In everyday life, nostalgia is often associated with a warm feeling of subtle longing for the past, typically “for a period or place with happy personal associations”. Yet, in certain contexts, nostalgia can play a more significant role, related to issues of politics, collective memory, cultural and national identity. After the Yugoslav Wars, the citizens of former Yugoslavian countries developed a specific form of nostalgia for their socialist past. Defined Yugo-nostalgia, it has since grown into a real cultural phenomenonin an attempt to justify and cope with the region’s difficult past.
While Boris Kralj, a Berlin-based photographer and son of Yugoslav immigrants to Germany, has not experienced the life within the Yugoslav regime directly, his nostalgic photographic exploration of the former country’s capital, Belgrade, can be seen as a quest for personal identity. My Belgrade, takes the shape of a book that collects images of the city that form a very specific place in the collective Yugoslav memory, even: the neon signs and dull loking cinemas, the overwhelming brutalist buildings and empty roads, the grey skies and occasional pops of red. These are all iconic elements that appear in Kralj’s photographs, telling a story – that is both personal and collective – of nations that tried to forget their common past and are now reclaiming it with a vengeance.
Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Boris Kralj
