captured in post-Soviet cities feature a constant stream of memoryscapes repurposed as arenas for ludic acts.

Skate video is an underutilised archive of urban change and reinterpretation animated by unsanctioned performance, play and destruction. Dinces (2011: 1516) makes two arguments in favour of analysing skateboarding video. One, skate videos ‘have a high level of relevance for skateboarders themselves, and thus that they offer historians an archive of material that has enjoyed a high level of circulation within skateboarding subcultures’, and two, ‘skateboarding is not always easy to watch in spontaneous, real-time environments’. Video, therefore, ‘has considerable power in crafting a cultural identity for the activity’ and ‘provide(s) an especially vibrant historical record of how the range of these identities has changed over time’ (Dinces, 2011: 1516). Skateboarding happens in the moment of execution, the day or night in question when the skateboarder executes a trick or series of tricks (line) at a spot. There is no set time, no schedule. This moment is also – more often than not – captured and circulated digitally. Video and image constitute skateboarding’s currency, it’s exchange. Every week scores of professional and amateur videos of skateboarding filmed around the world are uploaded online, while thousands more short clips are posted on social media platforms. Older footage from DVDs and VHS tapes is increasingly available online. While Instagram and other social media is intensifying the circulation of clips (Dupont, 2020), video parts still hold the strongest cultural capital (Borden, 2019; O’Connor, 2020; Wheaton and Beal, 2003). Furthermore, as Dixon (2011: n.p.) notes, skate videos have an ethnographic quality. He writes, ‘skaters carefully accumulate a folio of visual documents that will continue to do particular kinds of definitive and signifying work once put into circulation; much like ethnographic writing, they hope to express the ineffable through the concrete’. As cities feature as both background landscape and foreground obstacles in skate videos, they offer an archive of urban landscapes viewed from a particular angle through particular slices of time. Skate video is an archive of ‘cultural topology’, what Shields (2013: 159) calls: a way of identifying a new ‘“dimensionality” and level of precision regarding spatial and temporal relations, flows and transformations’, accounting for the ‘proper and improper, the legitimate and the out-of-place’ (Shields, 2013: 157). While certainly not high art, skate video reflects and constructs imaginaries about contemporary cities, their landscapes and memoryscapes, rapidly circulated to 40–60 million skaters worldwide (O’Connor, 2016; Stratford, 2016). This archive is both enormous and underutilised by scholars. This article draws on skate video captured in Central Asia and the Caucuses with a focus on Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) and Sukhumi (Abkhazia) to consider the ludic lives of post-Soviet memoryscapes. Skate video serves as the text through which memoryscapes are recast and their ludic lives opened for analysis.

Post-Soviet memoryscapes

Memoryscapes describes landscapes upon which memory practices take place. Building on Appadurai’s (1996: 33) paradigmatic explorations of various ‘scapes’ as ways of accounting for the fluid landscapes shaped by globalization in national and local spaces, Phillips and Reyes (2011: 13−14) define the ‘memoryscape’ as a:

complex landscape upon which memory and memory practices move, come into contact, are contested by, and contest other forms of remembrance; older ways of conceptualising the past—largely framed in terms of national and local perspectives—are unsettled by the dynamic movements of globalization and new memories and new practices of remembrance emerging.

Thus memoryscapes are a ‘complex and vibrant plane upon which memories emerge, are contested, transform, encounter other memories, mutate and multiply’ (Phillips and Reyes, 2011: 14). It allows for inclusion of actual memorials themselves – statues, plaques, murals, mosaics – the built environment that hosts them – plazas, squares, thoroughfares – and the images, videos and other digital circulations of these sites; their ‘mediatised memory’ (O’Connor, 2019; see also Landsberg, 2004). Digital media has transformed the diffusion of memory and memoryscapes, what Hoskins (2011) refers to as the ‘connective turn’. For Hoskins (2011: 29), this turn is ‘shaping an ongoing re-calibration of time, space (and place) and memory by people and machines as they inhabit and connect with both dense and diffused social networks’.

