REMEMBERING ANTI/FASCISM European Perspectives in Critical Memory Studies

The rise of rightwing populism, authoritarianism and (post)fascism in the early 21st century has actualized the role of memory culture for political purposes. This international conference examines European memory wars from a political, philosophical and aesthetic point of view.

The rise of rightwing populism, authoritarianism and (post)fascism in the early 21st century calls for new perspectives on memory culture and politics. Studies of cultural history, memory and heritage are increasingly turning their attention to politically and ideologically motivated memory wars. Artistic practices, in turn, are intervening into the material, aesthetic, historical and theoretical perspectives that conditions memory culture so as not to allow for the ideological grid of fascism to stand unanswered.
The question of what we are to remember and forget, and how, involves a wide array of agents, materials and forms of expressions. It is, however, time also to question the grounds of what propels the urge to engage in memory culture from a theoretical and philosophical perspective. Why here, why now?
The conference discusses the kind of memory wars that are attached to the European forms of fascism that have been present in 20th century history and onwards, and that can be seen in conflicts surrounding historically and politically significant sites, monuments and works of art. One of the premises is the belief that so called memory wars are an important aspect of contemporary fascism, and by consequence also anti-fascism. The conference looks at how to conceptualize the struggle with fascism that takes place in memory culture, and/or the way in which fascist memory culture as well as anti-fascistic antinomies are given material and aesthetic expression.



SCHEDULE:
Thursday 5th sept
Room: MB503

10-10.45
Sanja Horvatinčić: The Bronze Spectres: Counter-Revolutionary Memory in Late- and Post-Socialist Croatia
Moderator: Gal Kirn

10.45 Break

11.00-13.00 Panel: Concepts
Mladen Dolar, Guido Bartolini, Gal Kirn
Moderator: Cecilia Sjöholm

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-16.00 Panel: Revisionism
Daniel Palacios González, Zoltán Kékesi/ Máté Zombory
Moderator: Gal Kirn

16.00 Break

16.15-17.00
Mathias Danbolt: Monumental Drag: Antifascist and Queer Abstraction in Admir Batlak’s In the Kink (2023)
Moderator: Rebecka Katz Thor

Friday 6th September
Room: MB503

10.00-12.00 Panel: Memorywork
Rebecka Katz Thor, Uroš Čvoro, Panagiotis Dafiotis
Moderator: Mladen Dolar

12.00-13.00 Lunch

13.00-15.00 Panel: Memoryscapes
Dubravka Sekulić, Mirko Nikolić, Cecilia Sjöholm
Moderator: Guido Bertolini

ABSTRACTS AND BIOS:


Dr Guido Bartolini: The Italian Revisionist Debate in the Light of Memory Theory

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Italian memoryscape was deeply affected by the profound transformations brought about by the end of the Cold War era, which in Italy led to the disappearance of all the mass parties that had dominated the political scene for the previous four decades and the formation of the first populist right-wing government led by the tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. During this phase of re-negotiation of the country’s political identity, numerous debates about the Fascist past and the legacy of the Antifascist Resistance took place: revisionist movements and right-wing activists contested the Antifascist paradigm that had been formed in the 1960s, while left-wing intellectuals defended its value and objected to changes in Italy’s memory culture. The paper considers some key texts from this period, focusing on the revisionist books by journalist Paolo Pansa and the committed polemical essay by historian Sergio Luzzatto. The paper raises questions around the notion of revisionism and considers, through memory studies theory, whether the opposition of Italian Antifascist intellectuals against the revisionist weave created effective and ethically sound narratives to remember the Fascist past.

Guido Bartolini is a FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University where he works on the cultural memory of Fascism in Italian literature and the idea of responsibility for the past. He is the author of the The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (Palgrave Macmillan: 2021) and the co-editor of Fascism in Italian Culture: 1945-2023 (Annali d’Italianistica, 2023) and Meditaing Historical Responsibility: Dealing with difficult pasts in European cultures (De Gruyter 2024). He worked at University College Cork and Royal Holloway University of London.



