Ana Hofman, lecture: Partisan Songs on Screen: An Affective Archive of Antifascism

Ana Hofman held a lecture at the Institute for Slavistics, Vienna University

In this talk, I examine how affective power of collective singing (and listening) of partisan songs is an essential aspect of the construction of Yugoslav revolutionary subjectivity. I draw on my long-term research on the genre of partisan songs, its affective politics during Yugoslav socialism and its afterlife in the post-Yugoslav societies. Looking at the iconic soundtracks from the partisan films Bitka na Neretvi (1969) and Užička Republika (1974), I observe the affective encounters produced by and through the auditory experience of partisan songs as a main tool for portraying collective revolutionary becomings. The fact that partisan songs are “born” in the moment of struggle and resistance suffuses them with a particular drive or spirit that triggers the songs’ mobilizing force and enables mobilization on various somatic, sensorial, emotional and cognitive levels. For this reason, they are not employed in the films as a tool for mediating a particular set of ideas and values, but are primarily as affectively imbued sonic objects. In other words, affective power of collective singing and listening is used to portray the emergent revolutionary sense of collectivity as highly somatic and affective experience. In this talk, I first examine the historical discourses of the affective power of partisan songs with an emphasis on their collective authorship, performance, mediation and circulation. In the second part, I engage with complex overlapping histories and memories of the antifascist struggle, resistance, and revolution as condensed in an aural experience that is capable of transmitting a spirit of the moment of Yugoslav partisan struggle with all its revolutionary exceptionality.

Alenka Bartulović, Affective hospitality: sevdalinka and the new politics of solidarity in Slovenia

In the framework of Erasmus+ teaching exchange, Assist. Prof. Alenka Bartulović gave four lectures at the University of Zadar at the end of October. She addressed the imagining of the future in post-war Sarajevo and especially the role of music in antinationalist activism. In her second lecture she focused on affectivity and politics of Bosnian music, particularly sevdalinka in Ljubljana in the 1990s.

Rajko Muršič: Affective and political dimensions of Yugoslav popular music, block of lectures, Bern 2019

Between October 14 and 16, 2019, Rajko Muršič gave a short block of lectures on Affective and Political Dimensions of Yugoslav Popular Music. The lectures were organised in the frame of the joint degree programme Creole: Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes at the Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Bern (Universität Bern, Philosophisch-historische Fakultät, Institut für Socialanthropologie).

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Ana Hofman, lecture “Antifascism, Activism and the Politics of the Past after Yugoslavia” Humanities Center, Bucknell University, U.S.

Ana Hofman will hold a lecture at the Humanities Center, Bucknell University   on “Antifascism, activism and politics of the past after Yugoslavia”; November 13, 2019

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XXXVth meeting of the European ethnomusicologists seminar “Performing Bodies”

Projektna skupina se je udeležila XXXV srečanja Evropskega seminarja etnomuzikologov “Uprizarjanje telesa” (“Performing Bodies”), ki je potekalo v času od 3-7 September 2019, na Oddelku za glasbo, Durham University, UK.

Izledke svojih raziskav so predstavili na skupnem panelu “Sounds, Bodies and Affects in Music Performing and Listening,” ki ga je vodil Martin Stokes, Kings College London.

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Roundtable “Sound survivals: affective structures of musical (self)care and solidarity across borders” at the 45th ICTM World Conference (11–17 July 2019, Bangkok, Thailand)

This roundtable set out to explore whether, when and how music and sound can contribute to practices of (self) care that oppose bodily and mental exhaustion, and structural feelings of social disintegration.

 

Participants: Marko Kölbl (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna), Evrim Hikmet Öğüt (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University), Ana Hofman (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Tom Western (University of Oxford)

 

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6th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Multipart Music

At one of the suggested topics of the ICTM group for multipart music (23‑27 September 2019, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina), which dealt with emotions and aesthetic experiences in music practices, Mojca Kovačič presented a paper titled Emotional and Affective Experiences in Collective Singing , in which she presented the theoretical starting points and methodological challenges for the research of emotions and affect elicited by collective singing.

Program and abstracts

 

14th International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF)

Ana Hofman and Mojca Kovačič presented the project at the 14th International Society for Ethnology and Folklore(SIEF) congress entitled: “Track Changes: Reflecting on a Transforming World.” They presented the paper “Affective politics in a time of political exhaustion: a sonic view” in the panel Affect and atmospheres in the ethnographic betweenorganized by the SIEF Working Group on Body, Affects, Senses, and Emotions (BASE), organized by Deborah Kapchan (New York University) and Birgit Abels (Georg August University Göttingen).

More about the panel: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/sief2019/p/7120

The project team joined the SIEF Working Group on Body, Affects, Senses, and Emotions  and participated at the group meeting.

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