Post-Soviet memoryscapes are, like post-Soviet landscapes more generally, diverse (see Danzer, 2009; Forest and Johnson, 2002; Kundakbayeva and Kassymova, 2016; Myadar, 2017; Ter-Ghazaryan, 2013; Tlostanova, 2018). Digital elements of Soviet memoryscapes have drawn attention in recent years, particularly the ways social media is used to challenge public memory practices, in keeping with debates on social media and cultural memory more broadly (see Birkner and Donk, 2020). Bernstein (2016: 423) explores the ways digital platforms serve as a mechanism from below to ‘reaffirm broad aspects of Soviet war memory, including of national unity, shared trauma and the privileged status of frontline soldiers’. Whereas in post-Soviet spaces seeking to decolonise memory, digital space enables contestation limited in past (and present) environments of censorship and heightened nationalism. Writing on the interplay between social networking sites, documentary and memory in Latvia, Kapräns (2016: 157) demonstrates the ways hegemonic representations of the Soviet past are challenged digitally as a ‘multidirectional enterprise that both reinforces and emancipates existing hegemonic representations of controversial past’. These hegemonic and counter-hegemonic claims play out locally. Skateboarders offer an adjacent transformation of these spaces with an apolitical, or at least wilfully ignorant appropriation of memoryscapes; momentary in execution the ludic repurposing has an ongoing life online when captured in skate video.

Urban planning in the Soviet Union followed a 30-year general plan ‘regarded as the central policy document controlling the process of urbanisation and guiding the transformation of cities and towns into socialist-type settlements’ (Shaw, 1983: 393). For Soviet leaders, planners and bureaucrats, as well as local elites in the peripheries, urbanisation was a singular leap from tradition to modernity, spatially and socio-culturally (van der Straeten, 2019). This singular leap required memorials and monuments celebrating ideological lineages, futures and struggles fought along the way and large open squares for military parades that helped tie the peripheries of Empire to the core (Stronski, 2010).

Following the dismantling of the Soviet Union, newly independent states in the former peripheries fought to foment national-identity and the built environment became a battlefield for public memory (Alexander, 2007; Hughes, 2017; Paskaleva, 2015). As restrictions on internal migration were relaxed (though not entirely lifted), and more citizens from post-Soviet states travelled abroad to work and sent money back to their families, these cities ‘changed their faces as many newcomers have claimed urban belonging and as new post-Socialist materialities have emerged’ (Schröder, 2016b: 149).

Skate video captures post-Soviet memoryscapes from a different angle and circulates them to millions of skateboarders around the world. In skate video memoryscapes are consumed by an adjacent audience, for whom the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles over memory are relegated in favour of the material assemblage of surfaces, objects and obstacles desired by skaters. Many of these consumers have little knowledge of the memoryscapes that appear, except perhaps as featuring a vaguely ‘Soviet’ or ‘communist’ aesthetic, even when the memoryscape in question might actually feature symbols of post-Soviet nationalism. New memories are created, but they stem from the skater and the trick, rather than precise knowledge of the memoryscape itself. In most cases the skaters and filmers utilising the memoryscapes are visitors from the US, Europe, Australia and South America travelling in search of new spots. Russian skaters also travel to Central Asia and the Caucuses, especially to escape the Russian winter, see for instance Moscow-based Absurd Skateboard’s videos Absurd in the Caucuses (Barabaka, 2016a), Absurd in Abkhazia (Barabaka, 2017), Absurd on the Azov Sea (Barabaka and Khud, 2019), Absurd in the Black Sea (billed as ‘closer than Barcelona and cheaper than California’; Barabaka, 2019), Somehow. . .Somewhere. . . (Barabaka, 2016b) and O3EPO (Beliaev, 2017).

As skaters travel further to search for spots, the cities of Central Asia and the Caucuses are landscapes of surprising, if dated, modernity. Some cities have recent flourishes here and there, particularly in cities with heritage sites or tourism potential, and in the spectacle cities of Astana (now Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan) and Ashgabat (Turkmenistan) characterised by authoritarian regimes, rapid construction and lavish landscapes (Koch, 2018: 2). In cities where post-Soviet symbols have assumed the frontstage, such as Baku (Azerbaijan), the undergirding urban fabric is the infrastructure of Soviet urbanisation (Grant, 2014). This is not to argue that all cities in Central Asia and the Caucuses look the same or have no vernacular urban form, but rather when viewed from below the knees the common elements of Soviet urban planning are reliable producers of skate spots. Crucially, there are always monuments and memorials. Monuments have flat ground, ledges, stairs and embankments. Surfaces are smooth, with concrete, granite and marble.

