theory assignments

“Monumorabilia” is a combination of the words monument + memorabilia.
A project surrounding the topic of public monuments, hinting on the aspect of personal memories that are commemorating, and connected to said structures.
It aims to research the power play and power structures integrated in building and commissioning monuments and statues. Which side of the story usually is in power to do so? Does it also give them the power to shape and form history for generations yet to come?
Can this (deliberately) leave a gap for the other side of the story? There are instances of governments and political parties forbidding the erection of certain monuments for years, even up until today. What can this absence mean for people, for communities, for generations after the affected?
On the other hand, there are many cases of monuments and statues that are offensive and hurtful to many people, which represent old and obsolete ideas and ideals. What can those mean for the general public, for affected groups, or for the uninformed? Could removing them change, or even improve the narrative known to the public? Or could it erase history into the forgotten realm? There are discussions of the risk of moving monuments and statues of this kind into museums, where they could become something like pilgrimage sites for for example the far right, like we have seen happening to former nazi houses.

In search of the topic of absence in monuments, both physical and tangible, as well as psychological and emotional, there were attempts at constructing and designing monuments for several moments in history, for different stories and different communities. There were thoughts spent on what makes a monument “good”, in the 4rt15t own eyes, in the public eye, and most important, in the eye of the community it refers to. What boxes does it have to check to be considered commemorating and respectful?
And what can a monument look like, when it does not check these boxes? Are monuments that are extremely abstract, and built as a performative gesture by a big institution hurtful to the cause? How much latitude is there for symbolism, before it becomes decorative?

Ako želiš da upoznaš sebe, pitaj druge.
If you want to meet yourself, ask others. (An old saying)

“Monumorabilia”, a combination of the words monument + memorabilia.
A project surrounding the topic of public monuments, hinting on the important aspect of personal memories that are commemorating, and connected to said structures.
It aims to research the power play and power structures integrated in building and commissioning monuments and statues. Which side of the story usually is in power to do so? Does it also give them the power to shape and form historical knowledge for generations yet to come?
Can this (deliberately) leave a gap for the other side of the story? There are instances of governments and political parties forbidding the erection of certain monuments for years, even up until today, one example being the iron mining and steel factory Arcelormittal that uses a former concentration camp in Prijedor, Bosnia. What can this absence mean for people, for communities, for generations after the affected?
On the other hand, there are many cases of monuments, statues, and street names, which can be an enduring form of monuments too, that are offensive and hurtful to many, which represent old and obsolete ideas and ideals. What can those mean for the general public, for affected groups, or for the uninformed? Could removing them change, maybe improve the narrative known to the public? Or could it erase history into the forgotten realm? There are discussions about the risk of moving controversial monuments and statues into museums, where they could become pilgrimage sites for example.

And while any monument, like actually anything in the world, will be embraced by one and resented by another, this might more strongly than not be the case in the countries of former Yugoslavia, where any topic often is met with at least three different versions, backstories, and very strong opinions, depending on the region one’s from.
Even the abstract and amorphous forms of the enormous socialist era Yugoslavian concrete monuments with universalist messages of harmony, reconciliation and unity, at their time still resulted in some horrified reactions, and not even exclusively from the perpetrators of the memorialized crimes, but sometimes even from the victims, if they found the design to be insufficient or decontextualized to the point of offensiveness to a horrific crime. The giant

