Wake Up, Fight for Your Dreams: Škart’s Visual Poetry and Student Protests in Serbia 2025

• In Event: Yugoslav (Re)Visions II: Bullies Flying into Oblivion: Art, Activism, and Direct Democracy in the Student Protests in Serbia

Abstract

This paper examines multimedia artistic activism in the context of the students’ protests in Serbia in 2025. It focuses on the series of visual poetry works entitled Wake Up Lines (srb. Crtice-Budnice), a project by the Belgrade-based art collective Škart. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the collective has become known for its politically engaged and socially inclusive art projects. As a support for the students’ struggle, in the mid-January 2025 Škart started to publish Wake Up Lines every morning on its social media profiles. The works consist of one or two rhyming verses within the characteristic black-red-white visual framework. In addition to being spread on social media, the works started appearing as self-made printed stickers, posters and badges, or as slogans at the demonstrations. In this paper, the focus is firstly on the literary and visual aspects of the works, as well as on the forms of their dissemination and medial transformation. Then the elements of reversed and subversive pedagogy in these works are highlighted, i.e. their aspects where moral or state authorities are denounced as unworthy and corrupt, and the systemic dysfunctionality of the state is exposed. The analysis also points to the political, social and historical continuities outlined in the works (e.g. the comparison of the students with Yugoslav partisans from WWII). Finally, the focus lies on different aspects of the seminal metaphor of awakening, which makes these works by Škart a multimedia diary of rebellion but also an artistic appeal to political action.

Author

• Goran Lazicic, U of Graz (Austria)