As Russian skater Kirill Korobov remarks in the skate video Down the Volga (Wallner, 2019), as skateboarding grew in post-Soviet cities, monuments became gathering spots for skaters. He says:

The modern age of Russian skateboarding got started in the 1990s. Vladimir Lenin monuments in different cities turned out to be epicentres for skateboarding because of good flatground and granite or marble made ledges. Skaters choose these locations as a meet up or as a warmup spot.

Many of these statues were removed and replaced in the years following independence, especially outside Russia, yet the squares and parks that hosted these statues remain intact and have aesthetic value in skate video.

Ludic lives of Bishkek’s memoryscape

Bishkek is an ideal city to explore the interplay between the post-Soviet memoryscape and the ludic geographies of skate spots. Bishkek has featured in several skate videos in the last decade, and here I will focus on the two most popular: Meet the Stans (Wallner, 2012) and independent skate video featuring a team of skaters from the US, UK, Russia and Europe made by the Hungarian filmer Patrik Wallner, and Children of the Sun (Abes, 2015) by the French filmer Sebastian Abes made for an energy drink company. The focal point of skateboarding in both videos is Ala-Too Square and surrounding plazas; an astounding landscape jammed with memorials, statues and open spaces.

Kosmarskaya et al. (2017: 147) refer to Ala-Too square as ‘the most politically and symbolically charged space of contemporary Bishkek’, following political protests in 2005 and 2010. They write,

The appearance of new monuments in the central square provides a great deal of material for reflection on the role of the state in urban transformation; on the search for a new ideological basis for the developing new state; on how modern Kyrgyzstan is re-evaluating its Soviet past; and on how the concepts of patriarchy and modernity are competing in different versions of the “national idea” (Kosmarskaya et al., 2017: 157).

Pelkmans (2017) discusses Ala-Too square in his ethnography of the changing ideological landscape of Kyrgyzstan paying particular attention to the rotation of statues in front of the National History Museum. Pelkmans notes the current form of the square dates to 1984. The statue of Lenin remained until 2003 before being relocated behind the museum. Lenin was replaced by the Erkindik (liberty) statue, a woman with Kyrgyz features holding a tunduk (the wooden frame of a yurt, a nationalist symbol) in her hands meant to symbolise freedom and democracy that lasted until 2011 when she was replaced by Manas, medieval king and unifier of Kyrgyz peoples (Pelkmans, 2017: 19−20). Pelkmans (2017: 20) writes: ‘[t]he passing away of the communist Lenin, who made way for the liberal Erkindik, who in turn was replaced by the national hero Manas, provides one glimpse of the ideological shifts that unfolded in Kyrgyzstan’. Not only do these rotating statues signal ‘the difficulty of producing a “state idea” able to infuse a sufficiently sacred aura’ (Pelkmans, 2017: 22), but Manas is a shift away from objects that signalled the future (Lenin) to remembering a glorious, if imprecise, past (Manas), with an interlude of timeless, though ill-timed, freedom in-between (Erkindik). Lenin remains, relocated, and as Cummings (2013: 617) writes, the statue of Lenin has come to possess a timelessness ‘because he symbolizes process, change and revolution and this symbolization can serve more eras than the Soviet one’.

In and around Ala-Too there is also a statue to Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov (across Chuy Avenue and Kiev Street directly facing Manas, c. 2011); a statue to Kurmandzhan Datka (the ‘Aly Queen’, c. 2004); Victory Square with several monuments commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War (Second World War) including the Victory Monument featuring the statue of a woman holding a cup (seemingly waiting for a returning soldier) under three connected yurt-like arches (c. 1985); the Friendship Monument with a circle of Kyrgyz figures seemingly floating off the ground (nomads, workers, farmers) suspended around two tall plinths (c. 1974); busts of various notable Kyrgyz rulers and writers; a statue of Marx and Engels chatting; the (relocated) statue of Lenin; and a remarkable monument dedicated to the protestors who stormed the parliament in 2005 (see Osmonalieva, 2005). The square and adjacent parks are surrounded by government offices, more memorials, museums and libraries, the philharmonic hall, the ‘sports palace’ named after the Kyrgyz strongman Baatyr Kaba Uulu Kozhomkul (with a statue of Kozhomkul hoisting a surprised horse over his head, c. 1974), and open spaces filled with gardens held up by angled marble walls; ideal for skateboarding.

