“After Slovenia decided in 1991 to leave the federation of Yugoslavia, the loss of the Yugoslav market and the transition to the new market economy led to the demise of many businesses. A few products remained in the people’s memory, however, and gave them security and a feeling of comfort. In the middle of the economic crisis, people look back wistfully on these retro products and the ‘good old days’ of Socialist Yugoslavia.” >analysis & photo (c) wieninternational.at 2014
“Thirty years ago, from February 8th to 19th, the fourteenth edition of the Olympic Winter Games was held in Sarajevo. A few years after the Olympic facilities, a symbol of common history and life, were targeted” in the Bosnia War. > full text (c) Osservatorio balcani & caucaso, 2014
Photo (c) flickr
“From August 1941 to April 1945, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Romas, as well as anti-fascists of many nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as Jasenovac.” A documentary with English subtitles. (Later, unfortunately, the camp of Jasenovac would me used to legitimize and/or relativize Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav Succession Wars of the 1990s.)
“From ex-officers and politicians to ordinary Bosnians, over 100 people have given video interviews for a new archive of memories of wartime suffering and imprisonment.” >article & photos (c) Balkan Insight, 2013
“Jovanka Broz (1924-2013) was the first wife of a Communist leader in Eastern
Europe to become a celebrity in her own right.” >text & photo (c) NYT, 2013
Alternative read (c) balkaninsight.com 2013
“Today everyone in Croatia knows the works of Marija Jurić Zagorka. This has not been always the case as it took the Croatian public quite long to recognise and acknowledge the significance of Zagorka’s contribution to equality between men and women.” >full text (c) wieninternational.at 2013
“The slogan Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu! was a Yugoslav Partisan motto, afterward accepted as the official slogan of the entire resistance movement, and was often quoted in post-war Yugoslavia. It was also used as a greeting formula among the movement members both in official and unofficial correspondence during the war and for a few subsequent years, often abbreviated as “SFSN!”. (…) Continue reading
The Canadian radio show Living Out Loud featured news reports from the early 1990’s and recordings with people who escaped the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia – also people who came to Canada before the wars broke out, people of Bosnian, Serb and Croatian background and their Canadian born children. All of them were interviewed separately in Toronto in 1992/ 1993, and then twenty years later >audio link (c) CBCradio, 2012
>More photos from Sarajevo, 1992-1995
“In silence, with my eyes closed, I spent 5 minutes drinking a glass of water. It was ‘a ritualization of everyday life’ administered to me by Marina Abramović to illustrate the methods behind her art.
The Yugoslavia-born, New York-based Abramovic, is at 65, one of the world’s best-known performance artists: she has rendered herself unconscious, whipped and poisoned herself and stood motionless for six hours while audience members were invited to use any of 75 display objects upon her – including knives and chains.” >read more
(c) Ross Simonini, THE GLOBE & MAIL, 20 February 2012; photo: Michael Falco
Nina Bunjevac “was born in Toronto, but raised in Yugoslavia, only to be back in Canada when she was sixteen, where she graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design. (…) Her chain-smoking, slightly alcoholic and manically depressed character Zorka may just be today’s ultimate antiheroine. A Balkan immigrant in the Brave New World, working in that same meat factory for the last twenty years, tormented by family constraints and her own secrete desires… we simply can’t get enough of her.” >article (c) Bturn, 2012 (reblogged) Continue reading
delirium clemens 