Maska - Volume 37, Issue 209-210, 2022

Yugofuturism is a never-ending story, indeed worthy of having a chance at a new beginning. Two years ago, shortly after marking the centenary edition of the Maska magazine and after we organized the conference Precarity and Self-management?, which drew parallels between the potentials and traumas of the past and the present, and published the edition titled Yugofuturism (mainly due to the contributions’ countries of origin), we came to realise that we had not yet broached the futuristic dimensions of the open problems at all. In view of this, we organized (in cooperation with MGLC) another YUFU conference in the frame of the 34^th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in autumn of 2021, aiming to start a reflection on “the horizon of a common Yugoslav future” and to open up “the possibility of a certain Yugofuturist future.” The next edition of the YUFU conference will be held in September 2022 at the BITEF Festival in Belgrade. We are grateful to the co-organisers for recognising the potential of our idea as well as for their cooperation in the making of the present edition.

I used a short surrealist story by French author Gisèle Prassinos, The Isle of Eternal Fungus, along with a series of Yugoslav journalistic books and texts (mostly published in the 1970s and 1980s) to define Yugofuturism as a utopian moment in the past of the SFRY that cannot be repeated. After its disintegration, it became fashionable to interpret Yugoslavia from an ahistorical perspective: Yugofuturism loses its position in time and becomes a concept, an idea. But if we go back enough in our study of literature, it is clear that Yugofuturism was a very concrete era that lasted a relatively short time. After the Communists’ initial futurist inspiration ran out, Yugoslav society turned from the initial communist utopia into a socialist grotesque. The essay discusses this disintegration.

The little leftover spirit left circulating in the barren future is destined not to surpass the present. And while the utopians are collectively converting into optimists, utopianism is now serving as the backside of politics. There are only enough proponents of communism and other dreamers to fill one or two ships of fools at the most. The people never got their chance. What was it, truly, that Yugoslav socialism was trying to let its children know? We talked about what may and what has to follow, with four people from the land of a common former utopia.

The war which caused the breakup of Yugoslavia and its transition from socialism to capitalism in newly-established states, oriented the region towards a “rebirth” of nationalistically defined values. In spite of the exclusion of the narrative about Yugoslavism from official discourse, it continues to influence the lives and co-habitation of residents in nationalist states established on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. This is also precisely where the potential for a vital political stance can be found. The text, by choosing to analyze Kingdom of Heaven, a theatre performance, as an example, offers a premise that Yugofuturism in theatre – in the sense of an emancipatory potential of Yugoslav heritage – is manifested by critically demythologizing nationalist history and the construct of the ethno-nationalist identity that is based on it.

The text deals with digital meme culture originating in ex-Yugoslav countries and the forming of a particular post-Yugoslav, (post)digital cultural space which we will examine both in the “affirmative” context of a (yet-to-be-conceived) Yugofuturism, and that of subversive affirmation strategy. This strategy – in which subversion comes not from criticism and clear resistance to any given discourse and action, but from controversial and vivid forms of overemphasis of those same ideologies and imagery – at first glance seems intrinsic to digital meme aesthetics. Following the footsteps of transitions of retrogardism (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and the wider field of contemporary subversive mimicry practices in post-digital art and culture, we will explore this ex/post-Yugoslav shared space in search of a possibility of a(n) (anti)utopic Yugofuturistic discourse.

What does my grandmother have in common with other women from Yugoslavia? What do I have in common with her? What do we as feminists today have in common with feminists from Yugoslavia? How do we embrace our unique yugofeminist past to imagine a possible feminist future for our region? This essays opens these questions up, through diving through family memories, connecting them with the key motivations and issues that brought hundreds of feminists together in Belgrade for the Drug-ca zena conference in Belgrade in 1078 and trying to bring those intimate and public histories to the present time, with the hope of imagining a possible future starting from there. Forty years after Drug-ca zena happened, when most social movements are being commodified by the states or the market, when most systems of care are being privatized and the ecosystem is slowly collapsing, it is needed to look back at our feminist legacy: for knowledge, strength, better understanding of ourselves and the systems of oppression we live in.

The article focuses on the Yugoslav video scene of the 1980s, specifically the videos of the music group Borghesia, and, in them, searches for the period’s ideas of alternative futures and ways of life. The group’s works placed sexually ambivalent bodies and non-heteronormative sexual practices at the centre of their imagery, which not only represented a deviation from the relatively conventional Yugoslav morality, but became a key position of enunciation for the alternative “dissidents.” The article therefore argues that Yugoslavia produced a specific queer futurism that once had a strong political potential.

Based on her doctoral dissertation, Jasna Novakov Sibinović, Serbain theatrologist and editor, wrote Oliver Frljić Political Theatre: From Empathy to Sympathy. In her introduction, she put Frljić’s following statement as her key ideal pointer: “I don’t see theatre as an end but as a means; and I don’t think any less of theatre because of it.” An intentional avoiding of an “end” is, of course, not only pertinent for the topical discussion of theatre or art that should give final answers (and thereby suggest its own inviolability).