UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

videos posts are not necessarily overtly political and posses little distinct political agenda. Still, as
externalisations of affect and memory they are far from insignificant in political terms. That the
comments are public expressions further adds to ‗transcribing‘ their very existence in political
terms. If we look at the Olga Rück‘s statement above, at the first glance it appears an ‗innocent‘
one. Yet it undeniably bears an expression of emotions that can, once made public, easily ignite
fierce reactions. Either in terms of positive or negative reactions, such a statement—uttered in a
fundamentally intimate manner—is an expression of adoration of a country, its past and also the
respect for the country (―once we would stand up when hearing the anthem‖). In post-Yugoslav
(nationalistic) environments where Yugoslav past is often discarded as foul full-on, such
statements may attain a political dimension.
Considering the fact that the statement was made in 2011—in the time of grave political and
economic crisis and instability, regional and global— it attains an even more ‗radical‘ tone. With
this I do not wish to imply that every expression of intimacy is necessarily politically motivated,
rather that once emitted into a DME it becomes stripped of much ‗real‘ person‘s data/information.
Instead it becomes a ‗populant‘ of DME and as such also part of the post-Yugoslav mediality of
the country‘s past and variegated presents and possible futures.
Another story is the second group of posts, employing a strategy of linking to newspaper articles
which deal with the present day situation in post-Yugoslav states, mostly focusing on Croatia,
Serbia and Bosnia but also Slovenia, Montenegro and Macedonia, and the rest of the world. This
practice attracts considerable attention and features even more clearly as a practice of representation
of Yugoslav—predominantly political—past in decidedly contemporary
environments and contexts. I.e. in linking to and commenting various newspaper sources the
users/participants in the co-creation inadvertently try to present a certain problematic through a
distinctly ‗Yugoslav‘ perspective. Or rather, through what the Yugoslav perspective is believed to
be 20 years after the country‘s demise.
This endows the memorial with an overtly political dimension making it in turn a site of active use
of memory for contextualising/making sense of the post-socialist realities. In dealing with these
issues, the ‗enhanced immediacy of remembering‘ enables the interweaving of the present with the
ideals of the past. And this is quite far from ‗mere‘ nostalgia usually attributed to any positive
evaluations of the Yugoslav past. On the contrary, it is a most rudimentary quest for normalcy, a
quest to acknowledge the past (and continuity, which is essential for any present) that the
generations born in Yugoslavia are systematically denied by the democratic, anti-communist
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