MONUMORABILIA

street names

pizza delivery

The fracturing was so deep, in fact, that in many areas of the Yugoslav region renamed entire cities which were named to honor Tito, while hundreds of street names and squares were redesignated in order to expunge all traces of their Yugoslav, Partisan or communist heritage.

And through that fracturing, new countries were being formed with new (or resurrected) identities, new ideas for their own futures and reinterpreted outlooks on their national histories -- all guided by new political ideologies -- and in many cases, the legacy and universal symbolism of the spomeniks did not fit into or could not be aligned with those new ideologies and 'new histories'. Through the course of this national reinvention, new monuments were erected that spoke in a new symbolic vocabulary. Consequently, some governments, militaries and political groups waged active campaigns to diminish the importance of the old Yugoslav monuments and, in many cases, actively worked to eliminate them from the memorial landscape so that the 'old system' could be forgotten and replaced with the 'new system'.

reasons im doing this

- i want to contribute, i learnd that it was a

- i learned that it was an

- i wanted to understand how it was possible (i never will)

-

IDEAS FOR EXTENDED VERSION (GRAD PROJ):

- mem. w/ photos, anyone can attribute

- historical markers (do ppl read those?)
maybe they will atleast make the city look nice
is that gentrifying?
monuments that double as useful things are better
so city markers just as an attribute to that?

- 8 dec memorial

exP IDEA:

- KILIM pressed in clay, like CUNEIFORM were pressed as driehoeken in wet clay
(meaning "behind":
sth like
symbolic 4 youth is trying not to foreget history
hmmm lamecheeky)
will think abt it
_ MAKE/GET 3 HOEK STICK
(essttaebchen?)

This historical marginalization and cultural erasing took many forms: new monuments were built on top of the ruins of old ones (Photos 6 & 7), monuments were overtly targeted, defaced and destroyed by vandals, old monuments were ignored in favor of new monuments, plaques bearings the names of fallen Partisans from WWII were replaced with plaques bearing the names fallen fighters from the 90s Yugoslav wars, memorial crypts contains the remains of Partisan fighters were demolished and scattered, etc, etc. However, it is important to realize that in each of the former Yugoslav republics, this phenomenon manifested itself in different ways. Among the most contentious and complex examples of the post-Yugoslav monumental erasure of the 1990s was in the Bosnian region, where the region's three primary ethnic groups (Serbs, Croats & Bosniaks) used monuments to compete in a quickly changing political landscape. A paper by Mraović & Begić describes the situation there in the following terms:

"[In the Bosnian region] the territory markers (monuments, commemoration ceremonies, names of schools, streets, and institutions) from the pre-1990s period have been replaced en-masse by new monuments, commemoration ceremonies, names, and collective histories. Interestingly, this was done is such a way that [Yugoslav symbols] and almost all markers associated with [them] were replaced by three mono-ethnic narratives and their symbols. This symbolic cleansing of territory has a dual purpose, to differentiate 'us' from 'them' and to make the ethnic other feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, and out of place in 'our' majority-controlled areas. In that regard, they almost represent a continuation of war through other (symbolic) means aimed at cementing ethnics cleansing and partition accomplished during the war... This 'enforcing and reinforcing of symbolic domination' has been primarily accomplished through the mass construction of religious buildings and symbols."

HMMMM (against my info on city plaque idea)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulen_Vakuf_massacre

https://susanschuppli.com/works/memorial-in-exile-2/

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interview:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/memorial-in-exile-in-londons-olympics-orbits-of-responsibility/

, Emsuda Mujagić, who lost 40 members of her immediate family. She now runs Through Heart to Peace an organisation for women refuges from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

arguments for and against our opinions

1) dei ene met zelfgemaakte dingen

2) https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/thousands-destroyed

3) acelor mittal exile monument

article: "Can memorials heal the wounds?" by Ana Milošević
https://europeanmemories.net/magazine/can-memorials-heal-the-wounds/

"In 2014, the Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg won a competition for a memorial to the victims of the Utøya massacre. The project, called Memory wound, aimed to cut an island into half to symbolise the death of 77 persons killed during the 2011 Norway attacks. But controversy beset Dahlberg’s proposal. Environmentally-friendly Norwegians opposed changes in the natural landscape. Local residents — already traumatised by the mass killings, stood against the project. “How we are supposed to heal the profound wounds”, they wondered, “with such a constant reminder of the tragedy?”
Perhaps even without knowing it, the Norwegians raised a very important and somehow forgotten question: What is the purpose of memorials? Can memorials help the healing of the wounds or do they simply keep them open?"