Uroš Cvoro: Against Triumphalism: Remembering the War in Bosnia and Harzegovina in the work of Aida Šehović and Mladen Miljanović

The political manipulation of commemoration in Bosnia and Harzegovina (BiH) has been a staple of its public life for decades but has become more pronounced since the start of Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 with deepening rifts between so-called ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ sides. In this context, ‘triumphalism’ – whereby genocide is not denied but glorified and celebrated by the perpetrators and their political sponsors – has had implicit and explicit support from the authorities in BiH Entity Republika Srpska, which is evident in numerous commemorative ceremonies, monuments, buildings, and streets dedicated to war criminals, and other gestures that celebrate genocide.
Against this background, this research has two aims. The first is to discus the ‘mural battles’ over the image of convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić in recent years as a combination of football fan iconography (murals and graffiti that enforce aggressive territorialism); nationalism (anti-cosmopolitism, traditionalism); and ‘kill all normies’ online trolling (appropriation of critical modernist strategies). I argue that triumphalist aesthetics converge on the image of Mladić to reinforce nationalist power structures and establish ownership of territory. The second is to discuss two artworks that critically approach the nationalism and triumphalism in BiH memorial culture: Aida Šehović’s Što Te Nema? (2006-2020), and Mladen Miljanović’s Draft For a 20-minute monument (2019). While Šehović’s work addresses remembering the Srebrenica genocide through staged commemorative events, Miljanović’s work addresses the post-conflict monumental landscape in BiH. Both works suggest models of remembering that are outside of institutional frameworks and political interference that often accompanies institutional forms of remembering. Furthermore, both works address the manipulation of commemoration that has been rampant in the last few decades. In a context where living witnesses of BiH war are passing on due to old age, Šehović’s and Miljanović’s works suggest significant models of remembrance beyond nationalist politics and staged media spectacles.

Uroš Cvoro is Associate Professor in Art Theory at UNSW Australia, Arts, Design & Architecture. His research interests include contemporary art and politics, cultural representations of nationalism, post-socialist and post-conflict art. His books include Post-Conflict Monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina Unfinished Histories (2020), Transitional Aesthetics (2018) and Turbo-folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia (2014).


Panagiotis Daiotis: 'Memory politics and the haunted plateau of modernism',

This presentation approaches the question of memory politics vis-à-vis memorials of anti-fascist struggles in Greece, though the perspective of two key terms: Hauntology as well as Crisis of Representation. Initially, the memorials are addressed as haunted relics of a bygone era characterized by ideologies, grand narratives and modernist aesthetics, in accordance to Derrida notion of Hauntology. Despite this seemingly pessimist approach the talk investigates more politicized modes of engagement with 20th-century modernism as Claire Bishop suggests . Moreover, in the backdrop of the Crisis of Representation, I revisit the (im)possibilities of imagining alternative political, and concomitantly, aesthetic avenues, as a Sisyphean yet necessary task.

Panagiotis Daiotis a tutor and researcher in the field of Arts-led Research in Education. He teaches in graduate and Postgraduate courses in Greek Schools of Fine Arts (mainly at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) emphasizing ways to connect Art Education with Arts-led research. He concluded his Arts-led Doctoral studies at the Institute of Education/UCL, He currently teaches art education as well as subjects on the relationship of the public sphere and contemporary/modern art (BA, MA). He frequently publishes his research in the fields of art (and) politics, arts-led research, and on new technologies in the cultural domain, and he participate sin EU funded Research Projects in the intersections of the above fields.




Mathias Danbolt: Batlak’s In the Kink (2023)

The Bosnian-Norwegian artist Admir Batlak has over the last years created several abstract sculptures that evoke the formal characteristics of antifascist public monuments in the former Yugoslavia, the so-called spomeniks. This presentation takes its starting point in the monumental installation In the Kink, presented at MUNCH museum in Oslo in 2023. If the formal features of In the Kink reference the abstract symbolism of resistance and freedom in Milorad Živkoivć’s Sutjeska monument in Tjentište (1965-1971), Batlak dresses his sculptures in glittery sequin – a material that holds a special position in queer drag culture where glimmer has been used as a tool for marking presence and affirming difference in defiance of the erasure of queer visibility. In this lecture I examine how Batlak’s infusing of the spomenik tradition with the glimmering aesthetics of drag folds anti-fascist and queer histories of resistance into each other, allowing different conceptions of “brotherhood and unity” to touch. Building on art historian Lex Morgen Lancaster’s argument of that abstraction “offers visual and material tools for queer resistance via processes of dragging”, I suggest that although In the Kink’s abstract appearance is “dragging away” from representation, its formal and material operations drag different aesthetical and political histories of resistance to the table in new ways.

