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Doctoral Thesis by Nela Milic Arts and Computational Technology Doctoral thesis by Nela Milic Arts and Computational Technology Goldsmiths, University of London May 2016 Title: Balkanising Taxonomy: How to capture and transfer an experience of the event – the case of Belgrade protest in ‘96/’97 Declaration 4 Instructions for the reader 5 Acknowledgments 6 Abstract 7 Keywords 8 Table of Contents: List of Figures 3 Introduction 9-24 Chapters: 1. Literature Review 25-53 2. Research Methodology – ARTillery 54-87 3. The Realm of Memory – Mediality 88-117 Case Study: Balkanising Taxonomy 4. Archive as Practice - Re-enacting the past 118-151 Cast study: BG:LOG 5. Reflexivity and Positionality – Narrative cartography 152-181 Conclusion 182-195 Glossary 196 Appendices: 197 1. Copyright agreement 197 2. Questionnaire 198-205 3. Protest participants and research contributors 206 4. Condition of Research 207-209 5. Extracts from the selection of interviews 210-223 Bibliography 224-236 2 List of figures: Figure 1: Belgrade is the World postcard 8 Figure 2: Poster: Arms against robbers 21 Figure 3: Inspiration software graph of the genealogy of memory studies 27 Figure 4: First drafts of the archive map and the first digital layout of it 49 Figure 5: Family practice or ‘storaging’ 54 Figures 6 – 11: Photographs by unknown authors 66 Figure 12: My parent’s house 70 Figure 13: Coupons by Skart 74 Figure 14: Final digital map of the protest 78 Figure 15: Balkanising Taxonomy symposium, 2008 104 Figure 16: Display of photographs from Balkanising Taxonomy exhibition 107 Figure 17: Photographs from the Balkan archive at Goldsmiths University 109 Figure 18: The catalogue of Balkanising Taxonomy project 114 Figure 19: Postcard (front) from the pilot project 131 Figure 20: Chained doormat 133 Figure 21: Pictures from workshop participants’ family albums 137 Figure 22: Pictures from workshop participants’ family albums 144 Figure 23: Jelena’s family album 149 Figure 24: The workshop at Vracar’s pensioner’s club 151 3 Declaration: Hereby I declare that this work is my own. Nela Milic 4 Instructions for the reader: How to approach this text This text accompanies my projects’ websites and links, which provide crucial information for following my arguments. http://www.kulturklammer.org/nm - protest map http://www.kulturklammer.org/days-of-remembrance - pilot for BG:LOG project http://www.kulturklammer.org/bglog-mapa - BG:LOG project map http://www.kulturklammer.org/view/179 - BG:LOG project blog http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/balkanising-taxonomy - 1st archive for the thesis http://daljenecesmoci.wordpress.com - 1st protest archive and blog http://vimeo.com/19207332 - Yugo Yoga project video http://fourthland.co.uk/nela-milicmotion2 - Here Comes Everybody project http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/culture/gallery/migration-and-women-exhibition- londons-wedding-bellas.html - Wedding Bellas project information Authorship and images The images in the text are from my archives and maps now available online. They are mostly from the private collections of my research contributors that I refer to when possible, but even though they were given to me by ‘the owner’, they often do not have assigned authorship as s/he could not locate it. Many Belgraders refuse the engagement in projects that are recorded or display formality, so it is imperative to understand that this research could not yield its artefacts if devised differently. Facebook pages that opened and closed during my research were assigned to the event itself, rather than to a person. The most relevant is Studentski protesti 90-ih set up by Milos Miljatovic: https://www.facebook.com/pages/%D0%A1%D1%82%D1%83%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0% BD%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8- %D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8-90- %D0%B8%D1%85/125939594139887?fref=ts Belgrade media organisations like B92 provided some of the images via its websites into my archive too, especially the ones that mark 15 years since the protest. Other local professionals that shot images for print media mostly ended up in the repository that Reuters provided to me in a bulk by dates, without authorship. Many authors, out of fear chose to be anonymous contributors to both Reuters and my repository. Methodology chapter covers to the issues around the authorship and images. See the enclosed memory card for the full list of images and sites the text illustrates. 5 Acknowledgment: For my grandad, who carried my Books. 