Yugoslav venation: skeletal traces of the past in the practice of the present.

Abstract

This chapter critically examines practices that are engaged with the material and political cultures of the former Yugoslavia in its successor states and the remnants of that common space. Taking the standpoint that the haunting of the present by Yugoslav pasts began after the 1974 constitutional redraft and the growing economic crises in the last fifteen years of the former state, different forms of hauntology are presented through the means of case studies. Following Mark Fisher's assertion that haunting entails not just the spectral presence of unfulfilled visions of the future from the past in our present, but also our awareness of a more collective and just future society yet unrealized, it considers five different contemporary artistic practices and the variations of the hauntological that they offer. While Borko Lazeski's monumental National Liberation War fresco can be double-coded as a mourning for a lost work and a summation of achievements at the end of a career, Adela Jušić's powerful When I Die, You Can Do What You Want focuses on the embodiment of personal trauma and loss in conflict. Selma Selman's destructive performance in Rijeka connotes the "haunting" of post-Yugoslav societies by marginalized Roma communities, as a means of not only challenging that marginalization but turning its force against itself. The Montenegrin artist Irena Lagator Pejović offers a critical reflection on the parasitic relationship of neoliberal capitalism to the remains of socialism. Elena Chemerska's durational project on the Monument to Freedom, by her father Gligor Chemerski (1980/1981) in Kochani, North Macedonia, is not only an example of the persistence of a Yugoslav-informed contemporary art practice but also opens up the possibility of a collective discussion on what freedom may mean and how a different kind of society may be worked toward collectively