Ugh, As If! - contemporary art and culture podcast · Lisa Fevral

Spomeniks' real meaning is anti-fascism - 4x08

·40 min·2 clips

The monuments are described as “the concrete legacy” of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist struggle.

1. Ugh, As If! - contemporary art and culture podcast focuses on Spomeniks and the argument that their real meaning is anti-fascism. 2. The speaker presents herself as someone who has read many academic papers on Yugoslavia and Balkan architecture, and she centers Bogdan Bogdanović, Owen Hatherley, Gal Kern, Tihana Pupovac, and Dubravka Škulić. 3. The episode asks why so much writing about Spomeniks treats them as detached objects instead of monuments tied to Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist history. 4. She says many articles repeat the claim that the monuments are “obscured by historiographical and political narratives,” then rejects that framing as misleading. 5. MoMA’s 2018–2019 exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 comes up as a major example, with more than 400 drawings, models, photographs, and films. 6. She argues that the Western art market and big galleries profit from collecting and displaying Yugoslav work, including Bogdanović sketches in New York. 7. The episode also says this market logic recasts Spomeniks as sellable objects and even as “totalitarian” or “UFO” imagery. 8. She says the lack of collective funding after the breakup of Yugoslavia helped leave monuments under-documented and under-maintained. 9. The speaker points to the post-1990s decay of many Spomeniks and says the condition of the sites is tied to public underfunding, not to socialist architecture itself. 10. She brings up Owen Hatherley’s critique of “concrete clickbait,” including the 2010s fashion for photographing monuments without their political context. 11. One recurring point is that monuments like the Stone Flower at Jasenovac commemorate victims of the Ustaše genocide, including Serbs, Roma, Jews, communists, and anti-fascists. 12. Bogdan Bogdanović is described as a Yugoslav partisan born in 1922 who later became a political dissident and left Serbia in self-imposed exile in 1993. 13. The speaker says Bogdanović wrote a letter to Slobodan Milošević and was driven out amid nationalist hostility, threats, and vandalism. 14. Another repeated claim is that Yugoslavia was highly decentralized, with local funds, enterprises, factories, and regional republics contributing to public monuments. 15. She says researchers such as Tihana Pupovac note that many memorials were not purely abstract, and some included realistic or narrative elements. 16. The episode also cites the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a site where local action has reactivated partisan memory across ethnic divisions. 17. The tone is argumentative, personal, and impatient, with the speaker repeatedly interrupting herself to emphasize disgust at nationalist and orientalist framing. 18. The format feels like a solo commentary that moves through quotations, examples, and reactions rather than a formal interview. 19. People interested in Yugoslav architecture, anti-fascism, and art history. 20. People wanting a detached tour of modernist monuments.

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