General information
Code: TAP J7-50215
Period: 1.11.2023 - 31.10.2026
Project leader at FDV: izr.prof.dr. Natalija Majsova
Research activity: Humanities
The phases of the project and their realization
MEMPOP is designed around 4 interlocking Work Packages (WPs), which run simultaneously.
The overall project timeline comprises the Preparation and team consolidation phase (1), M1-10, Data collection and platform design phase (2), M11-M24, and Data analysis and platform calibration phase (3), M25-36.
WP1: Mnemonic Murals focuses on mnemonic representations in graffiti, street art, and murals. Of particular interest will be the muralization of the conflict of the 1990s, which is increasingly visible in Croatia, as well as both positive and negative representations of WW2 actors. The Slovenian partner will focus on the engagement of positive and negative memories of Yugoslavia communicated through street art and graffiti, with contemporary sociopolitical issues (e.g. the Covid-19 pandemic). Despite their ephemeral nature, murals are challenging traditional forms of sites of memory (monuments, memorial museums, commemorations) as the most visible forms of memory activism in public space. Although not always long-lasting, murals and graffiti also have the ability to react to current events in public space, such as the war in Ukraine, which have appeared throughout the world since early 2022.
WP2: Participatory Memory Work and Film Culture examines how regional film (re)mediates collective memory, foregrounding selected regional festivals invested in memory remediation and memory work. Film networks in the post-Yugoslav countries weakened after the collapse of the socialist Yugoslav space, but the rupture was never complete (Stanković 2018), and they were also extensively (re)activated and expanded after the 2008-economic crisis (Papadimitriou and Grgić (2020)). This was due to the common realization of film workers around the region that collaboration is a path to quality output, to funding and distribution channels as well as international visibility. Similar collaboration in documentary films is even more pronounced, taking into account the shared (regional) thematic focal points in social and cultural sense, as well as more strenuous financing options for the documentary film. Old regional festivals that functioned throughout the 1990s, as well as new ones, which have been mushrooming as a part of a global trend, have contributed to this twofold development, providing alternative distribution networks for films with little commercial appeal (Papadimitriou and Grgić 2020, 14; Šepetavc and Majsova 2022). In the post-Yugoslav space, they also explicitly engage with cultural memory in terms of narratives, aesthetics, and practices, acting as hubs (Iordanova in de Valck and Loist 2012, xii) not only for industry professionals, but also for communities of practice and affect. WG2 examines the dynamics of memory work at multiple film festivals in the post-Yugoslav space, with a specific focus on Slovenia (29 annual film festivals active since 2008) and Croatia (between 39 and 69 annual film festivals active since 2008).
WP3: Popular Music and Participatory Memory Work focusses on popular music as a prominent means of representing the past in the space of fluid individual conceptions of reality, shaping the listeners’ imagination about the past in accordance with their own acquired experience (Bennet, Jassen 2016: 1-7). The technology of sound recording and reproduction makes it possible to listen to songs, so their recording in the auditory memory of the human mind is done through mnemonics (Kittler 1999: 89). Additionally, over the past decade, several musical phenomena have appeared in the post-Yugoslav space, engaged with the memory of Yugoslav and postsocialist transitional past (Velikonja 2014, Hofman 2012). These musical phenomena include popular groups, DJ collectives, tribute bands, and other forms of musical performance (see Karamanić & Unverdorben 2019). In addition, the playlist formation of Yugoslav popular music and the production of retro-genres, such as yugowave and post-Yugoslav synthwave, have become highly popular on streaming and social platforms (Kaluža 2021). The online participatory cultures are specifically eager to engage (1) in archiving practices of Yugoslav popular music in the digital media environment, and (2) appropriaton of Yugoslav (and post-Yugoslav, 1990s’) popular music in autohtonic digital and internet genre forms. Our preliminary research also shows that these phenomena use different mnemonic strategies, ranging from archival purposes to nostalgia and subversive affirmation of the past; all these condition the formation of specific post-Yugoslav appropriation of global music production.
WP4: Mnemonic Migration & Media is designed to integrate the data and analyses produced in WPs1-3 in order to develop a theoretical framework that can help understand the mechanisms of popular-cultural memory work in an inter- and transmedial context.
Research Organisation
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/20891
Researchers
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/20891
Citations for bibliographic records
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/20891
Key words
collective memory, digitalization, film, film festivals, graffiti, memory work, murals, music, popular culture, post-yugoslav spaces, streaming platforms
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