Dear reader,

Until the summer of 2021 I never particularly had any aspirations of designing monuments, or even to precisely research how an adequate and useful monument could look like. It was sparked by three different, slightly related, all quite coincidental, and all very odd feeling moments over the course of about two months.
In late June, in something as trivial as an Instagram subcomment on a page of historical Bosnian photos, I learned some very sporadic info about the particularly gruesome death of a to me related person, in a concentration camp in Prijedor, Bosnia, during the Yugoslavian war in the nineties. Following this bizarrely short text, I then fell a bit into a rabbit hole of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia trials, watching the trials en reading transcriptions of testimonies, as well as memoirs, and learned details about the war and the camps, as graphic as my parents prefer not to talk about to my sibling and me.
It then also happened that that summer, after two years of not being there (covid related), I was back in Kozarac, Bosnia, in early August, in the same week that the annual commemorating day happened at all three former concentration camps in and around Prijedor. (the closest bigger town next to both my parent’s hometown.) It was one of the two only days a year that the camps are open to visitors, and somewhat exactly 26 years after the surviving inmates, regular civilians, were freed after British reporters managed to find and expose the camps, and the then following international pressure on the Serbian authorities leading the camps.
It was probably the ugliest day of my llfe, with an effort to keep it together in public unlike ever before, walking through the rooms and halls that were once used for torture, rape and murder (and now function as a steel factory again), being in the very same room where the person of whom this dark trail of discoveries started with had lost his life. And as most of the people being present that day were former inmates of the camp, or people who have lost their very close family members, it for me likely has been the least impactful to be there and listen to short talks about the times in there, out of all the people present. Anyone somewhat closely related to me that had lost their life in the camps died before I was born. And yet, the memories of my new “discoveries” still were very fresh and I still was somewhat in disbelief of the cruelty that overcame so many “regular people” - but the memories of these people may haunt them everyday for years.
Being there so helpless and hearing the organizers remark how each year it’s less and less people present to commemorate these events, one wants to do something in a situation where there isn’t much to be done that would make anything less painful.
And as there was also talk about the steel factory company forbidding the people to visit the former camp site more often (which for some people acts as a placeholder for a grave of a body never found) or to put up a plaque at the “white house” (a small with building in front of the camp site, where most “final stages” of killings were held, and behind which bodies were dumped before they were distributed at different mass graves) or to put up any monument at all. Online I found out that people would protest in front of the main building of the steel company, located in London, and claim their headquarters their “memorial in exile” until they were granted their since 2005 promised monument at the former camp. Even as someone who hasn’t lived through any of it, one of the first things you notice during the visit, is the morbidity of an usual workday, lunch hours, and any triviality that is erasing the history of a place that has destroyed so many lives, of either the dead or the living.
The week after, unrelatedly and coincidentally, in a book I read about the “declining ambiguity in the world” (The Decline of Complexity in the World. On the loss of Ambiguity and Diversity by Thomas Bauer), there was a short passage about monuments that were put up at places out of performative necessity, instead of real empathy. For examples when big companies bought land where a tragic historic event has took place on, and out of an expected respect commission a monument, which turns out so abstract and decorative, that there is no real connection to the event it’s supposed to commemorate, and easily gets overlooked and doesn’t build a real connection to the cause.
With everything that’s going on regarding the attempts to erase proof about the genocide (resistment against a law that makes it pubishable to deny that an ethnic genocide took place, mass graves that were redug to cover up crimes, commemorating monuments being forbidden, and now also the threat of splitting the country of Bosnia forcefully once again, only 26 years after a peace agreement came into place), this was the final incident that started my interest in monuments and memorials.
And with all the heavy and ugly research it has brought me, it eventually also led me to having long conversations and an excuse to ask a bunch of questions about my family's past and life in Bosnia before the war. And as I, despite all, wanted to keep my practical aspect of the project somewhat positive (an attempt to create something healing, rather than something dwelling), adding to the fact that plenty of people still prefer to not yet talk about the worst parts of their trauma (which is human, I believe. In WW survivors it often happens that tragic stories skip a generation and are only told to grandchildren, rather than their own children), I asked them questions regarding happier moments, which has opened up many dear conversations and a better understanding of the little town where my heritage lies.

ENDURING [adjective]
continuing for a long time; lasting (Cambridge Dictionary)
✤ rewritten in the context of monuments:
Keeping memories of historically significant people or events on a permanent basis, in the form of physical objects, mostly statues and installations. Sometimes the ideologies of the time and era, of the ruling party, or of the community are implemented symbolically. Sometimes tragic events are being remembered and commemorated. Events being commemorated is mostly a post 20th century concept. In the past, they were more focussed on individual persons (like tombs and victorious statues in ancient Greece and the Rome, or statues and portraits of kings in and after the middle ages)

LIVING [adjective]
having life; being alive; not dead (living persons) -- in actual existence or use; extant (living languages) -- active or thriving; vigorous; strong (a living faith) -- burning or glowing, as a coal (https://www.dictionary.com/)
✤ rewritten in the context of monuments:
A more progressive sort of memorial (in contrast to traditional monuments and statues), which serve some sort of purpose and use to the people. Like traditional memorials as well, but even more so, they often serve as a meeting place for commemorative services. As such, they are often found near the centre of town, or contained in a park or plaza to allow easy public access.
Living memorials include (but are not limited to): bridges, parks, commemorative gardens, urban plazas, libraries, playgrounds, community centers, civic auditoriums, athletic fields, stadiums, and cemeteries.

HILL [noun]
an area of land that is higher than the surrounding land (Cambridge Dictionary)
✤ rewritten in the context of monuments:
A round/oval pile of earth, usually a burial mound, also called TUMULUS. Inside are TOMBS (in TREE COFFINS, URN’S, or just SCATTERED CORPSES (and maybe PREHISTORIC MONUMENTS) Tombs are the most famous, oldest and most widespread monuments. Other versions: MOUNDS (North American artificially created hills), CAIRNS (English stone hills), TUMULI DE PIERRES (French long formed Tumuli), Gravrøser (Danish buried stone boxes, covered with rolling stones), HUMPBACK TOMBS (Lower Saxony’s mounds that had a small circular mout next to it, where the earth that covered the urn was taken from, and marked the burial site)

I didn't change much from here except adding MLA.
I had fun idea's of expanding the glossary (also rewritten in the context of the town, also rewritten in the context of the camps, also adding new, more specific words), but finishing the other texts was a priority, and it never came to another glossary, at least not further than having dumped some more terms under the file and planning things out in my head.

