Dubowitz, D., 2026.

Imperial Palimpsests and Afterlives

Imperial Palimpsests and Afterlives
The resurgence of Russian expansionism and the war in Ukraine underline the urgency of investigating colonising practices in the imperial borderlands. This research proposes and tests a protocol for investigating architecture and urbanism built with military intent in the borderlands of the Russian empire, moving beyond the centre- periphery dialectic (Piotrowski, 2014) to re-frame urban and architectural studies.
It established a transferable approach to interpreting Baltic landscapes, making two contributions: an archipelagic analytical frame (Glissant, 1997) that reads island forts, garrison districts and logistics corridors as a connected field of afterlives, and an Encounter Protocol (EP) pairing archival anchors with multi-sensory site evidence.
Designed as a multiple-case study across Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, it used iterative cycles of archival investigation, site encounters and returns to test the stability of readings. Analytically, a post-qualitative diffractive stance guided the work.
Treating borderlands as a connected field decentres imperial narratives, revealing how dispersed architectures worked in concert across the imperial periphery. Pairing archival records with multi-sensory encounters uncovered textures, uses and atmospheres omitted from official accounts while keeping claims auditable. Developed across three Baltic states, the EP demonstrated transferability beyond the Baltic to wider regional contexts. The study reframes architectural and heritage inquiry from object-centred description to encounter-led analysis, foregrounding the imperial score over the script.
A 2023 keynote and exhibition in Helsinki led to a Visiting Professorship (University of the Arts, Helsinki 2023-26) and a EUR20k archipelagic urbanism grant supporting further fieldwork.Dissemination includes exhibitions in Tallinn (EKA), Helsinki (UNIARTS) and London (V&A East) (2023-27), integration into practitioner salons, and 2025 Chemnitz Archipelago Summit.
This work underpinned grant applications and informed cross-disciplinary teams, establishing the Encounter Protocol as a reference in wider debates. These outcomes and follow-on collaborations underpinned a Leverhulme project grant application (Imperial Palimpsests 2026-29, with Prof. Andreas Schönle) extending the framework to broader borderlands of the Russian Empire.