nesvrstani.rs

Heritage Map as Non-Aligned World’s plug-in

Heritage Map as Non-Aligned World’s plug-in

There is no ideal ensemble of the past buried underneath the contemporary city, only infinite fragments. The ideal city exists only in architectural models and in the new total restorations. Mine will be a dual archaeology of the city of words and the city of stone, glass and concrete. Sometimes this archaeology will be virtual, the archaeology of urban desires and potentials, of virtual realities in the imagination. Svetlana Bojm - – The Future of Nostalgia

Mapping non-aligned Belgrade’s landmarks as the Non-Aligned World exhibition’s heritage plug-in, emerged from the application of a similar (to Bojm’s) dual archeology – one that "digs" through the city, streets, facades, archives, passages and arcades, their ruins, restorations, or simply abandoned, inconspicuous nooks and crannies and dead ends, as well as in newspaper articles, private collections and memoirs, urban and architectural plans, magnificent ideas and testimonies. The website nesvrstani.rs is a heritage map as plug-in, add-on or extension of the Non-Aligned World exhibition in cyberspace, and it aims to mark, add, and from the perspective of a city (Belgrade) present the monumental aspect of the non-aligned world. It is called a heritological map because it aims to view "hard" and "soft" monuments of non-alignment, as well as its markers, features, various actions, events and memorials within the framework of heritage remembrence culture (lat. Heredium, eng. Heritage) and "the social social life of thingsˮ.

Numerous signs are mapped, which in the form of museums, parks, fountains, sebils, murals, mosaics, street names, memorial plaques, or in the form of photographs of events, protests, acts, gestures, ephemeral spectacles or excerpts from collective memory, often contain conflicting and inconsistent traces of history. They are both harbingers and messengers of anti-colonial values, expressions of solidarity, advocates of equality, but also witnesses of hasty, temporary solutions, intensive and unfinished materialisations of grandiose plans, and the wandering passage of time that has trapped them in inappropriate reconstructions, imperceptible declines, inevitable acts of forgetting.

There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments - Robert Musil

Based on the methodology of mapping heritage in cyberspace, an attempt was made to craft more conspicuous landmarks, to visualise the instant of their making and their lives henceforth to the present, as well as to recommend modern, living hyperlinks that may guide viewers to their augmented versions which include stories, many anecdotes, interviews and similar information. Contexts of the origin of particular non-aligned landmarks are marked with different pins to (i.e. for the First NAM Conference, the Ninth NAM Conference, other occasions or remembrance culture "excerpts"). To this were added also different pin colours suggesting the various states/status of the monuments – good, not good, does not exist, has disappeared, has a memorial plaque, without memorial plaque, location unknown, reparations or refurbishments needed, and the like. Stories about the lives of monuments are like "detective files", while location graphics on the map point to their "health records". Stories, through their social life, clarify the social significance of the landmarks, while the pins reveal their conservation status.

A complete map of non-aligned Belgrade lacks certain information, data and materials, because they had not been found at the time of writing. Fortunately, there is an awareness that this map (like any other map) is imperfect and incomplete. In the spirit of solidarity-based cooperation of the non-aligned world, we therefore invite participants to the process of this map’s joint completion. Perhaps a sense of long duration, search, elusiveness, incorruptibility, but also the joy having resolved a detective dilemma or story, awakens mutual satisfaction that the Museum of African Art aims to nurture. We will be happy to include and classify every suggestion, recommendation, correction and, of course – new non-alignment location. This heritological map may seem complex at first glance, but in fact it is familiar to all of us, logical and strange, provocative and mysterious like remembrance/memory itself.

Ana Knežević
Head and Coordinator of nesvrstani.rs