Tanja Petrović
The Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana

Slovenian alternative scene in the 1980s: Effects of Ambiguity

This talk dwells upon the dominant ways of historization of the period in which social, cultural and political alternatives were imagined and practiced in socialist Slovenia (and Yugoslavia). I argue for a gaze that is able to see the 1980s as they unfold in their own temporality, while also considering the ways in which their actors make sense of that period from a longitudinal and biographic perspective. I am particularly interested in the production of ambiguity and its affects. I analyze in detail the ambiguity-generating practices based on the techniques of imitation, (over)identification, repetition, citation, collage, widely used in the 1980s, and their impact on the interpretation and perception of the Slovenian alternative scene. I also focus on the ways the actors of this scene grapple with their own ambiguous position today, when Slovenian 1980s are largely subordinated to the foundational myth of Slovenian independence and understood as either contributing to the end of the socialist project, or within the paradigm of “pure art.”

The talk is based on the ongoing research conducted in the framework of the project “1980s and the creation of the new cultural field: Slovenian civil society between Nationalist policies and intercultural involvement” at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU.

From Dušan Mandić’s exhibition “The World is Beautiful: Soldier D.M.”, Ljubljana, February 2014.

Tanja Petrović is a principal research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU and professor of the ZRC SAZU Graduate School. She is interested in the uses and meanings of socialist and Yugoslav legacies in post-Yugoslav societies, as well as in cultural, linguistic, political, and social processes that shape the reality of these societies. She is the author and editor of several books and a number of articles and essays in the fields of anthropology of post-socialism, memory studies, masculinity, gender history, heritage studies, linguistic anthropology, and labor history. Amongst them are Yuropa: Yugoslav Legacy and Politics of Future in Post-Yugoslav Societies (Fabrika knjiga 2012), an edited volume Mirroring Europe: Ideas of Europe in Europeanization in Balkan Societies (Brill Publishing 2014), Serbia and its South: “Southern Dialects” between language, culture and politics (Fabrika knjiga 2015), as well as Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army (forthcoming with Duke University Press, 2024).

The event will be photographed and recorded due to publishing on social networks, the website and other information channels for the purpose of promoting the event and activities of the Institute.