Applied Yugoslavia – program is postponed, meeting online

Diversity in Culture and Activism

Applied Yugoslavia
Participants: Jelena Vesić (editor), Dubravka Sekulić, Milan Rakita, Ana Vilenica, Branislav Dimtirijević and other invited speakers
program in CZKD is postponed, meeting was online

The 2000s brought an amazing increase in consumption and appropriation of Yugoslav political history and images from Yugoslav everyday life within project practices of contemporary art as well as in various other fields – from the politics of remembrance, design, and film to the organizational forms, media communication and memes on social networks. We will term this phenomenon as Applied Yugoslavia on the following discussion with a group of speakers in order to summarize the meaning and the reasons for the usage of that “applicability”. During the first decade of the new millennium displaying the images of the socialist past entailed a critique of ahistorical omnipresence of global capitalism in the form of an effort to surf the “big wave” of the idea of a return to the future and the future as a return. The Yugoslav political exceptionality within the framework of the Cold War world order – nonaligned movement, self-management, social ownership – seemed like a good identitary capital, as a springboard for post-Yugoslav cognitariat from which a noteworthy leap into the global content market and alternative futures could be made. Still, no matter how we persistently (with good reasons!) criticize the idea of progress, the future is not and cannot be a return, since a resource that gets to be carelessly used has its own excruciating ending and its own not necessarily friendly outcome. Present times are saturated by the expenditure of Yugoslavia to such an extent that we are, for some time now, unable to differentiate between well-founded research and superficial branding. We had enough of that. Please, not another Yugoslav project! Is there anything to be found on the junkyard of used Yugoslavia? Please, do not recycle!

The program is realized within the framework of “Diversity in Culture and Activism” project.

The project is supported by the Delegation of the European Union to Serbia (EU/IPA), the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights and Social Dialogue of the Republic of Serbia and the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia.