A fascination with archives often entails a longing to return to sources, stories, and their beginnings. It is associated with a meticulous attention to detail, the uncovering of exciting connections, the collection of testimonies and reliable traces, accounts that corroborate a story, and contribute to the (re)construction of histories from below. However, at a time when the notion of the \u2018archive\u2019 threatens to become a dead metaphor or a cheap replacement for \u2018canon\u2019 or \u2018corpus\u2019, the symposium suggests to take a particularly contentious example \u2014 that of the Yugoslav Partisan \u2018counter-archive\u2019 \u2014 as a starting-point for its reconsideration of archival politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Yugoslav, socialist, and Partisan past was both demonized by the resurgent Balkan nationalist projects of the 1990s and commodified by Yugonostalgic memorialization, stylized as either heroic or droll. Against these versions of a \u2018frozen\u2019 past, a multiplicity of projects, cultural, artistic, or political, have sought to document and aggregate past fragments, diverse snapshots, artworks, political events \u2014 a diverse archive to be retrieved in order to unsettle current narratives and mobilize emancipatory changes. The term \u2018Partisan counter-archive\u2019 in particular builds on two recent publications, Gal Kirn\u2019s Partisan Counter Archive <\/em>and Davor Konjuku\u0161i\u0107\u2019s Red Light<\/em>, which tackle the return to the Yugoslav Partisan struggle and its after-life, going beyond both revisionism and nostalgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seeking to connect this particular example to wider revolutionary and decolonial histories, the symposium will also draw on some of the most advanced considerations of archival practices in radical modernist traditions and contemporary art. How can counter-archives connect the testimonies and legacies of past struggles with the victims of today\u2019s oppression? What kind of power struggles are produced by counter-archives, and how do they manage to draw attention to what has been lost, overlooked, reduced, suppressed, or omitted from national archives and established historiography?<\/p>\n\n\n\n These questions and similar lines of inquiry will be discussed by researchers, artists, and filmmakers who have been working on (or with) the notion of counter-archive\/s, recombining and reinterpreting the legacy of the oppressed. Coming from various disciplines and dealing with different archival materials, participants of this symposium share a critical awareness that the work on and with archives is traversed by profound power struggles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organized by<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Gal Kirn and Claudia Peppel<\/p>\n\n\n\n This ICI event is organized in cooperation with the project R\u00e9.Part \u2013 Partisan Resistance(s): Visual culture, collective imagination and revolutionary memory (ANR-15-IDEX-02) of Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rh\u00f4ne-Alpes (LARHRA) de l\u2019Universit\u00e9 Grenoble Alpes, with generous support of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung<\/p>\n\n\n\n With<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Daniela Agostinho Thursday, 29 April 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n Friday, 30 April 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cristina Baldacci
Paula Barreiro L\u00f3pez
Omer Fast
Jacopo Galimberti
Sanja Horvatin\u010di\u0107
Davor Konjiku\u0161i\u0107
Alia Mossallam
Marta Popivoda
Elena Vogman
Ana Vujanovi\u0107<\/p>\n\n\n\n