such as monuments , become signs and , without ceasing to be part of material reality , they reflect and refract reality in a certain way . But what determines the refraction of an ideological sign ? Voloshinov was categorical in this respect : the social interests in a struggle . When today , we see how monuments to Anti-Fascist Resistance , People ’ s Liberation Struggle and the Revolution have been reduced to an artefact attractive in form to the Western artistic gaze , ( Spomeniks ), we see how the same social interests in the destruction of Yugoslavia underlie the use of the term and the reduction of Yugoslav memorial culture to a select curatorship of large-scale abstract monuments . But all is not lost . Voloshinov claimed that “ the historical memory of mankind is replete with dead ideological signs incapable of being an arena for confrontation of living social accents . However , thanks to the philologists and the historians who continue to remember them , these signs still retain the last vestiges of life .” Against the death sentence of the fetishisation of the Spomeniks , the work of Sanja Horvatinčić and Beti Žerovc thus contributes to advocating these memorials of the Antifascist Resistance , People ’ s Liberation Struggle , and the Revolution as retainers of these vestiges of life , remaining signs capable of generating confrontation in the towns and landscapes where they still stand , in the face of post-socialist revisionism , nationalism and neoliberalism .
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