These symbolic readings are lost on the skaters who desire Ala-Too and surrounds for their material properties. For skaters the memoryscapes have a new life, an adjacent life, as ludic spaces. In Children of the Sun, skate photographer Kevin Mettalier, remarks: ‘it’s very crazy because if you take the main street, every 200 metres you have a big square with a plaza with Lenin, or some very famous guys from communism’. That is typical of the depth of thought to these memoryscapes; they have a vague past in Soviet iconography (even when many of the memoryscapes in Bishkek are post-Soviet), a kind of socialist kitsch. As skaters roll through central Bishkek, the rapid edits of tricks performed in different spots in the square gives the impression of stitching together its parts, its monuments, its historic episodes into a radically different interpretation of space.

For instance, in Meet the Stans, English pro-skater Laurence Keefe nollies into a nose manual (balancing on the front wheels only) across the top of the chiselled ‘1945’ in part of the entrance way to Victory Square. Later, Russian pro-skater Gosha Konyshev pops a heelflip from the flat of Ala-Too square up onto the lower platform of the Manas statue, the low camera angle showing the enormous Kyrgyz flag on one side of the frame and the National History Museum on the other, Konyshev takes an extra push and floats a frontside 360 (°) ollie down a set of five stairs (Image 1). French/German pro-skater Michael Mackrodt rolls out through the centre of the soaring yurt-frame of the Victory Monument and kickflips over a wide step onto the marble surface of the plaza, takes a push and spins a tre-flip, turns to avoid running into a child on a tricycle, the ollies onto a low, long marble hubba and balances a nose manual all the way down before dropping into more plaza (Image 2).

Image 1.

Gosha Konyshev halfway through a heelflip to nose manual along the base of the Manas statue in Ala-Too Square, former site of the Lenin statue (to 2003) then the Erkindik (freedom) statue (to 2011). Meet The Stans (Wallner, 2012). Screenshot. Used with permission.

Image 2.

Michael Mackrodt riding through the arches of the Victory Monument and kickflipping down the stairs in Meet the Stans (Wallner, 2012). Screenshot. Used with permission.

In Children of the Sun, French skater Manu Etchegoyen does a fakie-ollie-to-fakie-manual-to fakie-tre-flip out along the lower platform of the famous Lenin statue behind the museum. Etchegoyen is framed from afar so the full scale of the Lenin’s statue remains in view. It’s a curious conversation between the living and immortalised: Lenin gesticulating (what Cummings (2013: 606) refers to as the ‘characteristic haranguing pose’), while Etchegoyen glides along the smooth surfaces of the spot. In person the spot has more elements to skate than appears on video. A small hubba, also of marble, extends out from the first set of stairs leading away from Lenin and the museum, there is a long flat landing, then another set of four stairs with a long marble ledge extending for several metres. The ledges on both ends of the staircase are waxed well, and there are chips out of the marble in a few places. Performing a trick down the staircase takes the skater away from the statue, which backs onto the rear of the museum, but in the direction of Lenin’s gesturing hand.

During a visit to Ala-Too Square and surrounds in 2018, the centre of the city was full of summer crowds but I couldn’t find any other skaters. The flat ground around the statue of Manas featured in Children of the Sun and Meet The Stans was full of kids playing around. There was a vendor hiring out roller-skates, a man peddling candy-floss and scores of Kyrgyz posing for photographs in family groups and wedding parties. I visited each day for a week without luck. As local skater Roman Petenev discusses in Children of the Sun, the local scene is very small, especially when compared to the scene in neighbouring Kazakhstan. There is no local skate shop, so the skate scene has no stable home. However, skaters had left their marks all over the square and adjacent parks. Almost every marble ledge is covered in wax. Handrails have grind and slide marks all along them. Stairs have chips and small chunks taken out of them. The marks are heavy – coats of wax, layers of paint removed, surfaces worn down – it’s likely many people have skated the area over several years, making a subtle claim on this part of the city.

