This panel explores how memory work functions as a critical form of cultural resilience in the context of hegemonic ethnonationalist tendencies, by focussing on post-Yugoslav popular culture. Drawing on diverse media, including literature, film, and video games, and highlighting the significance of transmedia practices, the four papers investigate how cultural texts negotiate the legacies of Yugoslavia through creative reimaginations of the past that offer a platform for re-examining notions like community, belonging, and subjectivity. Together, the papers examine how memory is not only represented but also infrastructurally produced and circulated across cultural fields.
The first paper analyzes the collective memory of desertion in post-Yugoslav literature, revealing how narratives of refusal and withdrawal challenge dominant heroic imaginaries of war and nationhood. The second paper focuses on the memory of Yugoslav architecture in contemporary cinema, tracing how films mediate between utopian socialist modernity and its post-socialist afterlives through the built environment. The third paper turns to queer memory practices at regional film festivals, examining how curatorial and audience practices foster spaces of affective and political solidarity that resist heteronormative and nationalist frameworks. The fourth paper considers references from literature, film, and video games as key to transmedia memory projects that construct counter-memories of Yugoslavia, showing how digital and participatory forms of storytelling reassemble fragmented historical experiences into new affective communities.
By engaging with imaginaries and infrastructures of remembering, the panel highlights memory work as a crucial strategy of resilience that not only preserves traces of the socialist past but also enables alternative futures to be imagined and shared across the post-Yugoslav cultural landscape. In doing so, it positions popular culture and art as critical spheres for fostering public dialogue around memory, thereby contributing to democratic practices of reflection, contestation, and participation.
Milica Popović, Austrian Academy of Sciences, The courage of being a deserter: through the lens of (post)Yugoslav literature. When the Yugoslav wars erupted in the 1990s, the political elites used ethno national ideologies and the violent conflict as a tool to demobilize pro Yugoslav populations (Gagnon 2004). In such a context, the high rates of desertion and draft resistance did not come as a surprise. Today, acts of both antiwar and anti ethnonational resistance during and after the Yugoslav wars are excluded from the official memory politics of the (post )Yugoslav states. The project “The Silence of Saying No: (Un)Remembering Deserters from the Yugoslav Wars” aims to answer the question of how, in the interplay of public and private memory narratives, diverse mnemonic actors create a story of deserters from the Yugoslav wars in today’s (post )Yugoslav space. This paper focuses on the resilience of antiwar memories through popular literature which has particularly flourished in the last decade, looking at seven novels published across Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb, through critical discourse and content analysis. Depicting the deserters’ experiences through a variety of approaches, including one female perspective, the authors bring forward narratives which are fundamentally disruptive to the implicit collective memory (Erll 2022). The paper explores the contemporary politics of exclusion, obscuring the “part of those who have no part” (Rancière 1989: 30), highlighting how literature contributes to the re democratization of memory narratives on wars in a wider context. (Herewith, the term deserter encompasses deserters, draft resisters, draft dodgers, and conscientious objectors. Stevan Vraneš “Devojačka soba” (2023); Feđa Štukan “Blank” (2020); Ivica Prtenjača “Plivač” (2019); Svetlana Slapšak “Ravnoteža” (2016); Velibor Čolić “Egzil za početnike: Kako uspjeti u izbjeglištvu u trideset pet lekcija” (2018) (original edition in French: “Manuel d’exil”, 2014); Dinko Telećan “Dezerter” (2013) and Simo Mraović “Konstantin Bogobojazni”)
Nikola Radić, University of Zurich Secret Life of a Building: Yugoslav Modernist Landmark Sava Centar in Ivan Marković’s film Centar. For the past fifteen years, post Yugoslav cinema has seen a surge in themes related to the memory of socialist Yugoslavia. Architecture has been featured among its most consistent themes, as the cineastes of the younger generation revisited ruined hotels, unfinished museums, or abandoned World War II memorials. This presentation zooms in on Ivan Marković’s Centar (2018), a documentary exclusively comprising interior shots of an unnamed monumental building, as if suspended in time. The majority of its spaces seem to have been neglected, yet the maintenance staff continues to clean and vacuum them, polish the surfaces, and repair leakages. The building in question is Sava Centar, a congress space completed in 1978 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Designed by the renowned architect Stojan Maksimović to host the Conference on Security and Co operation and inaugurated by the Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, Sava Centar has been the stage of numerous international gatherings, including a summit of the Non Aligned Movement. At the time of the filming of Centar, however, this landmark of modernist architecture was slowly deteriorating while awaiting privatization. Left in a state of ‘functional decay,’ it met a fate similar to other edifices constructed in the heyday of Yugoslav infrastructure building, only to be neglected by subsequent nationalist regimes. I analyze Marković’s portrayal of Sava Centar as both a physical illustration of this negligence and a vivid incarnation of the ideological shift from Yugoslav socialism to the present day compound of Serbian nationalism and neoliberal capitalism. I will also demonstrate how Centar offers a conceptually intricate rendering of this building by representing it as a spatial and temporal vacuum, while also providing clues to interpret it as a living organism.
