Locating Remote Proximities: Documenting Yugoslav Socialist Memorial Heritage ERIKA LINDSAY University of Detroit Mercy
In the summer of 2016, I set out on a solo research trip to document Partisan memorials in the territory of former Yugoslavia. This iteration of the fieldwork would last for six weeks as compared to the initial ten-day-long trip taken in 2013 (and the recently completed four-week long journey made in July 2017). In the months leading up to the fieldwork, I researched each of the 28 memorials, locating, mapping and planning routes between sites, towns and cities across Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, BosniaHerzegovina, and Slovenia. During this time, I drove 4,853 kilometers across the five countries. Sited in former Yugoslavia, this project situates itself between a particular point of time in history when the state of Yugoslavia existed and these memorials came into being and their current plight in today’s post-Yugoslav context. These memorial sites are at odds with the nationalist and revisionist ideologies increasingly present in the region and subject to the myriad collective memories of people living in the countries of former Yugoslavia. The inspiration for this paper came from the many ways that notions of the proximate and remote slip back and forth geographically, conceptually, and politically in this project. Rather than focus solely on research outcomes, I aim to discuss the tools and techniques employed to render remote sites of study visible. While conducting the research, I moved between clearly defined point locations and geographically diffuse field conditions in attempts to locate memorials. Monuments erected in both urban and rural contexts, the latter which commemorate partisan hospitals, battles, and strongholds, are typically found in remote locations. Sites exist along a The Case for the Remote: Traversing the Unknown
gradient of discoverability; ranging from simple to locate (marked with signage and visible) to the nearly impossible to find (down unmarked overgrown pathways), invisible until confronted. When housed in remote locations, memorial areas operate as urban enclaves, providing gathering space, circulation, lighting and other infrastructure for large-scale commemorative events. These memorial areas meld familiarity of urban infrastructure in distant locations, mediating them and rendering them less wild, unknowable and remote. Vestiges of this decaying civic infrastructure of mediation bear witness that a memorial site was present in instances when the memorial itself was less fortunate. Lack of infrastructure produced conditions which rendered an already distant location that much more remote. Some areas were left far more devastated than others following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991— to this day some regions are still undergoing de-mining efforts. GPS-enabled devices attempt to plot routes across non-existent bridges, down logging roads, and through abandoned villages. In the absence of known infrastructure and reliable GPS, I turned to human interaction filled with handwritten maps and roadside conversations in broken languages and gestures. In each country, locals offered help to navigate to the site. While engaging this human infrastructure brimming with local knowledge, the remote became far less distant and unknowable to me, underscoring the relative nature of our relationship to the idea of remoteness.
Crossings Between the Proximate and Remote
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