The skaters seem to be left alone to skate through the memoryscape. Skate video revels in documenting encounters between authority and skaters. These encounters are crucial to the ways the culture reproduces an identity as rebellious, delinquent and oblivious to rules, that ‘middle finger’ once again. However, in Bishkek, as in many of the other post-Soviet cities in Central Asia featured in skate video, there is little hostility. Locals appear in the frame as curious or oblivious. The ludic space and the memorial space overlap, but they don’t create friction. There is no public outrage at the appropriation of public memory, of public ideology. Perhaps, as suggested by Cummings (2013), the rotating memorials of the reflect the difficulty of pinning down a coherent public ideology. The official memoryscape seems disconnected from local feelings of memory and place.

For urban dwellers, everyday spatial contestation runs along the fissures between long-term residents and new migrants, rather than over official memoryscapes. As Schröder (2016a) points out, the memories that generate feeling are nostalgia for a past urban aesthetic of neighbourhoods, order, cleanliness and urbane sensibilities. For Flynn et al. (2014) Bishkek’s post-Soviet landscape generates nostalgia for a return to how the city looked aesthetically in the late Soviet era when known as Frunze. At one point (2008–2010) the mayor proposed reconstructing the city based on photos from the 1970s (Flynn et al., 2014: 1515). Thus it is not only (or even usually) official symbols that assemble the memoryscape in Bishkek, but the layout of the city itself, the planned grid and ordered streets.

No one seems to care that much that skaters grind along the marble ledges of memorials to national unity, Kyrgyz culture, wars, political struggles and former rulers. The authorities also seem oblivious. However, the skaters do catch the attention of the police in Children of the Sun. US pro-skater Brian Delatorre attempts an ollie onto a high double kinked marble hubba (a ledge running alongside one set of stairs, a flat landing, another set of stairs) going from the from National History Museum into Ala-Too Square right by Manas. Delatorre gets close to landing on a few before a trio of police, one brandishing a machine gun, charge towards him. Apes is able to film snippets of the encounter, and it is narrated by French pro-skater Charles Collet, who was standing nearby. Collet recalls: ‘I saw the cops running in the street with a big AK-47, I was like, “no, no, no it’s not possible, it can’t be for Brian (Delatorre)”’. The police start escorting him from the spot. Collet adds: ‘Most of the time they can be really angry at the beginning and you don’t know why. After they start laughing with you. They know everything is cool. They are just asking for money’. In the video the police smile and shake hands with the skaters before leaving the area. They don’t seem to be concerned with the desecration of landscapes projecting national memory, they just seem to be angling for a bride. Perhaps the fact that the skaters are foreign has something to do with the response. Delatorre’s foreignness attracts the police in an overzealous display, and then enables an escape using cash. Skaters rarely pause to find out if they are allowed to skate or not, they just go for it. A local may pause; they should, and do, know better. As travelling skaters find out in Abkhazia.

Haunted memoryscapes

The most revealing counter example is the hour-long documentary Abkhazia (Lindevall, 2017) screened at film festivals and also available online. Abkhazia follows the journey of a group of Finnish and Russian skaters to the Republic of Abkhazia in 2012. Following the Abkhazian-Georgian war of 1992–1993, Abkhazia declared independence from Georgia in 1999, though no other countries recognised the declaration. After the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 (over South Ossetia), Russia recognised Abkhazian sovereignty and a few other countries followed, though for the most part Abkhazia’s sovereignty is defacto (Clogg, 2008; Trier et al., 2010). The population of Abkhazia has reduced since the end of the Soviet Union, as Mingrelians and other Georgian communities have fled back to Georgia, leaving entire stretches of landscape in ruins (Venhovens, 2019). There have been outbreaks of violence between communities and political protests in Abkhazia periodically in the years since. In Abkhazia skaters encounter memoryscapes animated by fresh trauma and a public more intent on protecting and policing the commemorative symbolism. For the skaters, the memoryscapes begin the haunt them, to alter their quest for spots. Once these meanings seep in, one they get into the heads of the skates, they become hard to shake-off.

