Where Is the Safest Place for Memory?Audiovisual Heritage in Times of War and AI
War disperses not only people but also their memories. After 1944, Lithuanian refugees carried cultural memory westwards and continued creating it through recordings, radio, film and community archives. This paper argues that such dispersal can be understood not only as loss, but also as resilience: a distributed memory is harder to destroy. Digital technologies now allow dispersed heritage to be reconnected without physically relocating originals. Yet AI introduces a new challenge – distinguishing authentic records from convincing simulations. Museums, libraries and archives therefore become infrastructures of trust, connecting authentic sources, digital representations, metadata and people across borders. Dr
