MEMORY SCREENS

The one-day exhibition is the curator’s approach to her generation’s memories about the 78-day military intervention in Serbia. On March 24, 1999 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) started a military operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) as part of an effort to stop the ongoing conflict in Kosovo between the Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). As this year marks the 20th anniversary of the intervention, it would be interesting to look into the memories that have since emerged from its heritage— the ones of the generation that was born in the early 1990s. Through interviews with peers born between 1990 and 1996, the aim is to juxtapose the participants’ most vivid memories about the bombing with the official narrative offered by the state Radio-Television of Serbia (RTS).

Between the archival materials of the prime-time news program Dnevnik 2 and interviews conducted with the participants, the goal is to explore the way memories about the bombing have formed, changed and in some cases resurfaced twenty years later in the minds of those who were very young at the time the military intervention took place. Through showing some excerpts of the most significant news reports of the period and being able to hear first-hand experiences, the exhibition aims to engage the viewers with what everyday life looked like during the bombing from the perspective of young children and what it signifies for them today. 

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Mila Bajic is a first-year student of the two-year Nationalism Studies Program at CEU. She is also an intern at the Blinken Open Society Archives in the Yugoslav Archives Project where she is working on re-processing and coding archival material. Her main sphere of interest is the role of media materials in the memory formation processes about the 1990s in Serbia.