YUFU Conference

While post-communist, post-socialist and post-Yugoslav discourses merely reinforce the appearance of an unchanging and unstable present with a more or less accurate expression of the situation, Yugofuturism follows the example of other ethnofuturist movements such as Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, Baltic Ethnofuturism and Hungarofuturism, which tactically empower peripheral identities and subversively affirm individual cultural curiosities. The former Yugoslavia, which in its utopian form combined the best of North and South, East and West, capitalism and socialism, was never a monocultural country, which is why its heterogeneous multiethnicity used to be the main point of Yugofuturist affirmation.

After the turbulent disintegration of the idea of brotherhood and unity, the territories of the former states have been left barren with the »we don’t have dope for a borek« generations, all tied together by a common fact: they are all without a future and without the possibility of meaningful political participation and societal self-management. Where and how, then, do Yugofuturist time and space manifest themselves? Yugoslavia is not merely a nostalgic idea or a historical curiosity, but an important building block of the present. As Alexei Kisjuhas writes, Yugoslavia is still alive as a social reality, fundamentally involved in the development of the region, its infrastructure, public education, urbanisation, industrialisation, health and social insurance, popular culture, the consumption of its mass products, coastal mass tourism.

The internet, which is gaining disruptive power through meme culture and pop music, is also becoming a new testing ground for the regional integration of the affect of perspectivelessness, and which could lead to the re-establishment of the horizon of a common Yugoslav future. Yugofuturism thus furthers the vital parts of this idea, imaginatively envisioning its -someness and opening up the possibility of a certain Yugofuturist future. The transition must be executed in a trans direction.