YUFU conference; Vera Mevorah, 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2021, accompanying event at MGLC Švicarija.
Photo: Urška Boljkovac. MGLC Archive.
While post-communist, post-socialist and post-Yugoslav discourses merely reinforce the appearance of an unchanging and unstable present with a more or less accurate expression of the situation, Yugofuturism follows the example of other ethnofuturist movements such as Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, Baltic Ethnofuturism and Hungarofuturism, which tactically empower peripheral identities and subversively affirm individual cultural curiosities.
The former Yugoslavia, whose utopian form combined the best of North and South, East and West, and capitalism and socialism, was never a monocultural country. Indeed, its heterogeneous multiethnicity was once at the center of Yugoslav affirmation. After the turbulent disintegration of the idea of brotherhood and unity, the territories of the former Yugoslav states have been left barren, their “don’t have dope for a borek” generations tied together by a common fact: they are all without a future and without the possibility of meaningfully participating in political affairs. Where and how, then, do Yugofuturist time and space manifest? Yugoslavia is not merely a nostalgic idea or a historical curiosity, but an important building block of the present. As Alexei Kisjuhas writes, Yugoslavia is still alive as a social reality; it is fundamentally involved in the development of the region’s infrastructure, public education, urbanization, industrialization, health and social insurance, popular culture, mass consumption, coastal mass tourism, etc. Moreover, the internet, which is gaining disruptive power through meme culture and the dissemination of pop music, is also becoming a new testing ground for the regional integration of a perspectiveless affect, thus acting as a potential vehicle for the reestablishment of the horizon of a common Yugoslav future. Yugofuturism plays a vital role in these prospects, imaginatively envisioning a Yugoslav – someness and opening up the possibility of a certain Yugofuturist future. This transition must be executed in a transversal direction.
Participating: Tibor Hrs Pandur, Dinko Kreho, Vera Mevorah, Niall McCourt aka eurovicious, Enea Kavčič & Maks Valenčič, Mladen Zobec.
Organizing Committee of the Conference:
Rok Bozovičar, Pia Brezavšček, Alja Lobnik, Muanis Sinanović, Lili Šturm.
In cooperation with Zavod Maska.