How Material Objects Remember Yugoslavia: An Inventory of Feelings through Things in the Post-Yugoslav Novel

• In Event: Yugoslav Memories II: Remembering after Yugoslavia: Archives, Feelings, and Anachronistic Memories

Abstract

During Yugoslav period of 70’s and 80’s various artistic and cultural projects in Yugoslavia were focused on making inventory of things in everdaylife such as Vladimir Dodik Trokut’s Antimuseum (1972-2018), Mladen Stilinović’s Exploitation of Dead (1986-1990) or an open call for making the Lexicon of YU Mythology in newspaper Start in 1989 to name just few. By stressing out objects and things in broader context of contemporary Yugoslav culture, those projects could be seen as anticipating devastating impact of the political events on the horizon but also anticipating important questions of who and how and under which circumstances is doing the framing of the memory. Namely, those questions became crucial in cultural wars since the breakup of Yugoslavia and are vividly lasting to our present times. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, particularly material objects became only palpable connection with the period of socialism which also means the subject of manipulation and controversies, negotiation, struggle and emancipation. Certain number of postyugoslav authors (D. Ugrešić, M. Jergović, L. Bastašić and others) are taking material objects as central in making their own literary poetic of eccentric inventory of cultural memory on Yugoslavia and thus continuing the aforementioned Yugoslav artistic and cultural traditions in problematizing framework of memory in new context. Each of them is shaping its own (his)story about remembering Yugoslavia trough material objects and things and thus articulating alternative archive of private life during socialist Yugoslavia which was embedded in specific social structure and structure of feelings.

Author

• Maša Kolanovic, U of Zagreb (Croatia)