These four videos delve into audiovisual records that inform the memory of the dissolution of the former socialist Yugoslavia, and of the ethnic conflicts that scourged the region at such a crucial juncture for post-Cold War political stability. Their work features TV snippets from 1980 to 2000, peddling former President Slobodan Milosevic’s “happening of the people,” the nationalist discourse that set the scene for the bloodshed that followed. The original footage is plucked from the media stream of its time and elongated in slow motion, or spliced into a syncopated sequence in the editing suite. The techniques hark back to vanguard cinema. Each fragment is shown on a monitor, composing a space where the documentation of historic events is related to the ephemerality of the spectacle industry, exemplified by the staging of the Eurovision Song Contest just days before the beginning of the ethnic conflict between Serbia and Croatia, or the empty Maksimir stadium in Zagreb, which was supposed to host a final that was never played.
