“Use Me, When Needed Again”: Performing Heritage at Monuments of the Yugoslav Era

Abstract

Monuments of the former Yugoslavia are a highly contested case when it comes to narrating the conflicted past(s) in Europe. Built mainly between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, they mirror the idea of Yugoslavia between the political, economic, and cultural antagonists of the Cold War. Today, 30 years after the wars of the 1990s, these over-dimensional open-air museums undergo a visible entry into art and popular culture. In fact, the ‘source’ communities are witnessing a process of colonisation where ‘the others’ are narrating their stories in either art vocabulary or popular images. This paper proposes introduction of performing heritage as a possible way to address the layered narratives, without neglecting the gap between their origins in Yugoslav culture and their current state in post-socialist times. Performing heritage offers a method to engage in narrating the past as politics of the body. Through examples of mentored student field work performing heritage is explored as a tool of a critical and foremost bodily encounter with Yugoslav history and post-socialist presence.