Mathias Danbolt is Professor of Art History at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Over the last decade his research has focused on the politics of history and historiography in art and visual culture, with a special focus on queer, feminist, and decolonial perspectives. Danbolt is currently working on the contact zones between art history and colonial history in a Nordic context with an emphasis on memory politics, monuments, and art in public space. Danbolt has been leading several collective research projects that examine the effects of colonial politics today, including “Okta: Art and social communities in Sápmi (2019-22), “The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories” (2019-2023), and “Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era” (2022-25). His latest publication is the anthology Searvedoaibma: Art and Social Communities in Sápmi (2024), co-edited with Britt Kramvig and Christina Hætta.


Mladen Dolar: Which specter?

With the rise of the new populisms over the last decades, it appears that the specter of fascism is again haunting Europe. The contribution will try to explore some difficulties of using the term fascism (along with the terms totalitarianism, authoritarianism etc.) in relation to this new wave. The question can be raised as to whether and to what extent these movements present an old phenomenon under new disguises, or else, to what extent their novelty should be taken into account. Further discussion will be devoted to the very present dangers of the normalization of obscenity and the role that the digital media (and particularly social media) play in this surge of the right. The memory of the anti-fascist struggle on which the European community is based is thereby getting obfuscated and relativized.


Mladen Dolar is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism and art theory. He has lectured extensively at the universities in the USA and across Europe, he is the author of over hundred and fifty papers in scholarly journals and collected volumes. Apart from fifteen books in Slovene his book publications in English include most notably A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into ten languages), Opera's Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, also translated into several languages), and Rumors (Polity 2024). He is one of the founders of what has become known as the ‘Ljubljana Lacanian School’.


Sania Horvatinčić: The Bronze Spectres: Counter-Revolutionary Memory in Late- and Post-Socialist Croatia

Contrary to an ahistorical, revisionist understanding of antifascism as a “European value”, and monuments as metaphors of an abstract notion of memory, this analysis turns to a materialistic understanding of monuments – both their construction and de(con)struction – as concrete products of historical economic relations, aimed at mobilizing particular past narratives while employing various monument-making strategies. The analysis will focus on monuments dedicated to the antifascist struggle, socialist revolution and class struggle in Yugoslavia during WWII, and the empirical case study of their systemic erasure in 1990s Croatia. I am not only interested in agents, methods and technology of that erasure, but also in what had instigated, due to specific historical conditions, the disassociation of those objects from the progressive ideas which they had been designed to embody, what was their emancipatory potential in the “moment of danger”, and how it came to be silenced or neutralized. In seeking those answers to this, the presentation will look beyond the striking statistics of demolished monuments in Croatia since the 1990s, and tackle the internal contradictions of late socialism in Yugoslavia and the systemic violence and disposition of the working class as the central subjects of the revolutionary memory.

Sanja Horvatinčić is a Research Associate at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb. Her research focuses on the production of monuments and remembrance culture in socialist Yugoslavia, as well as on heritage and memory politics in the post-socialist context. She has participated in research projects on the history of Yugoslav cultural politics and the Non-Aligned Movement, critical heritage studies, and digital art history.In 2023, she coedited the book Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia (Archive Books Berlin, IZA Ljubljana).



Rebecka Katz Thor: Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure

Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure. This presentation takes a quote from Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes as its point of departure, where she states that “every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure”. I ask what such failure is, or rather how can we understand it? I address official
monuments and memorials, as well as alternative renderings on the scene of contemporary art and memorial days, with a special attention to different projects commemorating the victims of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica.

