Mnemonic Aesthetics and Strategies in Popular Culture: Murals, Film, and Popular Music as Memory Work

Popular culture (e.g. prose and poetry, popular music, cinema, comic books, and murals, as well as the different platforms where these cultural products are created, mediated, and consumed) transmits stories about the past and equip it with colors, sounds, and protagonists. In the post-Yugoslav space, the institutionalized memorialization of the past (World War Two, communism, wars of Yugoslav dissolution) seeks to impose hegemonic narratives created by the political elites, whereas various popular-cultural products challenge as well as reinforce those narratives. MEMPOP will conduct pioneering research into the mnemonic aesthetics and strategies of popular culture and how this memory work from below interacts with the institutionalized memoryscape. The project is designed to explore collective memory in the post-Yugoslav space beyond the binarism of trauma and nostalgia, unpacking the mechanisms of memory politics in popular-cultural production in Croatia and Slovenia, as well as in a comparative, and regional perspective. MEMPOP's aim is also to develop tools and methods for cultural and media memory studies, facilitating memory research across and at the intersection of different media. MEMPOP considers the cultural and mnemonic impact of popular culture as a product of popular-cultural texts, sounds, and visual representations (mnemonic aesthetics), as well as the processes and agents involved in the production, distribution, and reception of these texts, sounds and representations (mnemonic strategies). Popular culture may encourage popular participation in memory work through activities such as producing fanfiction, commenting on forums, engaging in mural-production, and, in the process, highlighting new stories about the past and adapting old ones. MEMPOP examines how manifestations of modern popular-cultural production not only replicate hegemonic representations and narratives, but also operate as bottom-up communicative memory generated by participatory memory work.  MEMPOP examines 3 sites and media (murals, film, popular music) engaged in memory work in the post-Yugoslav space, to analyze the transmediality of memory work (goal 4) and: 1) Design a typology of mnemonic murals in the post-Yugoslav space, accounting for the messages conveyed, social functions, visual styles, narrative tropes, techniques, and performative aspects of muralization; 2) Offer a classification of the memory-work strategies developed and used by local film festivals, accounting for their transnational and transcultural dimension (that is, program selection, curation, and international and local presentation, and communication), film aesthetics, and reception; 3) Map how popular-music production, distribution, criticism and consumption engage with memories of Yugoslav socialism, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the transitional 1990s, accounting for key actors, platforms, intermedial and intertextual references, aesthetics, reception; 4) Design an interactive digital model of popular-cultural participatory memory work, accounting for the different mnemonic narratives, aesthetics, their intertextual and intermedial relations, as well as for their reception and key production and distribution actors. The model will combine content-, structure-, and relation-focused dimensions; constructed using data gathered in the post-Yugoslav space, its design will be applicable to other contexts.  To achieve these objectives and offer a pioneering methodologically comprehensive perspective on the types and mechanisms of popular-cultural memory work, MEMPOP will rely on medium-specific data collection and processing methods (e.g. visual anthropology, ethnography, ethnomusicology, representation and discourse analysis), and analytical methods that allow for intermedial and transmedial analysis, as well as transnational comparison, developed in the context of a tailor-made multimodal platform relying on digital-humanities  tools, and grounded in memory studies.