Magdalena Bogusławska

Institutional Transformations of Museum Practices – the Case of the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade

The article deals with institutional transformations of the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and their influence on the exhibition policy and practice of institution. Belgrade museum, initially functioning as a spatial and symbolic centre of Yugoslav political religion focused on the cult of Josip Broz Tito, today tries to realize the formula of a modern historical museum focused on the deconstruction of a mythologized image of socialist Yugoslavia and a critical presentation of the discourse of remembrance of this experience. The aim of the article is to answer the question regarding what mechanisms enabled this kind of transformation and how the Museum of Yugoslavia, while developing the post-Yugoslavian symbolic space, became an important actor of social processes acting not only in the field of tourism, but also in the field of the culture of knowledge and in the sphere of identity policies.

The text concerns the reception of contemporary Serbian drama in Poland, namely cultural aspects of its theatrical adaptation. Dušan Kovačević and Biljana Srbljanović text stagings, usually issued Serbian authors on the Polish scenes, reveal the persistence of certain strategies for the “Other” perception. They are based primarily on the orientalism and balkanization matrices, although the creators of the performances more often than on the imaging of serbness focusing on diagnosing a Polish historical, social and cultural experience by reference to texts that were formed in the conditions of crisis. A separate part of the article was devoted to the ventures of etnological-artistic Polish alternative theatres, that in their work are inspired by Balkan (also Serbian) phenomenon of ritual drama.
 

The paper follows in the assumption that the transformations of central-European and Balkan cities taking place in the second half of the 20th century can be considered a symptom of complex economic, social and political processes related to the development and decline of the culture of socialism. Changes after the Second World War were closely interconnected with the urbanization project, which was implemented in two ways – either by rebuilding, reorganizing and resemantizing old cities, or by creating cities and urban communities – in a modernist spirit – from scratch. We consider these issues by comparing three examples of cities with different historical experience, which shaped their identities within culturally and politically different frames of reference.

The subject of thus oriented considerations is the question of what happened to the socialist utopia which at the end of the 20th century was put to the test. What was its fate depending on various politically – but also culturally-motivated scenarios of political transformation? In what way and by whom is its heritage appropriated in the 1990’s? While analyzing the fate of the utopia of the new city from a post-communist perspective, it should be noted that although individual projects did not meet the ideals and hopes of their designers, they proved to be an impulse that released social activityqualitatively different from existing traditional patterns and initiated a thorough redefinition of urban identities.