6 Abstract: The Serbian uprising in 1996/1997 was an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of president Milosevic after he annulled elections because of the opposition party’s victory. Ashamed by the unsuccessful outcome of their protest, the people of the capital Belgrade, have never produced an archive of the 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 a full account of the uprising. My project is that archive – the map of images, leaflets, badges, flags, vouchers, cartoons, crochets, poems etc., an online record of the elucidated protest available to the participants, scholars and the public. The narratives of this event have been locked within the community and there are only odd visual references hidden in people’s houses. My research has generated them through interviews and image elicitation that looks at the uprising by analysing these accumulated historic relics. Presented in sections on the website (timelines, artists, routes) and pages of art formats (poems, photos, badges), this overview of the geographical, political and social circumstances within which the protest’s artwork was produced demonstrates how it influenced the actions of the citizens. This urban spectacle was enthused by the creative participation exposed in the walks of the masses that became the force of the protest. The reflexive method of my practice, just like this communal approach at the uprising challenges dominant representations of culture, history and politics from the whole of the Balkans. My online package for capturing the past (hi)stories shifts the official narratives, predominantly from the West and saturated by the wars of the ‘90s into only one possibility among others. It maps the failed revolution in Serbia under Milosevic from its beginnings, revealing the accomplishment of academics, artists and citizens buried under the war stories... 7 Keywords: The Balkans, protest, positionality, memory, digital archive, Belgrade, event, mediation, representation, historisation, ethnography, narrative, map Figure 1: Belgrade is the world, the image used on the postcard from the protest, unknown author, anonymous contribution1 1 The banner in this photograph was at the start of the procession and often in company of another one - Zajedno (“Together” coalition). Rastko Sejic claims the authorship of the slogan on the banner as well as the sign “Straight”. However, the drawing has allegedly been done by Zoran Mujbergovic and the sign in the digital form transferred by Bojan Jankovic and Kosta Milanovic. Slavisa Savic also asserts himself as the designer of the first banner written by hand. 8 INTRODUCTION2 The term ‘balkanising’ was introduced at the end of World War One to illustrate the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the region, but it was used predominantly in the media as a geopolitical synonym for ‘fragmenting’ (a division, a split, a detachment of a region or a group into smaller and often more hostile units), and as a metaphor for the recent history of the Balkans, especially the disintegration of Yugoslavia. At first it was only ‘media speak’, but ‘balkanisation’ quickly spread in academia, providing this negative connotation to the whole of the Balkan Peninsula, picturing it as the underbelly of Christian Europe. On a subtler note, ‘balkanising’ can also mean ‘degenerating’, being ‘an imitation’ rather than the original. It implies a derogatory quality of the Balkans employed by academia in the West where the region has a subordinate position. My research is proclaiming power within that condition of the lack of Western validation. It tries to deconstruct and challenge that strategy of demeaning, undermining and looking down on in order to elevate the Balkans from the space it has been allocated through the dominant narrative of the West. It provides an insight into the workings, technology and methods of such edifice. A methodology that Western societies pride themselves with – ordering, indexing and classifying3 is established as a tool that builds the West’s own identity (supremacy, divorced from violence, economic power) and it is reversed. Western colonisation in intellectual and territorial means has been the life work of Edward Said4, and this inevitably underpins my writing, but postcolonial theory proves 2 This introduction has been substantially changed and developed from its shorter version published in Audiovisual Media and Identity Issues in Southeastern Europe 2011 Pistrick, E., Scaldaferri, N. and Schwörer, G. (Eds.) Cambridge Scholars Publishing 3 The study of nature was stimulated in 17th and 18th centuries in Western culture by the urge to reveal the order and harmony as thought to be provided by God. Scientists then believed that the diversity of living organisms obeys laws that could be disclosed by the way organisms were taxonomised. These early indexes are precursor to the systems that we use today. Developers of such systems “attempt to carve nature at its joints and to construct ways of grouping phenomena that reflect their natural state”. Millon, T. (1991) Classification in psychopathology: Rationale, alternatives, and standards. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 100: 245–261 4 Said, E. W. (1935 – 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist and intellectual, one of the founders of the critique of postcolonialism. He is best known for the book Orientalism (1978), a term he redefined as the West's patronizing perceptions and cultural representations of the “East” - Middle Eastern, Asian 9 not readily available in the case of the Balkans.
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