The opening shots of Abkhazia are bleak. Crumbling infrastructure, empty streets, empty piers extending into the Black Sea. With a stirring song in the background, Abkhazia is introduced as a former Soviet resort town, and a series of title cards narrate the arc of conflict, unsettled sovereignty, with the sequence of location shots closing on the Abkhazian flag waving through electricity lines. The title cards turn to the purpose of the trip (translated from Finnish in provided subtitles): ‘the skaters hoped to find new and unique spots to film. No skaters have previously travelled there’. The scene cuts to an image of one of the skaters shot from below the knees, just legs pushing along an asphalt road with that distinctive sound of urethane wheels on rough surfaces. The film is certainly staged as a journey into the unknown, a search for spots in a new frontier, an unstable frontier.

Abkhazia features much more ‘behind the scenes’ content than actual skateboarding. The skaters meet in Russia and skate in the city of Krasnodar before crossing the border. Once inside Abkhazia the prospects for spots appear slim. There are lush green foothills, cows roaming on potholed roads and hollowed-out buildings. The urban landscape of the capital, Sukhumi, has some open spaces, especially the waterfront along the Black Sea, which is paved and has a few skateable obstacles; benches and concrete blocks. The skaters get some footage, but soon a man appears in army fatigues and is filmed in conversation with skater and translator/fixer Kirill Korobov. Korobov pleads (translated from Russian in the subtitles): ‘it is really hard to find a spot that is good for skateboarding here’. The police/soldier has his own plea translated as: ‘We are asking you as if you are our grandsons. Do not skate here!’

The skaters move on. The scene cuts to a session on the waterfront at a striking memorial. It features a statue of a muscular near-naked male lying horizontally, one arm planted into the ground, the other making a fist pointed to the sky. Behind him is a horse, the arc of its neck matching the trajectory of the man’s fist, its limbs only half-length. The man and the horse appear suspended in the air, held up only by the man’s arm. Around the statue is a smooth marble semi-circular stage, a perfect ‘manual pad’. The skaters take turns to perform tricks up onto the stage, land on two wheels, roll the length of the stage and then perform another trick off two wheels onto the lower ground. Soon a man appears on the edge of the frame, well-dressed, late middle aged and speaks quietly and politely in Russian (translated from Russian in the subtitles).

Man:

‘I’m sorry, you can’t do this here’.

After some confusion he tries with Korobov.

Man:

‘You are not allowed to do this here’.

Korobov:

‘We can’t skate here?’

Man:

‘It’s a monument dedicated to the tragic pages of our history. You can’t do it here. Please understand this. Thank you.’

In skate videos it is common to see skaters plead to be allowed to keep skating or wait until whoever has told them to stop goes away and then start skating again. Here, the skaters go quiet, unsure of how to react. The ‘tragic pages of our history’ eviction is not something they are used to.

The next scene is another monument in a park, this one with a knee-high marble ledge. Finnish skater Miki Tähtinen is sitting on the ledge waxing it to make it easier to slide or grind along. Waxing a ledge is an act of claiming before a skater attempts a trick. It leaves behind a trace, a trail, evidence of a skate session on urban landscapes all over the world (Vivoni, 2009). Waxing is usually a defiant act; a skater approaches an object in space and furiously rubs wax on it. It is such a curious act to witness for those unfamiliar with skate culture because it doesn’t look like other forms of vandalism. Skaters don’t wax to damage a surface, but to enable the reinterpretation of the object; like lighting a stage. Tähtinen is self-conscious waxing the monument. His eyes dart around. He even says (translated from Finnish in the subtitles), ‘I don’t want to wax it’. A voice off camera replies: ‘Just wax it!’. Tähtinen pauses and asks if anyone is watching. The camera pans up and the statue is revealed; a man in a suit and tie with a book in hand, the Abkhazian writer Bagrat Shinkuba (1917–2004). Shinkuba is the national writer/poet of the Abkhazian nation, and his work has dealt with identity, exile and ‘cultural extinction’ (see Gould, 2016).

