GRUIA BADESCU  Lecturer at University of Oxford

 

Gruia Badescu is a Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Oxford with an affiliation to St John's College. His PhD, at the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research at the University of Cambridge, examined the relationship between architectural post-war reconstruction and coming to terms with the past. His ongoing research projects include further work on reconstruction and emplacement, as well as a study of transnational debates on memorialization of political prisons in post-dictatorship Eastern Europe and Latin America.

 

"Memorializing Victimhood: War monuments, ruins, and symbolic violence in Belgrade"

 

Fifteen years after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, remaining ruins in the centre of Belgrade are the focus of memorialization debates. This paper will analyze through an urban lens the transformation of narratives of victimhood and of the memory of the Yugoslav wars in Serbia.

 

The paper will explore the memorialization and reconstruction debates of sites associated with multi-layered memories of victimhood and perpetration, discussing the ruins of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army (Generalstab) and one monument of the war designed by an architect. It shifts the scale from the national to the urban, and from “classical” memory entrepreneurs of the political realm to city makers, usually perceived as “technical” actors, but as the paper argues, in direct relationship with historiographical debates. It examines architects and city makers as mediators of collective memories and state politics of memory, and the city as an arena of spatial manifestation of different memory narratives as well as an actor of memory making.

 

For a number of architects, the ruined Generalstab represents a memorial of the bombing itself and its reconstruction is an act of memorial architecture which has to engage with the trauma of the city. Employing Galtung’s (1990) notion of cultural violence, Dacia Viejo Rose’s (2011) symbolic violence, and Zizek’s (2013) structural violence, I discuss scenarios of reconstruction and memorialization as acts of violence in dialogue with historiographical “memory wars”. The paper shows how visions for ruined sites and narratives of victimization influence each other: not only that approaches on ruins are derived from memory politics and narratives of victimization, but also reconfigurations and memorializations of ruined sites strengthen such narratives. 

 

All in all, the paper argues that the production of urban environments through reconstruction on the one hand reflects the heterogeneous and conflictual nature of memory, while on the other contributes itself to the shaping of collective memory and narratives of victimhood.