Paper short abstract:

The goal of the Monument Group (Spomenik) is to discuss the wars in the 1990s and the (post-)war collectivities in former Yugoslavia. The Monument we produce neither follows the ossifying politics of monuments nor the models of reconciliations between subjects.

Paper long abstract:

The goal of the Monument Group (Spomenik) is to discuss the wars in the 1990s and the (post-)war collectivities in former Yugoslavia. Through this space we produce a Monument that neither follows the ossifying politics of monuments nor the models of reconciliations between subjects. The Monument that we create is in the process of becoming and is composed of the collective (people and material objects) whereby each entity defines its own political position.

This presentation will address the politics of memory promoted and practiced by the Monument Group. We proceed from the premise of the impossibility of memory: what we cannot remember reveals what we cannot forget. Hence, we interpret the syntagm 'politics of memory' as a demand for a renewal of politics. Stated in the negative form, we claim: There is no memory without politics! / There is no oblivion without politics! The Monument Group views the impossibility of actual memory, that is, the impossibility of forgetting, first of all, as an impossibility of constructing an actual political subject. Without a political subject, it is possible to have only a private and historical memory that remains deadlocked within the gap of 'neither oblivion nor memory'. In the case of the genocide committed in Srebrenica, 'neither memory nor oblivion' is the result of a two-fold ban that precedes it: national socialism's ban on thinking politics and the ban on producing a political subject in actuality, that is, the hasty reduction of the actual politics of genocide to historical national socialism.