Rethinking Revolutionary Memory: The Production and Afterlives of Yugoslav Socialist Monuments

After the Second World War, Socialist Yugoslavia witnessed extensive production of monuments dedicated to the antifascist People’s Liberation Struggle and the socialist revolution. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, these monuments have faced various fates, ranging from neglect and physical destruction to global fame generated by the high-modernist visual appeal of a number of them. However, the full scope and complex context of Yugoslav monument-making, including its inherent contradictions, remain largely unexplored.

Following their collaborative editorial work on the book Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia (published by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, Ljubljana, and Archive Books, Berlin), Sanja Horvatinčić and Beti Žerovc will examine this complex legacy through complementary analytical approaches. Their research challenges the prevailing treatment of high-modernist Yugoslav monuments as an isolated phenomenon—often termed “spomeniks”—arguing instead for a historicized understanding that situates these works within broader international modernist currents and local political and economic contexts.

Žerovc will focus on a fundamental paradox within socialist commemorative practice: while aspiring to egalitarian ideals, many monuments were designed in increasingly abstract and hermetic forms, accessible primarily to educated audiences. This contradiction emerged from the belief that high-modernist aesthetics would “revolutionize” recipients and transmit socialist values through what she identifies as a “bourgeois mythology” about art’s universal power. Horvatinčić, on the other hand, will explain the remarkable heterogeneity of Yugoslav memorial production, from works rooted in local commemorative traditions to artistically ambitious projects resulting from competitive federal programs. By foregrounding the diversity rather than the exceptionality of Yugoslav memorial production, this approach centers on continuity, negotiation, and hybridization as key strategies for creating shared spaces of remembrance. This perspective proves particularly valuable for understanding the afterlives of these monuments beyond the dominant trends of fetishization or weaponization.

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Image credit: Cover of the book Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia, featuring Luiza Margan's work Eye to Eye with Freedom, 2014, Rijeka (Courtesy: Bildrecht, Vienna, 2023).

The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense.  We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion.  From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny.  All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.