Twenty years after the breakout of the Yugoslav Wars, this photographic collection is the evidence of one man’s impulse to document the remaining fragments of the Yugoslav idea in the Serbian capital. It is a nostalgic project that is done with an earnestness and a naivety of which only someone who has never lived there could be capable. Photographer Boris Kralj has Yugoslav parents but was brought up in Germany, and although the Yugoslav culture was a large part of his upbringing, the poison of nationalism and the horrors of war in the 1990s had a lasting impact: suddenly, his father and friends became Croats, his relatives Slovenes, acquaintances Bosnians, and Belgrade an international pariah. However, the apparent nostalgia of this project is not reactionary; it responds to a more progressive idea of a Yugoslav multiculturalism, all the while resisting any idealization of the past. It is a documentary effort that capitulates to big statements—an approach that would seem made for a region that bears so many traces of the propagandas of the past.
Twenty years after the breakout of the Yugoslav Wars, this photographic collection is the evidence of one man’s impulse to document the remaining fragments of the Yugoslav idea in the Serbian capital. It is a nostalgic project that is done with an earnestness and a naivety of which only someone who has never lived there could be capable. Photographer Boris Kralj has Yugoslav parents but was brought up in Germany, and although the Yugoslav culture was a large part of his upbringing, the poison of nationalism and the horrors of war in the 1990s had a lasting impact: suddenly, his father and friends became Croats, his relatives Slovenes, acquaintances Bosnians, and Belgrade an international pariah. However, the apparent nostalgia of this project is not reactionary; it responds to a more progressive idea of a Yugoslav multiculturalism, all the while resisting any idealization of the past. It is a documentary effort that capitulates to big statements—an approach that would seem made for a region that bears so many traces of the propagandas of the past.