UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

and storytelling. The commemorative and remembering practices they foster are, as I have shown
in the analysis, in many cases expressions of utter disillusionment with the present (i.e.
undelivered promises of transitionalism) and also the vessels that carry the co-creative ‗quest for
normalcy.‘
Archiving ... Nostalgia
In the analyses above there was some discussion on nostalgia, yet as it remains the underlying and
often notorious topic in dealing with the past, it seems only fair to say a bit more now. So, in this
section I look into how archive and nostalgia are often intertwined, i.e. into the why nostalgia (as a
practice), often used derogatorily, can in fact be seen as a predominantly an archiving practice. I
argue that, in the case of the digital afterlife of Yugoslavia, digital remediations (as found, for
instance in blogs, YouTube memorials and several Facebook historical profiles, and as discussed
in Chapters 2, 3, and 4)—and the practices of renarrating memories, co-creating memorials and
engage in digital storytelling—are effectively a result of media archaeological endeavours that
lead to often mnemosynal audiovisual constellations. These, in addition to being renarrativisations/externalisations
of vernacular memory, in many cases also become vernacular
archives. Importantly, I argue, such archaeological and archiving practices are intrinsically driven
by nostalgia. In this view, I understand nostalgia as a socio-cultural practice of navigating through
and collecting what was consigned to cultural oblivion. As a nostalgic mind not only likes to
brood over the bygones but also often compile remnants of the past, nostalgia can be seen as an
inherently archiving practice.
As has been discussed in more detail in case studies above the individuals/users/produsers
engaged in remediating the Yugoslav past, and their own, do so principally by a method of media
archaeology and editing and publishing the ‗disinterred‘ material. ‗Digging‘ through massive
amounts of audiovisual material, the produser, a memonaut, is navigating through the records and
traces of the past that may no longer be part of the official post-socialist (political, media,
historical, personal) narratives and canons. Thus the memonaut navigates her way through ‗a
jukebox of memories‘ 425 or rather ‗externalisations of memory in the audiovisual.‘ However,
425 On jukebox metaphor see Chapter 3.
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