Invited lecture at the COST Digital Memories Workshop. The presentation considers memory and memory practices in digital media environments (DME) from the perspective of enhanced immediacy of remembering and co-historicity, which are particularly resonant in, applicable to the situation in post-Yugoslavia. First, the presentation a brief historical:cultural framework within which post-socialist/Yugoslav memorial and commemorative practices are situated. Second, it discusses the interweaving of three concepts particularly useful in dealing with digital memory: cultures of the past, media archaeology and micro-archiving. Finally, and on the basis of this conceptual:practical skeleton, the presentation investigates the issue of enhanced immediacy of remembering (EIR) and co-historicity in post-Yugoslav digital memory practices.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 37653293The book offers refreshing insight into the ways Europe is imagined, negotiated and evoked in Balkan societies in the time of their accession to the European Union. Until now, visions of Europe from the southeast of the continent have been largely overlooked. By examining political and academic discourses, cultural performances, and memory practices, this collection destabilizes supposedly clear and firm division of the continent into East and West, ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe, ‘Europe’ and ‘still-not-Europe’. The essays collected here show Europe to be a dynamic, multifaceted, contested idea built on values, images and metaphors that are widely shared across such geographic and ideological frontiers.
C.01 Editorial board of a foreign/international collection of papers/book
COBISS.SI-ID: 37436717Serving in the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija) was a ritualized experience: it consisted of repetitive, predictable and highly performative practices and patterns, and it was surrounded by a number of rituals (including army send-offs; paid songs played at local radio stations by parents, grand-parents, and relatives; photographing in local studios once they became the JNA soldiers and sending these photos to family members, friends and relatives). The paper explores the border-crossing and border-maintenance practices as performed by those engaged in army services and argues that this ritualization was always followed by detachment of the act from its literal meaning, thus opening up spaces of subversion, resistance and refection. The author argues that the detachment and multiplicity of ways to approach borders set by ritualized protocols enable particular kind of agency to emerge—agency that sheds new light on the dialectic relationship between oppressive institution and oppressed individuals. This also makes memories of the JNA into powerful sites of multiple, often contradictory, meanings, attitudes and interpretations that go beyond the banality of the “army stories.”
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 37065517This paper critically engages with the ways neoliberal view on post-socialist societies and transitional paradigm have been internalized in the (ethno)musicological scholarly discourses in the post-socialist societies. It comments on the fact that scholarly accounts have been generally overloaded with late-capitalist discourses of music industry and primarily concerned with the creation, management and selling of music, either as a physical/digital product, a performance, or as a bundle of intellectual property rights.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 37350445The author discuses a number of digital memorial videos/memorials, which are understood through the perspective of digital storytelling, media archaeology and digital archives. First, he discusses a specific type of digital (video) storytelling in relation to Yugoslav past and post-Yugoslav present. Second, he introduces users’ strategies in co-creating such memorials, the ways in which audiovisual elements are used in construction of memorials and aspects of digital sociability. Finally, he discusses the ephemerality of such memorials in social media, such as YouTube, focusing on a case of a memorial video made and uploaded by user xPartizani0zauvijekX. The user used a cover of the famous song The Partisan, which after the intervention of the copyright holder was removed by Youtube, along with the commemorative community of individuals.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 36922413