Petra Milički - Essay 2

Phenomenon of the past conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and their formal representations - monuments make a good example of how collective and individual memory can be both preserved through a continuous production of media elements, but also lost through the reproduction and reframing of particular narratives and images.

The collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it chooses to erect. Whatever a nation (its political structures) chooses to memorialize or not to memoralize in physical monument is an indicator of the collective memory.

>>> intro

The memorial culture in former Yugoslavia is represented through structures that were commissioned by Josip Broz Tito, former Yugoslavian president, in the 1960s and 1970s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place, or where concentration camps stood. They were designed by different Yugoslavian sculptors and architects.

There were hundreds of them scattered throughout villages and rural deserted landscapes representing power, confidence and strength of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. They were/are usually of gigantic scale and abstract forms. Most of them were built out of concrete or stone, while some others with metal cladding or partly glazed.

Up until the 1990s, they were attracted millions of visitors, schoolchildren (young pioneers), military veterans, patriots, polititians, and mourners who had lost family in WWII.

These impressive and expressive abstract totems were meant to endure, to resist the transiency of time, but after the Republic dissolved and was torn by nationalist and ethnic violence in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, rarely visited and left there to decompose and rott. They stand unknown by the younger generations and are neglected by the older. Their symbolism a fading as is the memory in the collective mind of their host cultures.

While completly ignored by the political structures and the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, the monuments became quite famous only because of the interest of a particular and relatively small group of people outside of the former Yugoslavia - designers, photographers and other visual artists and blog consumers.

In only few months the word ‘Spomenik’ (meaning monument in languages of the former Yugoslavia) gain a completly new meaning. When used as a google search term gives by far more articles and pictures comming from international webpages and blogs (in english mostly). The word is even grammaticly treated as a word comming from the english language (e.g. Spomeniks, reffearing to plural od Spomenik).

The reason for this is “Spomenik: The End of History”, a book by Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers that presents series of 26 photographs of 25 monuments of former Yugoslavia, that has became widely known in artistic and design circles through various blogs and art/design magazines. Kempenaers toured around the ex-Yugoslavia region (now Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.) from 2006 to 2009, but with the help of a 1975 map of memorials.

“They have become submerged in a new age, rendered unintelligible to the current generation. Their symbolism has been lost in translation as the visual language has changed, their signals muffled by a shifted worldview. The monuments have been the objects of blind fury and now, of indifference. What remains is pure sculpture in a desolate landscape.”5

The particular selection of photos, set side by side in a big format book, where each of monument has its own page, communicates something completely different than each of them would separately communicate. They are all shot in the same time of the day, from a human perspective, without people present.

...“He captures the Spomeniks in the misty mountain landscape at sundown. He allows the viewer to enjoy the Spomeniks’ melancholic beauty, but in so doing, forces us to take a position on a social issue.”

...“Looking at the photographs one must admit to a certain embarrassment. We see the powerful beauty of the monumental sculptures and we catch ourselves forgetting the victims in whose name they were built.“

It is the memory of the socialist party that is all over now. And yet, this is precisely what enriches the monuments’ meaning. In their dilapidated condition, they are no longer symbols of victory, but for the first time, true symbols of a newfound mourning.

“The photographs raise the question of whether a former monument can ever function as a pure sculpture, an autonomous work of art, detached from its original meaning. Can it live on, after its ideological progenitors are dead and gone and its symbolism is no longer intelligible?” But not only that, can this book as an art piece or atleast the series of photographs put together like this and distributed all around the internet, be considered as new monument? A monument that converged each of the monuments as the places of remembering to a group of them that can communicate only forgetness?

Ultimately, however, the medias that produce, reproduce, and remediate increasingly digital content, contribute to a more fluid, diffused and unpredictable media/memory ecology.

>>> (to be added) dissconected memory

What is their meaning now, what are they communicating? On one hand, their physical condition and institutional neglect reflect a more general social historical fracturing now when their original ideologically driven meaning is no longer intellegible. And on the other hand, they are still of stunning beauty without any symbolic significances that communicates nothing but their aesthetic values (e.g. some blogs are refearing to the monuments as the ‘25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like they’re from the Future’)