Rebecka Katz Thor is a writer and associate professor at REMESO, Linköping University. She is currently developing the strategic vision and knowledge framework for the permanent establishment of the Swedish Holocaust Museum. Her PhD is in Aesthetics from Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research focuses on cultural memory studies, the commemoration processes in monuments and museums, and the political,
historical, and ethical dimensions of contemporary art.


Zoltán Kékesi – Máté Zombory: Antifascist Memory in the Algerian War: A Paradigm of International Solidarity

Our paper reconsiders antifascist memory in order to use it as a starting point toward a historical critique of our present. In particular, it relies on recent studies on the crisis of international solidarity in the context of contemporary Holocaust memory and the post-colonial world, and explores anti-fascist memory in the postwar era as a distinct model of international solidarity. More specifically, it interrogates the role of the memory of fascism in the Algerian war, and demonstrates that antifascist memory was both internationalist and non-Eurocentric. In order to do so, it looks at the use of antifascist memory in anti-colonial struggle in three geographical contexts: the colonies (Algeria), Western Europe (France), and Eastern Europe (Hungary). While previous studies rediscovered pre-1945 antifascism as an internationalist movement of global scope, we re-evaluate the antifascist memory of the postwar era. While the Algerian war has long been seen as a historical moment that galvanized the international Left, we argue that it coincided with the crystallization of postwar antifascist memory as a paradigm, and helped shape its internationalist agenda. By looking at voices from both Western and Eastern Europe, we demonstrate that antifascist memory was—despite its instrumentalization—not inherently contingent on Cold War epistemology. Ultimately, our paper contends that the memory/politics nexus in postwar antifascism is fundamentally different from contemporary Holocaust memory: unlike the latter that ultimately aims at shaping individual attitudes (e.g. by promoting values such as tolerance), antifascist memory was transformative in the sense that it attempted to change social relations in and around the postwar world.

Dr. Zoltán Kékesi is a cultural historian of Central and East Central Europe with a focus on Holocaust research, Jewish history, memory studies, and fascism studies. He is a research fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University College London. He has worked internationally for several years, and held research fellowships at the Center for Jewish History in New York, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, and most recently at the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin. He is the author of two books in English: Agents of Liberation: Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Art and Documentary Film (Central European University Press, 2015) and Memory in Hungarian Fascism: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2023).

Dr. Máté Zombory is associate professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, and senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. His field of interest is the historical sociology of transnational and cultural memory. He is the author of Maps of Remembrance. Space, Belonging and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe (2012), and Traumatársadalom. Az emlékezetpolitika történeti-szociológiai kritikája [Trauma Society. A Historical-Sociological Critique of the Politics of Memory] (2019). His current research projects include the Cold War history of Holocaust documentation with particular attention to the work of Hungarian journalist and author Jenő Lévai, supported by the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, Paris, and the history and memory of international antifascism.


Gal Kirn: Antifascist Ecology in Yugoslavia: from partisan artworks to partisan monuments

The antifascist memory often take the very space of subjectivation of Yugoslav liberation struggle for granted: people's liberation struggle, its major battles and liberated territories, most of its cultural and political activities predominantly took place in the forrests. To join partisans was equated to go, for indefinite time, to forrest. The metaphore of nature has long served, especially in its Westerncentric and Enlightenment legacy, either as a of aesthetical beauty, and in more political sense, a site of the uncivilised. This text will pose a question how strongly were forrest and animals, and nature in general, engrained in the liberation struggle, in its political and artistic imagination? Moreover, I will try to answer how come all the major socialist modernist monuments to revolution -most of them sites of recent aesthetical fascination- most of them are located deep in the forests? Could we say that despite the obvious postwar socialist modernisation that relegated nature to the secondary site – site to be exploited if need to be – perhaps monuments testify to the legacy of not only multinational antifascist solidarity between nations and people, but a legacy that was radically inclusive in so far that partisan ecology included animals, plants and nature. Everyone and everything was mobilised in the struggle against fascism. It is both partisan ecology and this un-expected solidarity between Communist party, liberation, peasantry and nature that are subsequently sustained in various monuments to revolution.

