Yugo-nostalgia
The Museum of the City of Zagreb is a cramped room dedicated to the war of the nineties. The facts are summarized in a caption of some thirty lines, where it says that Croatia "had to go to war" and he mentions the operation Storm of 4 and 5 August 1995 in which it regained the territories previously occupied by the Serbian army. A video shows a few episodes of the conflict: Pope John Paul II blesses the troops, soldiers with camouflage colors repaint buses and armed with welding machine, turn in armored vans. I leave with the feeling of being mocked: You want to believe that the Croats have rejected Milosevic's army because of their ability to DIY? No mention, for example, Military Professional Resources Inc., the U.S., with the approval of the Clinton administration, provided staff training and the Croatian army, nor is mention made of Croatian generals Gotovina, Cermak and Markač, on trial at the Court International Hague for war crimes committed during the operation.
I try to understand more than the war in Ljubljana, going to see the documentary The road of unity and fraternity Maja Weiss. B51 The road was built after the Second World War from 3,000 technical and 54,000 volunteers of the Communist Youth to affirm the unity of Yugoslavia. The director has recounted in 1998, from Slovenia to Macedonia, to record the nostalgia and hatred, and to reconnect the broken links from the current communication difficulties. One of the young people who worked on the construction of the road says, "We were happy and convinced that we would live together in peace and forever. The way things are today, is no longer possible. "Another:" Nostalgia is not for the old state, is for youth, when life was good. "
One interviewee tells a joke: a Kosovar Albanian ask a Montenegrin: "How come you are 500,000 and have an independent state and two million of us who do not have one?" Do not worry - the answer is - when there will be 500,000 along to you. "
Mojca, a precious friendship born in a hostel in Rio de Janeiro, is very busy with his doctoral thesis in aesthetics, but finds time to take me to the Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia for the exhibition on Plakatna Afera or scandal of 1987 posters. Every year we celebrate Tito's birthday, May 25, with a relay race in which the Communist Youth traveled the country before coming to Belgrade and to pay tribute to the President. The republics of the federation in turn hosted the start of the torch relay and preparing and posters for the event. In 1987, in a climate already independent, this task falls to Slovenia. The jury chose the designated poster Novi Kolektivizem proposed by the study: a man, young, blond, wielding the baton, on which is carved the tower of the parliament in Ljubljana, while the other hand holding a flag of Yugoslavia, where the auction is topped by a white dove. The sketch was published by the newspaper "Politika" and a reader pointed out that it was revising Thirty years of work of German designer Richard Klein: The Nazi flag was replaced with the Yugoslav and the eagle with the dove. The study is part of Novi Kolektivizem with other artists as the music group Laibach (Ljubljana in German), the collective Slowenische Neue Kunst. They work on the aesthetics of power and submission with reference to the thesis of the Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek. The intent of subverting the totalitarianism is not achieved by the criticism, the complaint ol'ironia, but, according to a strategy sovraidentificazione through the staging, without taking away the symbols of which have served the Nazi regimes, the socialism real, the capitalist West and the recent nationalisms. NSK has built the foundation of its formal aesthetics with reference to the artistic avant-garde of the twenties, as did the political ideologies of the twentieth century. The viewer is led to experience the desire of submission that sparked the mad followers of the various forms of totalitarianism, in which he is forced to look at himself. The acquisition of this knowledge is, in the intentions of the collective, the only tool available for ensuring that history will repeat itself in the emergence of repressive systems.
The day ends at a table in a cafe overlooking the square dedicated to the French Revolution. Here was erected a monument to the Unknown Soldier in the Napoleonic Army, "grave pour notre liberté." Bostian works at the Slovene national television and tells me of a pub that everyone calls "Bangladesh." Years ago, "back in the socialist era" says Bostian, a television crew, which is based opposite the pub, was sent to Bangladesh to cover a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, and before going to the airport, the journalists went the pub, got drunk and lost the plane. Some hours later the director of television and the phone rang in the pub was raised by one of its journalists drunk. The director, surprised, asked, "Where are you?" and the answer was: "In Bangladesh,"
Train Ljubljana to Thessaloniki is an antique, at least fifty years old, which can meet the claims of the most demanding lover of the "battered the Balkans" compartments of the truck bed on one side have three bunk beds, a sink near the window is hidden by the mirror to shave and down the hall There is a chair that is the location of the controller, from which he can see if you turn on the red lights that indicate the calls of the passengers. The controller that I will smoke the lot fell sigh and complain all night. Throughout the car there are only five passengers, all over sixty years, and up to Belgrade will not rise any more.
I leave the station in Belgrade at seven in the morning and walked to the center. A few hundred yards away, along the way Nemanjina are clearly visible two buildings gutted by the NATO bombing of 1999. This is the first time I visit a country that Italy has attacked militarily in my lifetime.
The center was built at the confluence of the Danube and the confluence of the Sava and fruit are the impressions that I collect during my walks around the city. Knez Mihailova pedestrian zone is cosmopolitan, its sides are Central European style architecture that has the offices of Italian banks and its spine is a row of outdoor cafes, contemporary version, sponsored by American and German beers drinks of coffee Ottomans. The percentage of smokers is very high, inside and outside the premises, and the Museum of Applied Arts is hosting an exhibition entitled Ars Fumandi . The same museum, a retrospective at the French designer Charlotte Perriand, while at the Gallery of Contemporary Art There Breaking Step , contemporary British art exhibition. Here the group Henry VIII's Wives exhibited his works based on the draft Monument to the Third International Tatlin secure the Novaya Galerija Tretyakov in Moscow. There are, then, their photographs in the series Iconic Moments of the 20 th Century and the equally intelligent work Chozko Adam, Nathan Coley, Jeremy Deller and the collective Inventory. If pedestrian and art galleries suggest central Europe, Another aspect of Belgrade me back in Moscow: the beauty and elegance of women; unforgettable a beautiful girl with a lovely emerald green satin blouse, sleeveless and with a showy ribbon closure on left shoulder.
The corridors of power are great, as befitted the realm of the southern Slavs born after the First World War and the Republic of Tito, who was a military and diplomatic power. In comparison, a state that Serbia now seems, put in a washing machine at the wrong came out tight. The Ethnographic Museum, however, "aims to show the unity of the Serbian people gathered around objects sacred places which, for centuries, gave their ethnic and cultural power of attraction "and exhibited at the map shows how" Serb areas "most of Bosnia and Croatia, and Kosovo, and the Banat up Arad and Temesvar. Let me know the official version of events that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, but the Yugoslav History Museum is closed indefinitely. Provo at the Museum of Military History. In the last room contains weapons and equipment of the "Albanian terrorists in Kosovo ', the' rebel Croatian 'and the crew of a downed U.S. fighter in 1999, along with photographs of civilians killed during the bombing of city \u200b\u200bof Nis by NATO. There is also a reliquary containing depleted uranium shells used by NATO troops. The captions indicate the origin of the seized weapons to Croatia and men of the KLA (USA, Germany, Slovenia), but does not mention either the origin or evolution of the conflict between Serbia and NATO.
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