On the 5th and 6th of March 2019 with support of the KOSMOS Workshop funding and DFG Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is organising interdisciplinary workshop bringing together art, activism and academia to discuss on the issues of borders and violence. We will analyse and verify definitions and interpretations of ‘border’, ‘frontier’ and ‘boundary’ that are applied in social and cultural studies and different research and art approaches for their study. This occurrence shows how much importance gain border studies in the interpretation of post-modernity. Borderlands are thus sites and symbols of power, exemplified with the most extreme division elements such as walls, guarded towers or barbed wire, which constitute particular markers of sovereignty and liminal zones. 

However the most interesting forms of power in the borderlands are those, which are invisible, or bare no material existence, but can illuminate the role of border identities in the process of strengthening nationalistic ideas and self-definition processes. These are particularly performances of identity and violence in the borderlands that we chose as the main research topic for presented workshops.

Borderlands will be envisaged and analysed using different case studies as meaning-making and meaning-carrying entities, parts of cultural and linguistic landscapes which often transcend in a very distinctive way political and social contexts and the limits of power structure.
We will focus on the clash between critical analysis of the chosen examples of material and non-material cultural and societal production with verification of the actual landscape of borderland area, and the reconstructive mechanisms of elements of the post-conflict representations in the collective memory.
Through analysis of the semantics of memory-sites and oral histories we will point out a synchronous functionalization of different representational systems that present different variants of development of the national and identity discourses in border area.

The border regions of the Balkans that will be the main subject of the workshop are characterized by ethnic, religious and language coexistence and tensions. The research focus will be based mostly on the social movements, cultural transformations and organized violence, which arose in this region and by creating ethno-national loyalties that in turn had produced the organized violence.

Tuesday, 5th March 2019
9:30h-10:30h
KEY LECTURE I
Stef Jansen (University of Manchester): Practices and paradoxes in Balkan borderwork

11:00h-12:30h
BORDER CITIES AND CROSS-BORDER PERCEPTION
Jasna Čapo (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb): Exhibiting power, staging the border: refugees’ transit through Croatia in the autumn of 2015
Vladan Jeremić (Belgrade): Fragile Presence, Time for Movement
Marzena Maciulewicz (University of Warsaw) Doing fieldwork on the borderlands. Challenges of the organization of research in a divided city (Mitrovica).

12:30h-14:00h
UNMAKING AND MAKING FROM CENTERS TO PERIPHERIES: NEW BORDERS IN THE BALKANS
Rigels Halili (University of Warsaw): Marginality and centrality: few remarks on Zagorie valley and the Albanian-Greek borderland
Olimpia Dragouni (HU): Redrawing frontiers blurred: inter-confessional borders in Christian/Muslim shared places of cult in Macedonia
Lana Čmajčanin (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna): Redrawing Borders

16:00h-17:30h
IDENTITY, NATIONALITY AND STATELESSNESS IN THE BALKAN BORDERLANDS
Roswitha Kersten-Pejanić (HU): Performances of identity and discourses of othering in the linguistic landscape of post-conflict Croatia
Elife Krasniqi (University of Graz): The appropriation of common descent to identity politics in Opoja, south of Kosovo
Pieter Troch (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Regensburg): The legacy of socialist urbanisation on ethnic partitioning in Mitrovica (Kosovo)

Wednesday, 6th March 2019

10:00h-11:30h
COMMEMORATION PRACTICES IN THE BORDERLANDS
Enriketa Pandelejmoni (University of Tirana): Contested memories in the borderlands. Cham and Greek identity and representations in Southern Albania today
Christian Voss (HU): The documentary “Witnesses” (Svedoci, 2016): Contesting “Bratstvo i Jedinstvo” during the Greek Civil War in the intergenerational memory of the Macedonian diaspora

12:00h-13:30h
ORAL HISTORIES FROM THE BORDERLANDS
Arbnora Dushi (Institute of Albanology, Prishtina): From border memory to border experience
Gilles de Rapper (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique): The Enchanted border: Neo-Pelasgianism in Albania
Robert Pichler (Austrian Academy of Science): The lure behind the mountains: Macedonian Albanians and their imaginations about their mother country during socialism

15:00h-16:30h
BORDERS, WALLS AND VIOLENCE – FACING THE FENCING
Srdjan Jovanović-Weiss (City Collage of New York): Architecture of romancing true power
Nenad Stefanov (HU): Remembrance and experience of violence in the Yugoslav-Bulgarian Border Region in the first half of the 20th century. Possibilities of Subjectivity
Vladan Jeremić and Wenke Christoph (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung): Implications of Safe countries of origin legislation, border regime and migration on Roma people in the Balkans

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

 

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