Summer School as School 2023
The Public Program
August 14, 2023, 20:00

Restoring society from below after mass atrocity? Inclusive commemorations and artistic activism versus competitive victimhood in the former Yugoslavia​
Presentation by Ana Dević

Venue: Boxing Club, Mark Isaku 8, 10000 Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo

Abstract

How should we understand the relationship between remembrance, violence and societal repair in the former Yugoslavia, a place where no consensus over the past has been reached even several decades after the end of the most recent wars. It is often assumed that, when a conflict is officially over, the atrocities of the past should never be forgotten and therefore always commemorated (in the form of memorials, cemeteries, heritage sites, museums, public rituals, and symbolic gestures). But it often turns out that the very imperative to commemorate also nurtures resentment, reinvigorates violence, and creates conflict along old (or sometimes even new) lines. In this presentation and research underway, the question of remembrance after mass atrocity is addressed by studying a range of post-war memorialization and commemoration practices and the effects that different forms of remembrance can have on a society in the post-Yugoslav space. The destructive effects of certain memorialization and commemoration initiatives are juxtaposed with the restorative potential of others, in particular initiatives that have been started from below and have an artistic and activist ambition.

Biography

Ana Dević is an associate professor of political and cultural sociology who obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego and her master degree at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. She is currently a senior researcher at KU Leuven, where she was previously a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow. Ana is also an adjunct associate professor with the University of Bologna Eastern and Southeast European Studies, teaching there a master course on the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema. With the course on Soviet and post-Soviet history read through film and popular culture, she regularly contributes to the summer term teaching at Boğaziçi university in Istanbul. Ana specializes in nationalism, intellectuals, social movements, gender, memory politics and arts. Her recent publications include “Artefacts of national subversion: the flag as a critical presence or a disturbing absence in contemporary visual art“ (2023, with P. Vermeersch), ''Class, Conflict, and Power between Hegemony and Critical Knowledge” (2022), and “Hijacked Feminism of the New Right“ (2021). With the two recently won grants, she is embarking on the project dealing with the artistic-activist commemorations of mass atrocities in the post Yugoslav space.