Collecting objects whose value extends only to those who keep them is a way to account for the past and the material of memory. This is particularly true for those who have been disregarded — economically, politically, and narratively – by the institutions that create authoritative narratives about the past. In her article, Olivera Jokić explores the political imagination of provincial counter-archives.
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The scene is as follows: In a village in northern Serbia, people gather at a local bar. The bar is popular with the locals. Drinks are very cheap because the bar is illegal, as are a third of the local bars at any given time. This bar will likely never be legalized, even if the owners wanted to start paying taxes, because it is located in the back room of the town’s publicly funded firehouse. It is also the kind of place to which people go to for more than just cheap alcohol and socializing.
The bar anchors a collection of objects that used to belong to local households and represent the familiar townscape. Items in the collection were brought in by the bar’s regular clientele and others who don’t usually frequent this type of establishment in the Balkans (a ‘kafana’), namely women.
Deer antlers, firewood, clocks, shop plaques,…
All contributors to the collection were inspired by the example of the bar owner, who is the local volunteer fire marshal. The bar was his entrepreneurial solution to the lack of compensation for his position in the local budget. He was the first to display the items he gathered during fire inspections of abandoned local houses in this space. In a village that has suffered cataclysmic economic decline brought on by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and whose population has steadily shrunk for decades, the remaining residents brought some objects from their homes that they thought would look good on display in the public space of an illegal bar. Over the course of about a decade, these contributors assembled a peculiar collection of items, including handwritten documents and paintings, musical instruments, glassware, bicycles, wood-burning stoves, deer antlers, firewood, clocks, shop plaques, and street signs.
What are these people gathering and why are they bringing these objects in this unlikely public space? Coming together in environments routinely described as ‘post-socialist’ or ‘post-conflict,’ in a village that suffered catastrophic economic downfall with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and globalization of agri-business, they seem unreliable servants to a variety of master narratives that have aspired to describe the situation in which they find themselves. Their collection contains few materials that would interest the professional keepers of museums and designers of historical memory about the place. The collection has little to show by way of evidence of a total demise of state socialism and how this vanishing act brought about recovery from the false consciousness imposed on those who lived it.
Socialist Yugoslavia was never a popular character in stories about formerly socialist nations entering the global history of self-liberation. While this liberation narrative asserted its power and progress across imagined communities of newly democratic nation-states, socialist Yugoslavia became a curious digression of that narrative, a special case of progress derailed by an unexpected flare-up of unaccountable (ancient!) feelings that burned the tree on which universal freedom was to grow. Useless to revisionist nationalism, the bar’s collection of objects is hardly more helpful in the preservation of the socialist legacy, insecure (unlike the “partisan counter-archive” proposed by Gal Kirn) in its power to ‘mobilize the emancipatory purposes’ of historical materials and historiography.
A relevant collection – but why and to whom?
The bar’s collection provides an opportunity to consider the impulse to collect material that resembles an archive or museum in a public space, separate from any program of gentrification, state-mandated historical recovery, or ‘heritage’ preservation. To think about its protocol of preservation and curation is to begin to articulate some new kinds of narratives about what happened with socialist Yugoslavia. Against the impossibility of folding this collection into prevailing, sweeping narratives about events from the not-so-distant past, its objects the desire to preserve and display among people who usually don’t create revisionist historical narratives or emancipatory visions of the future.
Still, they are not archives of peasants or working-class people more broadly, as in the old revolutionary impulse that Jules Michelet acted on in the early nineteenth century, when he combed through the dusty state archives of newly republican France, seeking to retrieve from them the lives of ordinary people and so spare them from the ‘contempt of the future.’ The village bar collection has little to do with the recent academic debates about the materials to be used in telling plausible stories about those who had been left outside the dominant historical narratives. Their collection inadvertently bypasses the groundbreaking academic discussions of the past several decades about the origins, architecture, and interpretation of archival collections, especially those in ‘marginal,’ ‘peripheral,’ or ‘colonial’ spaces.
The collection is being compiled by people who are unfamiliar with archives and do not think in abstract or academic terms about what happened to them and their town. They gather the stuff of ordinary life without following instruction from an identifiable outside authority, institutional or ideological, about what objects they shall deem valuable, symbolic, or relevant. They seem to proceed as if unconcerned about discerning their project’s motivation: they never seem to worry or lament their marginality and have little use for the grand narratives that would precede their effort at collecting objects in a badly lit corner of the present. Their collection in this light could be a bunch of trinkets, relevant only to the locals who admit them to the shared room at the bar and maybe remember what their significance once had been.
