The memorial project - In search of lost monuments…
The focus of my project is the resemblance between the history of Berlin and the memorials that were built after WW2 and the memorials in former Yugoslavia, that were erected in honour of the resistance fighters against fascism. The latter are nowadays mostly regarded to be useless by the often aggressively nationalistic successor states of former Yugoslavia, because of their socialist origin. This was especially the case in the 1990ies and during the wars from 1991 to 1995, in which many of these memorials were destroyed. Those memorials who survived the war are mostly left to decay.
This memorial project tries to investigate the exposure of the collective history of socialism in former Yugoslavia, especially focusing on the phenomena of neo-nationalism and the breakup of Yugoslavia in its successor states during the 1990ies. With this I connect to my personal experiences during the time of the politically and ethnically motivated civil war, which gives this project an additional, authentic layer of meaning.
Because of the political reality in the successor states of former Yugoslavia, this field of research is highly tabooed, in Croatia one can even speak of an interdiction of dealing with this particular matter. Therefore I have decided to carry the project forward from the perspective of my live in Berlin today. I hope, that the unique history of Berlin can help to objectively describe the past of my homecountry, where books, documents, cities and memorials are arbitrarily assimilated by the reigning political system. In this context of systematical transformation of meaning and their erasure, I am looking for bridges into the lost past.
The project follows the idea to personalize the forms used by the old socialist system. The monumental memorials will be reduced in their size to a more human level and by this reinterpreted due to the new scale they are presented in. The aim is to achieve a reanimation of the collective history imprinted into the memorials through their small and mobile re-enactment. I also want to combine these with the history of Berlin by embedding these sculptural statements temporarily into the urban space. In this way they may act as an arena for collective memory as well as a reflection of the denotation of private and public space.
Translation Philipp Koch
Reconstructed models: Memorials of yougoslavian modernity 1, scale 1:2
Reconstructed models: Memorials of Yugoslavian modernity 2, scale 1:2
Reconstructed models: Memorials of Yugoslavian modernity 3 scale 1:2
Reconstructed models: Memorials of Yugoslavian modernity 4, scale 1:2