Monument List Workshop
International Summer School: Revolutionary Roads. Destination: Comradeship
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM), Ljubljana
August 2025
In August 2025, Fokus Grupa led a workshop as part of the fourth edition of the international summer school Revolutionary Roads. Destination: Comradeship, organized by Moderna galerija (Ljubljana), the Museum of African Art (Belgrade), and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro (Podgorica). The summer school brought together 26 artists, curators, and researchers from across Europe and beyond for a week-long nomadic program traveling through Ljubljana, Belgrade, and Podgorica, with a focus on Yugoslav socialism, antifascist monuments, and the cultural legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement.
The workshop took place in Ljubljana, in the same space as the Monument List installation at the (Un)Equal Geographies exhibition. Participants were asked to submit one or more case studies to the monumentlist.eu website before arriving, and to read texts by Gal Kirn on monumental iconoclasm and the partisan counter-archive. The session provided time and space to discuss the submitted cases, situate them within the broader history of revisionist monuments, and examine the classification system used on the website — with the possibility of questioning existing categories or proposing new ones.
The group included participants from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia, France, Germany, the UK, Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal, New Zealand, and South Africa. This geographic range brought cases that extended beyond the initial scope of the project, which had been developed primarily for the +MSUM exhibition. Submissions ranged from monuments in post-Yugoslav space—such as the repeated vandalism of Sanja Iveković’s Pregnant Memory in Zagreb—to cases from France, Romania, New Zealand, Egypt, and Russia.
Among the case studies discussed were: the Zagreb Ethnographic Museum and its framing of non-European collections; the Monument aux Morts de l’Algérie française in Toulon, linked to the OAS; the Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand and its role in colonial place narratives; the Mother Dalmatia sculpture at El Shatt in Egypt; the Zelea Codreanu monument in Romania, a pilgrimage site for far-right groups; and the 2025 reinstallation of a Stalin bas-relief in the Moscow metro. Several submissions addressed graffiti and informal interventions, such as Bruno Bušić mural in Zagreb, raising questions about what counts as a monument and how the project’s scope might expand.
The workshop functioned both as a research session, a critical debate and as a way to extend the archive. Cases submitted by participants are reviewed and, where appropriate, added to the online platform. The diversity of perspectives helped identify patterns and local specificities that would otherwise remain difficult to track from a single vantage point.