Subverting authoritative narratives
The preoccupation with discerning the motivation behind keeping ordinary objects among people poorly illuminated by the stories of social improvement and historical progress is not new. Alice Walker stages the drama of competing motives for preserving the stuff of ordinary life in “Everyday Use” (1973), a short story whose narrator, an illiterate African-American mother, has to decide who to deny the ownership of an heirloom family quilt: the homely daughter who would take it as her wedding gift, or the one who returns home from university and wants to take it out of regular circulation. With a new awareness of the importance of collecting evidence of their existence for the outside world, the educated daughter wants to claim the quilt for an imagined collection of artifacts. There, the quilt would serve a greater purpose as evidence of cultural history.
The keeping of ordinary objects by ordinary people is a political and an aesthetic project, even if explicit justifications for its curating decisions are requested by the outside world once it is taken aback by the discovery of the material’s importance to someone. In the disappointing aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, Alice Walker has Mama reject the imperatives of a political consciousness raised to the level of a museum. The story reaches a tormented conclusion: everyday use is not the ruination of culture.
Unofficial accounts of the past
Those who abstract objects from their daily use would have them speak convincingly against assumptions of inferiority (for presence, aliveness, resourcefulness, creativity, historical worthiness). To speak audibly in such situations is to plan on addressing life-giving audiences who may not exist, Alice Walker warns. Collecting objects whose value is questionable beyond the circle of those who keep them in their shared space is the way to account for the past and the material of memory for those who have been left to their own devices – economically, politically, and narratively – by the machine that manufactures authoritative narratives about the past.
Unable to attach to the grand narratives about what happened in the past half century or more (globalization of agri-business, privatization of food and related industries that employed most rural population, ethnic strife and solid identity formation, triumph of Serbian nationalism, defeat of Serbian nationalism, democratization, collapse of local governance, etc.), the provincials were abandoned by the centers of authority, but they did not find themselves in a vacuum. The scene in the illegal bar is a projection of their social and political imagination in a public gathering place. It holds a vernacular collection of material that frames the energies for gathering and remembering in this place said to be without a usable past or future once its attention shifted to material close at hand.
An alternative landscape of attention
The collection provides an opportunity to consider how the gathering of ordinary materials around principles that are difficult to discern tells us something about the sources of mastery over the histories of places and the characters that populate them. Without a framing historical narrative to anticipate its relevance and good service, this collection in an illegal local bar suggests how narratives about the past can still acquire different forms. Filmmaker Lucrecia Martel recently proposed that the method for creating alternatives to dominant narrative tropes could be called the “cinema of neighbors.”
This process favors the discipline of observing the world it captures and represents, noting proximities and interactions without presupposing their significance: it sees neighbors before it can see enemies. It arrives at narrative lines by organizing accumulated material, rather than impose them ahead of time: framing makes a subject, a person, a place, a situation. (Modern filmmaking technology makes sound recording an especially capacious field, picking up material not confined to scripts or language systems.) This kind of looking at accumulated material produces a different landscape of attention to the way details come together and reading pays off. Without the ready scripts, there is no sentimental debris of ‘the Balkans’ and ‘former Yugoslavia.’
The village museum as a weapon
Looking at trinkets not glued together by a familiar script might find them speaking differently – as neighbors, maybe trapped in the morass of other rigid explanations, maybe in other places where badly lit processes of globalization and social disruption eat their own tails. “Bacurau”(2019), a surreal Weird Western film written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles that thinks about the size of the world visible through the lens of technological and narrative capture, offers a vision of the village museum as a space of historical and political imagination. The film tells us that the village of Bacurau no longer appears on the map, yet people continue to pass through.
Some are natives who return after years of absence, some are confused tourists looking for the museum, and some seem to know the place too well though they are never to be seen in it. They need no old map and care for no museum: they have come for the village and its water. Against their hi-tech blitz, the villagers find limited weapons of defense in the museum – one giant old machete to help one invader meet his end. What ultimately defeats the invasion is the villagers’ organized armed resistance. The film offers a nearly utopian vision of the plebeian victory over today’s remote-controlled armies. It encourages us to consider the village museum as an important resource in the fight against mass destruction.
Varieties of communal bonds
The surprise at the appearance of such a place in an impoverished rural settlement in the fictional municipality of Serra Verde, Brazil, or in a village in Serbia, betrays a sense of wonder. Why bother in a world like this? And where is the entitlement to take this kind of imagination seriously? It takes audacity to store insignificant objects in a room and see what they can do in a world like this. They are the furniture of ordinary living, the physical coordinates of that life, from one day to the next.
Their imagination does not map a nation (though its fragments remain), but rather, a variety of communal bonds: life in a house without electricity, steel production and domestic life, peasant life consumed by modernization and urbanization, property ownership among the landless and largely illiterate, and gender categories unsettled by medical technology and social change. The forces that bring together these people and their objects are the machineries of historical narratives. How those fictions place people and objects in the frame – in the room, in the bar, in the town, in any historical context – is still everyone’s business, an acquired taste for what we can make of each other and what we are able to recall.