✤ "On the one hand, we overproduce memory using obsessively memorial language and tools. On the other, we are terrorised by the forgetting (see Rieff, 2016), or better said the absence of memory. Not remembering or wanting to forget is associated with amnesiatic or denial state. Our infatuation with memory and memorials might be the real reason why we do not discuss anymore whether and why to memorialise but rather ponder on how.
How we handle memorialisation often depends on who is directing the process, and importantly what role is assigned to memorials. Differently from the past that celebrated survival, resistance, victories, and heroes, our present is built on monuments that primarily commemorate trauma. The purposes of these memorials are multiple: as a form of symbolic reparations, justice for the victims, acknowledgment, tools for dealing with the past. Memorials are conceived as ethical and political promises of non-recurrence that clearly have a didactic end. They are meant to teach future generations the lessons from the past so that tragedies of the history cannot repeat again."

✤ "Bizarrely enough – we know little about memorials as a part of social and personal recovery.
It is unclear whether memorials indeed help to heal the wounds of antagonism and what is their role in the prevention of future violence. The past, after all, has its ways of coming back to life. But what we know for certain is that memorials don’t always act as a unifying force for social groups. Sometimes they can also deepen the lines of division and further lacerate the wounds inflicted by tragedy and violence."

✤ More than 20 years after the wars in the Balkans, memorialisation has evolved into an ethno-political instrument for nation-building and virtue signalling – a conspicuous expression of moral values. Arguably, it serves to keep the wounds alive rather than to support reconciliation and the healing process (Touquet and Milosevic, 2018).

^^^ wowwtf
the source she uses is her own text (ft. a study colleague)
plus according to
https://www.researchgate.net/project/Europeanisation-of-memory-politics-in-Croatia-and-Serbia
her methods were: Methods: Non-Participant Observation, Public Policy Analysis, Elite Interviewing, Content analysis - SHE DIDN'T EVEN ASK THE PEOPLE WHO IT WAS RELATING TO

I'm not saying that what she's claims isn't happening or relevant at all. There will always be people who can't even visit the country at all any more after fleeing, because of PTSD and opened wounds that are triggering.
But it's very short sighted to use that as an argument for all people in BiH because some sources that were published claim that.
People have been PROTESTING for the right to put up monuments commemorating their past, protesting against the prohibition of it.
She mentions how memorabilia and that stuff has became a money making machine and a facade. And starts this with an anecdote of her "entrepreneur minded" friend that wanted to know where to get exyu flags because he "sensed" that that is what diaspora would want to bring home from vacations. ITS NOT THE MEMORABILIA THATS CORRUPTED. ITS PEOPLE LIKE YOUR EXPLOITIVE FRIEND. Wages and income have been a shitty joke ever since the war, and expenses like groceries are proportionally expensive for the people living and working in most of the regions. Not even the big capitals are much better off. Why take a business opportunity away from the locals. at least collaborate or something. How can one write about the shitty corruptness, the performative and exploitive side of it all, while it is within in your very own friendgroup that is raising these problems. And then just end the argument with that it's wrong all together, instead of highlighting WHAT is wrong about it.
If you create something that it ripping open wounds to so many people. I dare to árgue' that YOU DID IT WRONG. And with that I mean you DIDNT TRY TO IMPLEMENT THE OPINIONS OF THE PEOPLE WHO THE MONUMENT IS FOR.
I know I actually am in no position to say this. I am no scholar, no academic, and this woman is working for a university and some EU institutions.
But

https://visoko.co.ba/prijedor-danas-kolektivna-dzenaza-za-29-ubijenih-civila/

NOT TRUE THAT POLITICIANS ATTEND
PERFORMATIVE< THEY OFTEN DONT
ATTEND OR ANSWER TO IT AT AL

%% include monument in exile (acelor mittal) as well

✤ In these and many other cases, the victims and survivors are used as a political currency. Only rarely do they have a say in the handling of the public memorialisation. As the time goes by the victims and survivors perceive memorialisation as a perpetuation of past conflict and lived trauma. The meanings of their personal tragedies and suffering are appropriated by the collective.

The untold story is that, more often than not, top-down memorialisation fails to meet the expectations of survivors in the aftermath of violence. With their grievances unattended, survivors are often creating alternative memorial spaces that will address their needs. The Monument Quilt, for instance, is one such example. It is a crowd-sourced collection of thousands of stories from survivors of rape and abuse. Using quilts to symbolically stitch their stories together, the victims are creating and using public space to heal after sexual violence. Yet, even when memorialisation is successful – that is accepted, endorsed and practiced by the survivors, it still represents only one segment of a much broader process of addressing their needs (health and care, support, poverty, reparations).

(ABT SYMBOLICAL ABSTARCT MONUMENTES)