The Aesthetics of Change: Exploring Post-Communist Spaces

This article explores the relationship between material change and social change under a
proposed theory of aesthetics of change. Suggesting a particular understanding of the aesthetic
as concerned with feeling and perception, as opposed to artistic representation, the
article explores different ways in which practices of seeing, walking and engaging with the
material environment significantly affect our experience of social change. Borrowing from
Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur and his idea of history as directly embedded into
space and the material environment, the article explores the way in which two different
forms of visual and spatial manipulations—the Painting Tirana Project, and the Czech
Dream Documentary—significantly affect the way in which the post-communist transition
was negotiated in Tirana, Albania and Prague, Czech Republic, respectively.