Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on monumentality and the ways it has developed in the sociopolitical conditions of late socialist and postsocialist Southeastern Europe. It examines monumental production in this region between the 1960s and 80s, and the artistic practices that constitute responses to socialist monumentality undertaken in the postsocialist period in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. It considers the relationship between ways of remembering the Second World War and the monumentalization of what is often referred to as ‘actually existing socialism.’ Additionally, it explores how legacies of socialist monumentality have affected contemporary artists working in relation to socialist heritage and to more recent traumatic experiences, such as the wars coincident with and following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Southeastern Europe’s modernity has been a particularly conflicted one, both geopolitically and culturally. Home to an overwhelming number of (frequently overlapping and amorphous) ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, the region is notable for the hybrid and disparate ways political and cultural actors—from dictators to democratically elected officials—have attempted to cultivate a collective historical consciousness. Monuments serve as particularly rich examples of the ways politicians, artists, and publics navigate collective values and contest both projected pasts and futures. The transition from late socialism to postsocialism provides diverse examples of how public monuments in countries such as Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania relate to debates on ethnicity, gender, political economy, and class-consciousness in the context of continued redefinitions of Europe’s borders and culture as a whole. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to preserve, restore, relocate, or destroy socialist-era monuments offer a rich and complicated body of evidence for the ways that histories are repurposed, especially the histories of the Partisans’ transnational antifascist struggle during the Second World War. This dissertation argues that many contemporary artists from Southeastern Europe have focused precisely on the ambiguous and conflicted meanings of socialist monuments, and have avoided treating monuments as monolithic forms associated with official ideological forces, in need of demythologization. Instead, these artists have turned to monuments in order to address the disparate histories of struggle that have given rise to Europe’s current sociopolitical situation.