Radical Artefacts

The Serbian upraising in ‘96/’97 was an attempt to overthrow dictatorship of president Milosevic after he annulled elections because of the victory of the opposition party. Ashamed by the unsuccessful outcome of their protest, the people of the capital Belgrade, where number of protesters reached 200,000 daily, have never produced an archive of photos, banners and graffiti, which emerged during these demonstrations. Scarce information on the Internet and the inability of the media to reveal the data gathered during the protest has left the public without the full account of the upraising. My project is that archive - the website of images, leaflets, badges, flags, vouchers, cartoons, crochets, poems etc, an online record of the elucidated protest available to the participants, scholars and the public.
The narratives of this event known as “The Winter of Discontent” have been locked within the community and there are only odd visual references hidden in people’s houses. My research generated them through interviews and image elicitation that looks at the uprising by analysing the accumulated historic relics. Presented in sections on the website (dates, artists, routes) and pages of art formats (poems, photos, badges), this overview of the geographical, political and social circumstances within which the protest’s artwork was produced demonstrates how it influenced the actions of the citizens.