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Paper short abstract

The paper will explore how protesters in Serbia inscribed materiality to fight “post-truth” populism, by creating an identification of damage to the buildings to the experience of violence the protesters suffered.

Paper long abstract

The protests against the populist governing in Serbia started in 2016 on the day after Vucic’s party won the parliamentary elections. The same night, a neighbourhood in the center of Belgrade was demolished, starting a first wave of protests that are still ongoing.

In this paper based on my fieldwork on protests in Belgrade, I want to look at anti-populist protesters’ engagement with the particular forms of materiality. It was used to create a political ontology of resistance by re-introducing materiality to dispute “post-truth” populism. I will show how protesters inscribed and interpreted the populist spatial, social and economic embedding into the built environment.

I am going to focus on how the damage of the built environment was identified with, by those resisting. Through this process, the destroyed buildings were made to reveal the violence suffered by protesters. I develop how affects are framed in relation to and through damaged materiality, while some other bodily experiences of violence are silenced.

This piece aims to ethnographically reveal and theorize the link between agency, subjectivities and bodies of protestors and demolished neighbourhood, infrastructure, and a collapsed railway station. It offers an analytical insight into how forms of resistance articulate and link the damage to human and non-human actors alike and shape the anti-populist resistance.