I didn't have a good feeling using footage of the concentration camps or war footage for my cultural archive, unless I had a clear vision of what I wanted to do with it and if there was a respectful intention. Most footage and sounds I found at the beginning of my research were very devastating, and it also didn't convey with what I wanted for my end practice - something that radiates towards healing. Of course it was very important to research and acknowledge this part of history. But I didn't want to collage them into one long mix, as that felt disrespectful in a way.

As time went on, my focus for the end project for the minor had shifted to the memories of people from Kozarac (Bosnia). Things that once were and now aren't. Memories of places that don't have buildings to visit anymore or photos to look at. Since the beginning of the project I intended my end project to be somewhat positive - and even the stories of war of helpfulness, of forgiveness, of not giving in to propaganda and the sowing of hatred, had a touch too dark to them to reduce them to their positive component. I realized that a topic this big and draining was .too. big to take on during this little time, and that most people don't like to talk about it just yet. So I decided to work with memories before that time.
The stories are quite trivial and about every day life, yet I've learned so much about the town's and (for now) my family's history that I had never known.
What started as a research into the power play of who is in charge of which monuments, and what the presence or lack of them can do to people, shifted to amplify the voices of the people who definitely NOT are in power to do so - despite the fact that it affects their lives, their families, and the place they feel at home - all their memories, what these monuments would commemorate.
While my research is tapping into the past, and with the next step being to collect and publicize pre war photos, as this was one of the things everyone seemed quite happy about when they had the rare joy of encountering images of loved ones, either in happy times or even between the walls of the camps, there are many current signs of people also appreciating footage of everyday life from their hometown from current days - which is almost odd to see in our very fast pacing time of smart phones with cameras and social media and co.

As for my graduation project I plan to take the idea of monuments a step further and hopefully make them "living" and interactive, with the biggest factor being that everyone can contribute old photos for others to (re)discover and look at, as mentioned, I for my cultural archive used footage of a man who does this himself, but with present times, for all the world to see. Also the founder of the biggest community website, he takes photos every weekend at the local market, and every once in a while walks around the town with his camera, and talks to locals about their lives how they are doing. These images are enjoyed by diaspora all over the world, who are looking forward every week to seeing a small piece of their homeland, even if it's just regular every day life stuff. (In some households it even goes a step further, as they will put on these surveillance camera videos that just show the same street for hours - Which is on TV, with music in the background.)

S

flower shaped concrete monument in Jasenovac, Croatia is such an example, but many more of these brutalist builds were destroyed, as they were seen as inadequate, unacceptable or even insulting from certain perspectives, even with the best of intentions for the victims and their families.
And today there unfortunately might still be more room than ever for ambiguity and unintended provocation, when attempting to design a monument in countries so overlapping yet so rich of ethical diversity and cultures, but memories so fresh of tragedy and loss, and even constantly renewed and relived.
In search of the topic of absence in monuments, both physical and tangible, as well as psychological and emotional, several small objects - personal little monuments - were made as a starting point of my visual research, with the fundament being my own heritage, a small town in Northern Bosnia, Kozarac. Based on memories of inhabitants and diaspora, and implementing symbolism and traditional art forms of the region, an attempt was made to create something meaningful, positive and lasting, in search of answers to questions too complex, about a region with a history probably even complexer What boxes does a monument have to check to be considered commemorating and respectful? And what can a monument look like, when it does not check these boxes? Are monuments that are extremely abstract, and built as a performative gesture by a big institution hurtful to the cause? And how much latitude is there for symbolism, before it becomes decorative?
To start a visual research in order to try to answer these questions, the history of one of the most distinctive Yugoslavian, by every country and several cities claimed as “their national treasure” (while also found in every other country of former Persian Empire origin) art styles, the Kilim (a form of carpet weaving), was traced back to its furthest possible roots - the Cuneiform script from 3000 years BC, a form of written language, as complex and widely rooted as a language can be - the perfect contested metaphor for the contested cultures the project revolves around. And as Kilims were either used for prayer or just for decoration, the project plays with the thin lining between monuments seeming decorative, whilst maybe being useful in the sense of storing some semi abstractly conveyed information - in a language where words have several ways to be written, and one and the same sign can have several different meanings, it’s quite hard to make a sense of it all by oneself and without a ton of extra information - just like any monument.