Belgrade Heartbeat

The declaration of Slovenia to leave the Yugoslav federation on June 25, 1991, set in motion a series of conflicts, protests, displacements, and mass executions that would dominate the Balkans for the next eight years. The ensuing refugee crisis turned out to be the worst in European history since the end of World War II. The people who fled their homes during the Bosnian wars between 1992 and 1995 alone numbered 2.7 million. The war grew out of century-old ethnic and religious convictions, intensified by the artificial unification of the region under the construct of Yugoslavia. This historical event finds resonance in the present day, as thousands of refugees from war-torn countries hope to find a better life along their strenuous and often dangerous trek north. The Balkans served as one of the main routes until it was shut down in March 2016, leaving millions of people stranded at its southern end.

It is impossible to disentangle the numerous threads of political, historical, religious, ethnic, and cultural claims that are at the bottom of the countless conflicts that have ravaged the Balkans for centuries and still account for its politically complex character. In Serbia, often painted as the culprit for the bloodsheds of the 1990s, the aftershocks of the wars continue to be felt in a lingering sense of injustice, victimization, and strong ties with history. These memories become physically manifest when driving up Kneza Miloša, one of the main thoroughfares in Belgrade, which offers startling sights of bombed-out buildings amidst numerous diplomatic missions of countries from all over the globe. These ruins, baring their ruptured interior, serve as vivid reminders of the war while making a clear statement of the conviction of most Serbs that they have been wronged not only by their neighbors, but also by the international military alliance. The NATO bombardment of Belgrade lasted from March 24 to June 10, 1999, continuing for seventy-eight days, and resulted in the destruction of numerous buildings as well as claiming approximately five hundred civilian lives.

Even though the moral fine print behind the decision to leave the ruins visible in the city as accusatory monuments might be debatable, the act itself is not: too often is the physical damage of past conflicts hurriedly removed, rectified, or replaced with new or provisional constructions. The memory of war, especially that of human suffering, is often erased faster than it should be as physical reminders of the past are eliminated and confined to abstract knowledge drawn from history books.

In the middle of these war-torn years, Benoit Junod, Swiss Ambassador to Belgrade in the mid-1990s, decided to build a monument of peace to stand as a reminder of the human cost of war. After moving into the residency of the Swiss Ambassador in Senjak, Belgrade, in 1993, he started to redesign the property’s garden, incorporating numerous references to the histories of political conflicts, especially the present situation in the Balkans. On the columns of a pagoda, situated in a small maze in the garden, one can read “War” and “Peace” in Cyrillic, along with statues and busts and carefully selected flowers and trees. Junod wanted to capture the war in all its sensual components, especially sounds and smells, in order to create a more comprehensive and intimate image of its destructive force. Layers upon layers of meaning can be found in the garden, which stretch beyond the immediate political context to more general reflections on war and peace, love and hate, attraction and repulsion, victory and loss.

These binaries were at the core of Marta Jovanović’s Ljubav, a performance which took place in this garden at the invitation of the current ambassador, Jean-Daniel Ruch. The performance revived the memory of the years of bloodshed in former Yugoslavia, while at the same time constituting a way for the artist to come to terms with the wars in her own personal life. The performance reflected on the binaries of love and hate, peace and war, lust and pain, which...