TRANSformacije, book no. 48
Editors: Gregor Moder in Aleš Mendiževec
© Maska, Ljubljana, 2022
This book was published in Slovenian.
Gal Kirn: Partisan Contra-Archive: On Artistic and Memory-Related Breaks of the Yugoslav National Liberation War
In the time in which a better, different, new future is almost unimaginable, a return to archives with ther deconstruction and reconstruction seem very reasonable; it is something that can (and must) be done as “what has been institutionalised as the order of things is not just something that provokes but also something that can be reversed”.
Gal Kirn does exactly that – and his book can be regarded as a conscious “collection” of material connected to the events, episodes, and procedures from the past in which the author recognises a potential of a lost (forgotten) past – i.e. the partisan surplus. The method he proposes, the creation of contra-archives, is flexible and is not appropriate to use only in the case of the “lost” Yugoslav archives but also with all archives that require a re-evaluation and a reconctruction from today’s perspective.
(Lana Lovrenčič, from the foreword)
TRANSformacije, book no. 48
Editors: Gregor Moder in Aleš Mendiževec
© Maska, Ljubljana, 2022
This book was published in Slovenian.
Excerpt from the Book
Mesto akumulacije spomina je v nedrju državnih aparatov, ki jih nova država uporablja z zvrhano mero simbolnega nasilja glede preteklosti in povezave s fizičnim uničenjem partizanskih spomenikov ter izbrisom knjig in idej, ki so obujale spomin na neuvrščene, modernistične, partizanske in socialistične čase. Akumulacija nacionalnega spomina krepi dejanske etnične in pravne politike »čiščenja« ljudi, ki niso ustrezali idejam in novo zamišljenim mejam novih nacionalnih držav. V tej novi pripovedi je bila partizanska zapuščina videna kot najbolj moteč element, ki vznemirja spomine na preteklost in vizije
prihodnosti. Tisto najbolj univerzalno, transnacionalno in utopično.
–Gal Kirn, Partizanski protiarhiv
About the Author
Gal Kirn is a political and cultural theorist. In 2012, he obtained his PhD in Intercultural studies of ideas and cultures from the University of Nova Gorica. From 2008 to 2010, he was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht; from 2010 to 2012, he was a researcher at the ICI, Berlin; from 2013 to 2016, he was a post-doctoral associate at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; and from 2017 to 2020, he was an open topic fellow at the TU Dresden. He also lectured on film, philosophy and contemporary political theory at the Freie Universität Berlin and Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. Recently, he obtained ARRS funding as the principle investigator for the project “Protests, art practices and culture of memory in the post-Yugoslav context” at the Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana. He published Partizanski Prelomi (Sophia, 2015), edited Postfordism and its discontents (JvE Academy 2012), and co-edited Encountering Althusser (Bloomsbury 2013), Beyond Neoliberalism (Palgrave 2017) and Nights of the Dispossessed. Riots Unbound (Columbia Press 2021).