Dr Gal Kirn is a research associate and assistant professor of sociology of culture at the University of Ljubljana. He is also affiliated with Södertörn University (Sweden) and published two monographs Partisan Ruptures (Pluto Press, 2019) and Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter, 2020).



Mirko Nikolić: Struggling in memoryscapes of fascism and extractivism:
thoughts on memory politics in contemporary anti-extractive struggles in Serbia

The presentation tells the story of two different memoryspaces impacted by forces of fascism and extractivism, Timočka krajina in East Serbia and Jadar Valley in West Serbia, historically and today. Both regions have a mining past that goes deep into past, and have been important mining centres in modern Serbia and both Yugoslavias. During WW2, Jadar was a site of a Nazi-perpetrated massacre, as well as one of the first independent zones of partisan resistance. It also contained valuable lead and antimony mines which were indeed owned by a German company since before the war.
In East Serbia, a Paris-based company ran one of the largest copper and gold mining districts in Europe until the war when it was forcefully taken over and occupied by Nazis. During the war, it was a site of enormous human suffering with thousands of war prisoners and forced labourers working in the mines.
Both regions have a strong memory culture of these events. They are also sites of live socio-environmental transformation with two large investments by foreign mining companies. Foreign companies are often likened to ”occupying force” by the detractors, and the opposition to lithium mine in Jadar draws directly on the Great War battles against Austro-Hungary as well as (contentious) interpretations of resistance to Nazi Germany. On the point, the Australian-British company trying to develop the mine has in past collaborated with Franco’s regime and, indirectly, shipping ore to the Nazi Germany during the war.
How memory is mobilised in these contested zones is highly complex, yet it is one of the analytical frames used by the movements to interpret contemporary manifestations of imperialism and to formulate anti-imperialist ecological struggle. By doing so, however, emerge deep-seated contradictions and contentions in memory culture and historical understanding connected to the civil war between partisans and monarchist forces, as well as the wars of the 1990’s. In this super-charged ideological quagmire, how can a progressive environmental justice movement take shape?
The presentation uses as a starting point these struggles to draw a conceptual trajectory between fascism and extractivism, as well as to document how progressive resistance takes shape today. Since the situation is dynamic and contested, core parts of the analysis will be self-reflective and auto-ethnographic.

Mirko Nikolić is a cultural and knowledge worker, environmental justice organiser, with roots in the post-Yugoslavian space, now lives and works in Stockholm. He/they often work in collaborative constellations, primarily through place-specific performance and community engagement, in combination with writing, sound and photo/video. The main concerns in the work have been how to imagine and materialise justice in the areas of intense past, present or coming ‘nature resource’ extraction, with particular focus on eco-social impacts of mineral and metal mining and processing.
After obtaining a PhD in Arts & Media Practice from the University of Westminster (2017), he/they have been a project leader on an art-research project “what do rare earths deeply want?,” with two-year support from Kone Foundation (2017-2019). At the moment he/they are finalising the book connected to the artistic research project “water is (non)life: de-extractivist poetics in the semi-periphery” funded by the Swedish Research Council, which has been hosted at the Institute for Culture and Society, Linköping University (2020-23). mirko is a member of the Mustarinda Association, Pluriversal Radio, Group on Green Extractivism in the Balkans, Yes to Life No to Mining, and affiliated with Earth Thrive, Eco- and Bioart Lab, Posthumanities Hub.


Daniel Palacios González: An antifascist monument in a football ground: Clapton CFC and the Memory of the International Brigades

In 2024, a monument dedicated to the fighters against fascism will be unveiled next to a football ground in East London, the Old Spotted Dog, home to the Clapton CFC. This is an unexpected initiative, given the recent focus on victimhood and post-holocaust rhetoric concerning the War and the Dictatorship in Spain. However, the war in Spain was, at the time and for decades internationally, a fundamental episode of the struggle against fascism. The ¡No Pasarán! chanted by the self-organised people of Madrid against fascism, the colonial army, the landowners, and the Catholic Church transcended borders, mainly thanks to the participation of thousands of volunteers as part of the International Brigades. In East London, the memory of the anti-fascism of the Spanish war survives in unexpected echoes. Clapton CFC, a small football club, has played a significant role in keeping this memory alive. They chose a particular design for their away kit: the Spanish Republic's colours, the International Brigades' emblem and the ¡No Pasarán! stamped on the back. This is not by chance and has little to do with nostalgia. On the contrary, it shows the many intersectional facets of today’s anti-fascism and how those facets survive consciously and can be traced back to that of 1936: self-organisation in the face of fascism, equal gender participation in society, anti-racism and anti-colonialism, and even the critique of professional sport in favour of popular leisure not just remembering the Brigades, but becoming an update of the Brigades antifascist struggle confronting the deadly and slick faces of racial capitalism and its fascism.

