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Between Appropriation and Lost State of Planitude: Sculptural, Architectural, Urbanistic, and Other Ways of Commemorating the Homeland War in Croatia

The change that has befallen Eastern European countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall reflected, among other things, on the processes and role of memory in the context of a past, intensely characterised by the events during and after World War II. Communism and socialism forming the post-war space of the so-called other Europe had an impact on the art scene as well, which was trying to reintegrate itself into the art history of the West, among universal and recognisable art canons. At the same time, the situation in Croatia was furthermore troubled – in parallel with the Croatian Homeland War the society was undergoing a transition aspiring in principle to democracy and simultaneously denying and reinterpreting the past. Intensified national feelings, heightened by wartime destruction, often rose to the level of nationalism. They served as an exclusive argument of declarative oblivion of the life in the Yugoslav community and the circumstances of its appearance. Eastern European criticism classifies this period as ‘communism and post-communism’, highlighting ‘post-communism as an era marked by the endings of the previous system and the transition towards the future.’ However, the expected separations were less than smooth – in this period we encounter complex relations between the past, memory and oblivion. In Croatia they could be analysed (also) on the example of the deliberate destruction and removal of over 3000 monuments, semantically distinguished from the rest of the monument practice as ‘anti-fascist’, since the early 1990s, as well as the simultaneous already mentioned inflation of monuments to the Croatian Homeland War, the aim of which, among other things, was to erase the memory of the post-war past. Modern-day memory is archivist and ‘relies on very precise traces, dominantly material remains, the most specific footage, the most visible images.’ A brief disengagement from the recent wartime occurrences in Croatia led us to memorising everything because the present-day era leans on the ‘production of archives’ and not necessarily on understanding, remembering and memorising past events. A radical opening of Croatia and other countries caused by the collapse of former Yugoslavia, as well as other Eastern European countries, towards the desired and long expected West has resulted in facing with a series of stereotypes. In order to shed light on this period, we will make an attempt at delineating it in political and social terms as ‘the layering post- socialism’ that appeared in the late 1980s and spread into the 1990s. This period, which is often referred to as ‘losing the centre’, could be analysed from different points of view. More precisely, the traditional orthodox system defined by central polarity ceased to be functional. The centres multiplied and since it was no longer possible to define periphery, as this is the position everyone renounced, the quality of ‘centrality’ also became subject to constant reinterpretation. Changes in balanced bloc relationships established after World War II and opening tectonic crevices in mutual assumptions between East and West, fed for decades by the Cold War ideological polarity, impeded straightforward determinations of the newfound circumstances and generated new art strategies. However, unlike the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, which saw as the pivotal problems of the 1990s belonging to a unified geopolitical area and the need to face the traditional configuration of national and cultural identities, the situation in Croatia was furthermore burdened by the dramatic collapse of Yugoslavia and the Homeland War which followed. Certain attenuation in creative activities early in the decade was a natural response to the utterly traumatic socio-pathological situation that befell the Croatian society during the conflicts. It should be observed that after World War II there was more understanding for avant-garde monuments in Yugoslavia than it is the case in today’s Croatia. Often we tend to forget that former Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that expressed monumental volumes in the language of modern art. After 1948, when the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was expelled from the Eastern Bloc, there was a gradual association with western countries out of interest, which brought economic help as well as cultural influences. Abandoning the short-lived socialist- realist model meant a more autonomous organisation of cultural production and a development of art and science, whose particular synergy is evident from the series of monuments that are, sadly, today torn down or devastated.

Between Appropriation and Lost State of Planitude: Sculptural; Architectural; Urbanistic; and Other Ways of Commemorating the Homeland War in Croatia

U procesu recenziranja (rad je bio prihvaćen kao izvorni znanstveni i prikazan u sklopu kongresa održanog u Corku 2013. godine).