The Central European Refugee's Cultural Memory in the Homelands - Only Vanished Footprints or a Permanent Legacy?

The international cultural-scientific workshop, The Refugee of 1956/68 aims to establish a long-term V4 cooperation in the field of research, which is designed to discover political refugees of the V4 area from various cultural aspects.

The objective of this project is the introduction of this cultural region, the Visegrad states, as an 'interpretive community'. The workshop would like to prove the mutual historical roots, cultural heritage, reveal the interconnections in the artistic field and intensify the traditional coexistence of the member states. Nevertheless, the scientific exchange and research project makes the Slovak, Czech and Polish pieces of art influential parts of the Hungarian culture, and vice versa, the Slovak, Czech and Polish culture will be enriched by the reception of Hungarian artworks. Introducing the emigration extensively in an artistic overview, the Polish uprising, the Hungarian revolution (1956) and the Czech uprising (1968) as characteristic components of the region's cultural remembrance in an intermedial perspective; this scientific exchange project will manifest the strong cultural relationship and deepen the cooperation among these four countries. Artists compelled to emigrate or choose the freedom abroad in the West were citizens of all V4 countries and art world during the Soviet occupation and the dictatorship. Moreover, '1956' and '1968' were symbolic dates for not just the regimes' policies and doctrines, but also for the intellectuals, civil movements and 'counter-presentic myths'.