VESNA MADOSKI
European Graduate School, Switzerland
madzoski@yahoo.com
BEING (A) NEGATIVE: THE SPECTRE OF SOCIALISM IN PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES
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Journal 19/2023 (Museum of Applied Art), pages 30-40
Article category: original scientific paper
UDC:
316.728:77
069.5:661(497.11)"2022/2023"
Abstract (original language):
In rare anthropological interpretations of the glass smashing custom in the Balkan Peninsula, it is written that this could be understood as a manner in which one informs his/her environment of transiting to a different state of consciousness. This article analyses, on one side, the questions encountered while working on the exhibition Fragile: Glass Narratives, Broken Histories (Public Space With A Roof Amsterdam and Skver Magazin Zaje?ar, December 2022, Museum of Applied Art Belgrade), and on the other the possibility of interpreting socialist history from the fragments found in the former glass and crystal factory Kristal Zaje?ar. The focus is on the discovery of several hundred rolls of discarded photographic negatives, a key tool of understanding the glass production in Serbia after World War II. In an unusual dialectics, the glass fragments become readable thanks to the survived images of the past, while the history narrative created by the found negatives becomes destabilized by this smashed glass. The theory of photo negatives is fragmentary in the history of photography and this article is an attempt to change this. Namely, the potential of negatives to offer different versions of one recorded moment also offers a unique possibility to write versions of history not complying with the official narratives. This way, a new plane of understanding the new post-socialist normality is created.
Key words: (original language)
Kristal-Zaje?ar, glass smashing, photo negatives, Walter Benjamin, history of photography
Summary:
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