Paper short abstract:

The Serbian upraising in ‘96/’97 was an attempt to overthrow Milosevic’s dictatorship. Ashamed by the unsuccessful outcome, Belgraders never produced an archive of artefacts emerged at demonstrations. The public has been left without the full account of the upraising. My archive is trying to amend that and contribute to the celebration of this event

Paper long abstract:

The Serbian upraising in ‘96/’97 was an attempt to overthrow dictatorship of president Milosevic after he annulled elections because of the victory of the opposition party. Ashamed by the unsuccessful outcome of their protest, the people of the capital Belgrade, where number of protesters reached 200,000 daily, have never produced an archive of photos, banners and graffiti, which emerged during these demonstrations. Scarce information on the Internet and the inability of the media to reveal the data gathered during the protest has left the public without the full account of the upraising. My project is that archive - the website of images, leaflets, badges, flags, vouchers, cartoons, crochets, poems etc, an online ethnographic record of the elucidated protest available to the participants, scholars and the public. Most of the acquired objects required a transmission to digital form in order to be visible on the screen and that process brought numerous questions on technological advancements at the time, the role of the Internet in this failed revolution and its connection to the Arab world uprisings that we often take away from the people and place it in the praise of technology. The archive is now serving as a pedagogical tool as well as an interrogator of archival discipline standards in workshops as well as through individual use it has as a digital repository. In these practices, it is questioning the success of any storage as a platform to capture the past.