Jasmina Šepetavc, University of Ljubljana Resilient Screens: Queer Memory Activism and the Politics of Resistance in (Post )Yugoslav Queer Film Festivals. For decades, queer cinema, art, and activism were imagined as predominantly Western phenomena, with Southeastern and Eastern European queer histories often portrayed as absent or derivative. Within the Yugoslav and post Yugoslav spaces, this erasure was reinforced both by their underrepresentation in queer studies and by regional mechanisms of silencing – through nationalism, homophobia, and post socialist neoconservative transformation. Yet, over the past four decades, regional queer film festivals have emerged as powerful sites of memory activism and collective resilience. This paper explores how LGBTQ+ film and cultural festivals in the former Yugoslavia (such as Slovenia’s LGBT Film Festival and Red Dawns, Serbia’s Merlinka, and Croatia’s Smoqua) play an active role in excavating and reframing regional queer memories. Often taking on multiple functions – as distribution, production, and screening platforms, affective communities, and grassroots archives – they preserve traces of queerness that have been systematically marginalized or erased. By finding, digitizing, and screening early queer films from SEEE, as well as archiving and filming their own ephemeral materials and stories, the festivals circulate regional queer memories through documentaries, exhibitions, and curatorial practices. In doing so, they not only safeguard fragile pasts but also intervene in contemporary narratives of belonging, queerness, and regional identity. Drawing on autoethnographic insights from curatorial practice, this presentation analyses how these festivals and film memories they highlight facilitate forms of resistant remembering, where art and media become arenas for negotiating loss, survival, and solidarity across linguistic and political divides. It situates queer memory activism in Yugoslav and post Yugoslav contexts within broader debates on decolonizing memory studies, demonstrating how peripheral cinematic spaces can reframe both local and global understandings of queer histories.
Natalija Majsova, University of Ljubljana
Post-Yugoslav Memory Work as a Transmedia Project: Re-Imagining Yugoslavia at the Intersection of Literature, Film, and Video Games.
In popular culture, memory work - the conscious restaging of the past with the purpose of reinterpreting its significance for the present and future (cf. Kuhn 2010) - is a transmedia process (cf. Jenkins 2014; Lähteenmäki 2021) that unfolds through dialogue with representations and forms circulating across different media. This paper engages with video games set in or directly exploring the memory of the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1991) to exemplify this process, examining how these video games draw on imagery, stories, locations, music, and practices that evoke this past to create a complex intermedial - and, in some cases, explicitly transmedia - imaginary. By engaging aesthetic and narrative strategies from film and literature, such as cinematic framing, montage, and introspective or allegorical storytelling, these games invite players to reflect on how the present and imaginaries of the future are inextricably tied to traces of the past.
This presentation outlines the importance of video games to post-Yugoslav memory work by first discussing the evolution of the post-Yugoslav virtual memoryscape and then turning to a detailed analysis of recent independent video games. The affordances of video games for articulating, reimagining, and contesting memory are explored with reference to A Trip to Yugoslavia: Director’s Cut (2017), The Golf Club: Nostalgia (2018), Highwater (2022), The Cub (2024), Space Yugoslav 2D (2022), and Yugo: The Non-Game (2024). The analysis highlights that video games not only archive stories about the past but also remediate the structures of feeling that shape our relationship to it. As such, these cultural texts operate as interactive barometers of collective memory and serve as potent tools for contemporary memory work.
20260730T110020260730T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires5.9. Memory Work as Resilience in Post-Yugoslav Popular Culture: From Imaginaries to InfrastructuresSV405 (ART)MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
