UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Milošević giving a speech is embedded. In the following shot the I with no internal borders drawn
is split up, and Croatia and Serbia are coloured in red and yellow, respectively. In both ‗territories‘
footage is embedded showing rallying masses waving flags (I still contains the red star). Then the
visitor sees Milošević again at a rally, followed immediately by tanks and I National Army
soldiers at a military parade. This shoot is followed by a delegation visiting Tito‘s grave,
switching swiftly to out-of-the-car shots of a demolished village with bodies in the street and
interspersed with people crying. The video ends with a long ‗procession‘ of people leaving, left
without a country, a home, a past and a future. The way the ending is edited suggests a reading
that the country‘s collapse started with Tito‘s death and the ensuing nationalist independence
projects, wars and struggles over the country‘s legacy were in fact the wake. Tito‘s funeral in 1980
was attended by world‘s leaders, yet this reference is entirely absent from this narrativisation.
Instead, the attendants are the people walking in the long line in the streets of a war-torn town.
Much like mejerchold‘s, SerbianGhost‘s digital memorial uses the song in reference to SFRY,
rather than the NATO bombing. And while both videos use the same shot of Mostar Bridge being
torn down, the respective placements prove illustrating: in mejerchold‘s, the scene is placed at the
end of the video, thus in a way subsuming the wars and the collapse (although the bridge was torn
down in 1992, and the war did not end until at least 1995) as presented in the video; the end of the
bridge, the end of ‗bridges.‘ In SerbianGhost on the other hand, the footage of tearing down the
bridge comes right at the beginning of the war as presented in the narrative, which than acts as
another in line of events that brought the people apart. Yet, the ‗war-torn destinies‘ in
mejerchold‘s video seem to have a future (open ending; the girls running away), while in the
SerbianGhost‘s the people are bound to the ruins in a collective despair.
These three ‗renditions‘ are digital memorials to the I wars with only fleeting references to SFRY.
Using the same song that was created in early 2000s they each give the song in the memorial a
different role and meaning. And it seems this is the advantage of digital memorial landscapes:
giving room for voicing/videoing different interpretations using similar material, i.e. the song and
the bridge scene.
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