Francisco Martínez received the award for his monograph Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia. An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces (London: UCL Press, open-access)
The book reflects on what happens to legacies that do not find any continuation, exploring how national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and negligence too.
"Even if located in Estonia, this research is relevant to other societies by showing different ways to understand generational change in a material sense and by refining the concept of repair in its conceptual and analytical form," Martínez says.
Francisco Martínez received the award during the 15th EASA biennial conference, hosted in Stockholm in August. The jury, composed of members of the executive committee of the European Association of Social Anthropology, noted the original methodology, innovative structure, and conceptual ambition of the project.
Francisco Martínez joined the University of Helsinki in May 2018. Since then he has published three articles: Doing nothing: Anthropology sits at the same table with contemporary art in Lisbon and Tbilisi (Ethnography) Analogue Photo Booths in Berlin. A stage, a trap, a condenser and four shots for kissing the person you love (Anthropology and Photography); and The Serendipity of Anthropological Practice (Anthropological Journal of European Cultures).
Also, Francisco has edited three books that will be published within the next months: Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses (Berghahn); Common Grounds? Locating, Contesting and (Not) Defining European Anthropology (Berghahn); and Politics of Recuperation. Repair and Recovery in Post-crisis Portugal (LIT Verlag).
Currently, he is curating the exhibition Contemporary Objects of Attention at the Estonian Museum of Applied Arts and Design, and has been appointed as Guest Critic by the Artishok Biennale in Tallinn.