Projects / Programmes
Protests, artistic practices and culture of memory in the post-Yugoslav context
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.06.00 |
Humanities |
Culturology |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 6.04 |
Humanities |
Arts (arts, history of arts, performing arts, music) |
postsocialist transition, contradictory movements, democratisation, loss of legitimacy, concept of people, post-national, authoritarianism, protests, uprisings, political art, culture of memory, nostalgia, revisionism, elite and people, politisation of culture, alternative memory practices
Data for the last 5 years (citations for the last 10 years) on
June 28, 2024;
A3 for period
2018-2022
Data for ARIS tenders (
04.04.2019 – Programme tender,
archive
)
| Database |
Linked records |
Citations |
Pure citations |
Average pure citations |
| WoS |
59 |
201 |
191 |
3.24 |
| Scopus |
74 |
380 |
350 |
4.73 |
Researchers (6)
Organisations (4)
Abstract
This project investigates the role of artistic, memory cultures, and grassroots politics in the last decade of post-socialist transition in the post-Yugoslav context. With the rising authoritarian neoliberalism and lowering trust in the democratic institutions, the very notion of linear transition to open and democratic society has been undermined. Already the very early developments in the post-Yugoslav context pointed that transition was not homogenous and linear, but contradictory and even regressive process. The shared features can be traced back to phenomena such as economic inequalities expanding through neoliberalisation, and political corruption to the nationalist ideology, and the memorial rehabilitation of local fascist collaborationism. The project begins by critically diagnosing the latest stage of transition and responding to three central questions: 1) In the last decade, how did the transition unfold in the fields of grassroots politics, political art, and memory culture? (2) Who have been the agents of democratisation and what were the main topics that challenged the hegemonic constellation? (3) How important is the role of art for alternative collective memory and post-national democratisation? The project focuses on Slovenia’s postsocialist history, drawing comparisons with three other ex-Yugoslav countries: Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). All these countries, including Slovenia, have experienced a wave of protests, disobedience, and uprisings from 2008 onwards. Furthermore, all contexts share a vivid scene of political art and have been invested –along the official state apparatuses– in the question of politics of memory. Research will examine how various protests emerged, and how they were linked to the political art and alternative memory culture. After offering an overview of the transition, research will consider three sub-fields, backed up with case studies: 1. Resistance: protest, urban struggles and uprisings; 2. The political art: artwork and art collectives; 3. The cultural politics of the emotions: beyond revisionism and nostalgia. The research strengthens regional cooperation with external partners from Croatia, Serbia, and BiH, and it also offers a wider contextualisation with European situation with our partners from Austria and Sweden. The first research subfield analyses various protests in the last decade: the core case study focuses on the Slovenian context (Maribor/Ljubljana in 2012–13, and Ljubljana in 2020), while comparative and smaller case studies will analyse first the uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina (JMBG, 2013), and the anti-Vučić protests in Serbia, and lastly, the urban initiatives that countered neoliberal planning (Pravo na grad, Zagreb; Ne davimo Beograd, Belgrade). The project will evaluate these protests’ democratic potential, their confrontational frame popular against elitist, and ask what the major goals of these political formations were. The second research subfield deals with the contribution of political art to the protests. Has new political art only aestheticised the protests? Or was it able to articulate its own specific demands relating both to the increasingly neoliberalised cultural sphere and the canon and space of national culture? The project will enquire into the kinds of artistic strategies used, and ask whether they contributed to a set of alternative policies? The third research subfield will survey how these protests affected the culture of memory referred to in Slovenia as “national reconciliation”, while across the post-Yugoslav space the memory culture is associated with the rehabilitation of fascism and around the events of World War II. The dominant memory frame was divided into the conservative–revisionist memory and Yugonostalgia. This research will evaluate whether political and artistic initiatives articulated a potential to open up an alternative memorial protocol.