Daniel Palacios González, is an Art Historian and Social Researcher specialising in Critical Heritage and Memory Studies. He is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the UNED. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and he got his PhD at the Universität zu Köln as MSCA Fellow. He is a member of the research project NECROPOL at the Universitat de Barcelona. He is the author of the recently published book Making Monuments from Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain (AUP, 2024), and his previous book From Mass Graves to Sites of Memory (CEPC, 2022), got the Memory Studies Association First Book Award 2023.


Dubravka Sekulić: “Kuću gradim a kamena nemam”* On life and memory after ethnic cleansing in Prijedor

*line from a traditional sevdah song, which roughly translates “I build a house but own not a single stone”

In September 2020, regional news in former Yugoslavia reported about a man, Šerif Velić, burying his house in Kevljani, a hamlet between Prijedor and Omarska in the north-west part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, destroyed in the war of Yugoslav cessation in 1992. The inscription on the granite memorial stone erected next to the grassy mound/burial site reads, “Here lies my house, built by love destroyed by hate; Risen in 1974, Razed in 1992.” Against the Dayton suspension, I am reading this gesture of burying the house as a gesture of refusal, as the one that offers a new way to conceptualise the anti-fascist memorialisation that does not seek to resolve but stays with the grief and incompleteness. Which has the capacity to address the violence that is ongoing. The presentation (as well as the chapter itself) will be constructed as a constellation of fragments, not as a definitive statement, to address many lines of inquiry that buried house requires, most importantly the questions of property and genocide, and to lay out a proposition that memorialisation at the time of genocide as ultimately not a formal but an ongoing epistemic question.

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist and educator. In her work, she is trying to connect spatial knowledges and political emancipation, thinking with solidarities and struggles from below. She is working on a book manuscript entitled "City Against the City. Minorplannning for the Liberated Future.". She is the MA City Design Programme Lead at the Royal College of Art. She holds a PhD from gta the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich (CH), on the relationship between the Yugoslav construction industry and the Non-aligned Movement. In addition, she is working on several co-edited volumes Take Back the Land, with Godofredo Periera, Life of Crops - Towards Investigative Memorialisation, with Milica Tomić and Philipp Sattler and Curatorial Design with Wilfried Kuehn. She is the author of several books, including Glotzt Nicht So Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), and most recently she collaborated with artist and filmmaker Ana Hušman on Don't Trace, Draw! (2020), a film that explored the spatial legacy of the Yugoslav pedagogical reform.


Cecilia Sjöholm: Landscaping memory: Green monuments in former Yugoslavia

It has been widely discussed whether fascism should be defined as an ideology, a historical movement, or indeed as a political attitude. Today, we can identify a new line of conflict, specific to our times, where nature and the human relation to nature has become symbolically charged in a new way. This conflict also pertains to the demarcation line between fascism and anti-fascism. There is reason to study how an anti-fascist attitude to nature may be inherent to certain memory works. How can such an attitude be made to appear, how is the relation between human memory and the environment articulated?
In my talk, I will use works of Vojin Bakić and Bogdan Bogdanović to exemplify how the political and aesthetic signification of the monuments also have to do with their placement in, and relation to the landscape.

Cecilia Sjöholm is professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University. Her published research is particularly focused on the relation between art and politics in contemporary culture, and she has published extensively on art, psychoanalysis and critical theory. Her latest book Through the Eyes of Descartes; Seeing, Thinking, Writing (with Marcia Cavalcante Schuback, Indiana UP, 2024), examines Descartes as a thinker of a baroque aesthetics.