Building monuments, unleashing anger: The material disruption of contested memoryscapes

• Published in: Emotion, space and society space and society, 2023-08, Vol.48, p.100963, Article 100963
• Main Author: Kosatica, Maida
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Affective practices; Material trace; Memoryscapes; Monuments; Social semiotics
• ISSN: 1755-4586; 1878-0040
• DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2023.100963

This paper explores the post-war memoryscapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina via (defaced and destroyed) monuments evidencing the habitual struggle to disrupt and reorder space, and reinterpret the traumatic past. Analysing a combination of digital and fieldwork data, I make a case for interpreting attacks on monuments as a civilian retaliatory agency, exerting spatial hegemony and substantiating resentful affective regimes (especially in relation to the most recently imposed legal ban on the denial of genocide in Srebrenica). In doing so, I consider how citizens’ “truths” are enacted by distorting loss and violence, while collective trauma persists. This paper further illustrates how peculiar remembrance practices modify the standard purpose and meanings of a monument, contextualizing monuments within a larger framework of post-conflict spaces. •Derealization of loss operates through the strategic spatialization of seemingly irenic memory discourses.•Preventing people from commemorating is exactly what pushes them to fetishize commemoration.•Attacked monuments are inquiries into the deep scars of the social fabric and the workings of affective regimes.•Attack targets and material traces reflect and consolidate people's interests and needs to disrupt and “purify” the space.•Attacking monuments is a semiotic reinvigoration redefining transgressive social practices.