Multichannel audio-visual performance: Popina / Sounding Spomenik
The Popina monument, designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and completed in 1981, stands on Nebrak Hill above the village of Štulac as a sculptural meditation on one of the earliest and most symbolically charged confrontations of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. On 13 October 1941, vastly outnumbered Partisan units from the Vrnjačka Trstenički detachment and the Kraljevački detachment engaged the advancing 717th German Infantry Division in what is often described as the first full frontal clash between Partisan forces and the Wehrmacht. The battle was fierce, brief, and costly. It marked the beginning of the German counteroffensive against the short-lived Republic of Užice, the first liberated territory within the German Reich’s borders.
Bogdanović’s response to this history was not triumphalist. Instead, he shaped a landscape of stone sentinels carved from dark gabbro and arranged in a sequence of alignments that open and close like apertures. The forms, triangular, circular, pierced, and massive, evoke both ancient necropolises and futuristic ruins. They resist literal interpretation because Bogdanović believed that monuments should provoke reflection, rather than dictate meaning, offering a space where memory can be approached, not consumed.
His monuments often function as instruments of perception, and Popina is no exception. It is a place where the visitor becomes part of the composition. The central chamber, an acoustically remarkable circular space, acts as a resonator. Its geometry gathers sound and folds it back into the body of the visitor. The stone absorbs heat, light, and vibration, creating a sensory density that is inseparable from the monument’s architectural logic.
The subtle hum of the road in the distance gently glides down the crevices between large granite blocks. The July sun is merciless, yet the zenith holds the space around the monument in a dense vellum of heat and light. The nature is neglected, yet lush and mysterious. Strange paths through an impenetrable forest hold the shadows in their pockets.
Brutalist monuments of Yugoslavia are not only memorials, but rather political statements encoded in stone. Built during late Yugoslav socialism, they reflect a moment when the state sought to articulate a collective antifascist identity through art. Yet, Bogdanović, who later became a vocal critic of nationalism and authoritarianism, infused his work with ambiguity. His monuments resist propaganda. They refuse to monumentalize war itself. Instead, they monumentalize the fragility of human struggle, the cost of resistance, and the ethical imperative to remember.
In today’s fractured political landscape, where the memory of the Second World War is often contested, instrumentalised, or neglected, Popina stands as a reminder that memory is an active cultural practice and cannot be a static inheritance. The monument’s partial abandonment, its overgrown paths, and the fading of its once clear symbolic program all speak to the shifting politics of remembrance in the post-Yugoslav space.
The Sounding Spomeniks project offers a profoundly contemporary mode of engagement. By activating the monument through sound, improvisation, resonance, and attentive listening, the project reanimates the site without imposing a new narrative upon it. It treats the monument as a living acoustic organism capable of dialogue.
We came here to offer our presence, to examine the knots where past, present, and future intersect. We came to Popina out of respect for the struggle against evil, for the lives sacrificed for freedom, and to bow to the culture that preserved memory in such knowledgeable and grandiose ways. The gesture of presence, of listening, is political in its own right. It resists the erosion of meaning that comes with neglect. It abandons the perception of a monument as a silent witness. An acoustic marvel, the round chamber of the main Popina chamber treats sound in truly magnificent ways. Being and playing inside is forever inscribed in my body.
The essence of Bogdanović’s vision was that memory should be felt, not merely known. Popina reveals to us that memory is a willingness to stand at the threshold between times, a place where the past resonates into the present and where the future depends on our capacity to remember with care and complexity, to be open to absorb its demands for healing and transformation. Our contribution was deeply engaged, gentle, but resonant, and the gallery performance of the gathered experiences and materials will transpose a glimpse of this otherworldly encounter that opened new portals in our minds, never to close them.
Manja Ristić
March 2026
· Manja Ristić – performance, sound & field recordings, text
· Jernej Babnik Romaniuk – some field recordings
· Lina Rica – live visuals
Production: KUD Mreža / Alkatraz Gallery / Sonotopia, Ljubljana
Co-production: ON Rizom – Institute for Networking, Researching, Publishing and Promoting Contemporary Arts / Inexhaustible Editions / SonoLiminal, Ljubljana
Curators: Nataša Serec and László Juhász