Tähtinen tries his trick on Shinkuba’s monument a few times (Image 3). After one attempted boardslide on the upper ledge, Tähtinen steps off his board and shouting can be heard off-camera. A burly late middle-aged man rides into shot on a bicycle, agitated, shouting (translated from Russian in the subtitles): ‘I’m asking you why are you climbing? What are you doing? Do you know whose monument this is?’ He waits for a reply. Nothing. He adds; ‘Fuck your mother!’ and rides off, adding, ‘you have no shame’ (Image 4). The skaters huddle around a bench, sullen. They discuss whether the monument was marked during the skating. The Finnish skaters discuss whether Tähtinen should try the trick again. He doesn’t want to. Tähtinen tries one more time and gets the trick. The scene cuts to the statue of Shinkuba still on screen, haunting the spot. As he gets his things together, Karvonen says ‘we’re really sorry if we have desecrated some writer’, he pauses then adds, ‘maybe that writer would have been really stoked that his grave is being skated. He would have been like “I have dedicated my whole life to those who act like children at heart”’.

Image 3.

Miki Tähtinen boardslides the memorial to Bagrat Shinkuba in Abkhazia (Lindevall, 2017). Screenshot. Used with permission.

Image 4.

Moments later the skaters are accosted by an angry local at the memorial to Bagrat Shinkuba in Abkhazia (Lindevall, 2017). Screenshot. Used with permission.

The sense of haunted landscapes runs through their attempts to skate other spots in Sukhumi, including the former building of the Council of Ministries. The heavily shelled building is an enduring symbol of conflict and Abkhazia’s unsettled sovereignty. The skaters take some tentative pushes around the open paved area in front of the building. There is a monument on the grass next to a pathway, and it works as a spot for skaters with quick feet to clear the grass and combine tricks on the various surfaces and angles. It looks striking with the hollowed-out shell of the building looming behind. Karvonen gets onto the angled bank, ollies to frontside tailslide on the top ledge, then back onto the bank and then onto the pavement. Russian pro-skater Gosha Konyshev rolls from the other side, does a kickflip to noseslide, then drops down to the pavement. Soon an elderly man walks out of the building and is seen on camera talking to the Russian skaters gesturing to the monument. Closer to the camera the Finnish skaters discuss what they think is going on (Image 5). Karvonen says (translated from Finnish in subtitles), ‘he probably lived here during wartime’. Someone adds off camera, ‘it’s not long ago when it was a really bad time here. So I understand when people here don’t like it when we. . .’ and trails off. And then: ‘They haven’t forgotten that yet. A lot of people died here’. Back on camera, Tähtinen says to Karvonen, ‘I can imagine that our jumping around here with our boards doesn’t look respectful at all’. Karvonen offers a conciliatory: ‘But we come to represent freedom too’. He adds with a smile, ‘even if it’s not the kind of freedom he expects’.

Image 5.

Samu Karvonen and Miki Tähtinen watch as a local man confronts the Russian skaters outside the ruins of the Council of Ministries in Abkhazia (Lindevall, 2017). Screenshot. Used with permission.

As the journey goes on, the search for spots becomes a search for spots without meaning. On the final day in Abkhazia the skaters find a pavement gap; a spot created by a driveway or change in height of the pavement allowing skaters to launch from one side, perform an ollie, spin or flip variation over the lower section, and land again on the high side and roll away. A group of children sit on a low window ledge alongside the gap and watch. After getting close to clearing the gap, Tähtinen starts his push for another try, photographers crouch ready at the edge of the frame, he pushes hard, clears the gap, but lands with his weight too far back and the board flies into one of the watching children, banging into his legs. The boy screams out, starts crying and hobbles back to his house with the help of his friends. Korobov, shirtless with his pants sagging below his boxer shorts follows the kids to make sure they are ok, leaving the skaters to agonise over what just happened. Suddenly, the terrain feels hostile again. Curious on-lookers appear menacing. But things diffuse quickly. Tähtinen gets the ollie, the kid is ok, and through Korobov’s translation some adult reportedly tells the skaters: ‘just kick the kids away next time’.

