REVIEW
BOOKS
Shaping Revolutionary Memory . The Production of
Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia .
Sanja Horvatinčić and Beti Žerovc , 2023 ( IZA Editions )
Daniel Palacios González Art Historian , National University of Distance Education ( UNED )
Can a vast memory culture developed by thousands of people and interacting with millions over decades be fetishised and reduced to one word that strips it of all value ? Perhaps that is what we see when we come across the term Spomenik . In recent years , gigantic modern Yugoslav monuments , labelled under this concept , have been shown in exhibitions , photobooks and tourist guides and have delighted scholars and artists in Western Europe and the United States . However , far from making them better known , the term has obscured the significance of Yugoslav monuments . In contrast , the book SHAPING REVOLUTIONARY MEMORY . The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia , edited by Sanja Horvatinčić and Beti Žerovc , is an excellent antidote to the formalist and depoliticising revisionism of Western art history and memory studies on Yugoslav monuments dedicated to Anti- Fascist Resistance , People ’ s Liberation Struggle and the Revolution .
This book condenses authors with long years of experience working on monuments , and it is an excellent contribution in terms of theory , methodology and documentation and an example of how to research this kind of heritage . The authors of this book associate the symbolic dimension of these monuments with their material reality ; they do not separate them from the specific forms of social communication they perform , nor do they separate these same forms of communication from their material bases . They show how the production of monuments after the war and the revolution did not come out of nowhere . On the
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Observing Memories Issue 8