Monument to the Martyrs of the Pidjiguiti Massacre / "Mon di Timba", Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Nikola Arsenić (architect), 1975-1979. Photo: Sanja Horvatinčić, 2024.
Sanja Horvatinčić: A Yugoslav Community of Practice and the Production of Monuments in Post-Liberation Guinea-Bissau
lecture
Yugoslavia supported Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence in the 1960s, and continued to do so in different ways after 1973, when the country gained independence from Portugal and the bloody anticolonial war led by the communist African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) ended. Due to Yugoslavia’s political alliance and personal connections in the public works sector, Yugoslav experts greatly influenced the country’s cooperation sector in the 1970s and 1980s. Yugoslav architects contributed to numerous public works, but they also planned, designed and supervised projects of their own, ultimately dominating architecture in the country despite the growing presence of other approaches brought in by Guinea-Bissauans studying in the Soviet Union or Cuba.
Based on archival research, ethnographic encounters and a field survey, the lecture will present the memorial projects that emerged out of the Yugoslav cooperation with Guinea-Bissau and discuss their formal and social features in relation to the contemporary production of monuments in Yugoslavia, or the encounter with Portuguese colonial modernism. While Horvatinčić recognizes that Non-Aligned global exchanges and the mediation of transnational expertise and interests are important to consider, she argues that the work of Yugoslavs in Guinea-Bissau is better understood if we bring to light the ways in which they formed a community by weaving expertise, politics and intimacy. By acknowledging this complexity, we will be able to grasp how their presence is remembered and how their work continues to resonate in today’s Guinea-Bissau, both in the urban fabric and in people’s imagination. The event is organised by Moderna galerija and ZRC SAZU and is a part of the Summer School: Our Many Easts public programme
Sanja Horvatinčić is a Research Associate at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb. Her research focuses on the production of monuments and remembrance culture in socialist Yugoslavia, as well as on heritage and memory politics in the post-socialist context. She has participated in research projects dealing with the history of Yugoslav cultural politics and the Non-Aligned Movement, critical heritage studies, and digital art history. She participated in the research project “Models and Practices of Global and Cultural Exchange and the Non-Aligned Countries Movement, Research on Spatio-temporal Cultural Dynamics” (2020-2024), in which she deals with the relationship between the legacy of the Yugoslav anti-fascist struggle and anti-colonial movements in the countries of the Global South through cultural exchange within the Non-Aligned Movement. In 2023, she coedited the book Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia (Archive Books Berlin, Igor Zabel Association Ljubljana).