As the session over the pavement gap continues, Lindevall cuts to Samu Karvonen, tired and frustrated after several attempts at a trick, lying on his back on the pavement. He says that this is not a good place for a skate trip, despite being a beautiful country. He says in Finnish (translated through subtitles): ‘I think this is the only spot to skate in the whole town that no one has been buried in’. He adds, smiling: ‘Think about this. If Mikki (Tähtinen) had killed that kid, no one would be able to skate this spot anymore’. The weight of historical meaning has caused the skaters reflect on their ludic imperatives. At the same time Sukhumi’s memoryscape is frustrating in its fragility. Every patch has someone buried, a memorial, a commemorative meaning. And at any moment the few spots they have been able to skate guilt-free could uncover more trauma. Place and memory and entangled, and even those from far away are affected as they ‘journey through memory’ (see Radstone, 2011). As the journey draws to a close the skaters pass back through Krasnodar and skate the spots in this city again, jubilant to be back in a place where the assemblages of surfaces, objects and obstacles mean so little. Abkhazia shows the limits of skating on unstable ground, where the search for spots is hampered by the haunted memoryscape.

Conclusion

As more post-Soviet cities are enrolled in global circulations of skate culture, memoryscapes have an adjacent existence online detached from their intended meanings. These in turn create new memory within skate culture, though these are distant from the symbolic and commemorative purposes of the memoryscapes within their political context. The idea that memoryscapes have multiple meanings is not novel, though when viewed from the skater’s gaze, from below the knees, post-Soviet memoryscapes have new lives, ludic lives, as playgrounds. The calculations that matter are whether it is skateable, what tricks could be performed at the spot, whether the skaters will get harassed. To put it another way, skaters pride themselves on just going for it, on holding a middle finger to complex causality and meaning. The skater’s mentality is: see the spot, think of which tricks could be done, grab a filmer and don’t think twice. If there is trouble, ignore it, plead, run or offer to fix the damage. While it might be tempting to view the ludic repurposing of the post-Soviet memoryscape as acts of counter-memory, there is no attempt at reckoning or social justice here; the intent is playful. It is not as simple as commemorative practices versus ludic practices. The intended symbolism versus the unintended or insensitive. Skateboarding drags memoryscapes into an adjacent cultural sphere. The a temporary claim by skaters on the post-Soviet memoryscape is closer to Tello’s (2019: 2) non-binary and non-dialectical ‘and-and’ approach to counter-memory that ‘has something to do with living in global contemporaneity’ and living in an era ‘marked by the capacity to be attuned to all kinds of heterogenous materialities/immaterialities – time zones, histories, geographies and subjects’. Even this temporary claim, this alternative attunement to space, can unravel. The adjacent sphere holds, as in Bishkek, until it doesn’t, as in Sukhumi.

Watching skate video from post-Soviet cities of Bishkek and Sukhumi suggests that skaters are engaging in a repurposing of the memoryscape by focusing on its material rather than symbolic form. It is possible to read this as a denigration of memory, an affront to the contested narratives of the past. In Bishkek this does not provoke obvious public hostility or attention from the authorities, except in Children of the Sun where the skateboarding is interrupted only momentarily by the police. In Sukhumi, skateboarding in, on and through the memoryscape produces hostility and tension. Public memory is overbearing and the materiality of the skaters gaze is undone, despite the fact skaters have limited knowledge of the symbols and context. They did not experience the events or inherit the trauma, rather the affective properties of the memoryscape and encounters with hostile locals haunt them, forcing them to reconsider the very ludic acts that sustain them. Once meaning seeps in, it is hard for the skaters to look at the surfaces and objects in the same way; it is hard to hold the middle-finger steady.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-mss-10.1177_1750698021995982 – Supplemental material for The ludic lives of memoryscapes: Skateboarding post-Soviet peripheries

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-mss-10.1177_1750698021995982 for The ludic lives of memoryscapes: Skateboarding post-Soviet peripheries by Duncan McDuie-Ra in Memory Studies

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback that greatly improved the article. Gratitude as always to Patrik Wallner and Vantte Lindevall for permission to use screenshots from their beautiful videos.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Duncan McDuie-Ra

Author biography

Duncan McDuie-Ra is Professor or urban sociology at the University of Newcastle. His research focuses on urban frontiers in Asia. His most recent sole-authored book is on skateboarding and urban landscapes in Asia, entitled Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). He is Author of Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), Debating Race in Contemporary India (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) and Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway (Amsterdam University Press, 2016) and co-author of Ceasefire City: Capitalism, Militarism and Urbanism in Dimapur (Oxford University Press, 2020 with D. Kikon).

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