Forests of Resistance¹

Introduction: Landscapes of Resistance

Par­ti­san war is by def­i­n­i­tion char­ac­ter­ized by two spe­cif­ic ele­ments: the first is the emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion of the whole pop­u­la­tion, the sec­ond is the ​“com­plete and suc­cess­ful exploita­tion of nat­ur­al fea­tures of the coun­try­side as a place of refuge, a place of abode, a place for ambush­es and war oper­a­tions in a dif­fi­cult coun­try, under the worst pos­si­ble con­di­tions”.4

The con­crete and sym­bol­ic bond between Par­ti­sans and land­scape in its entire­ty and com­plex­i­ty was an intrin­sic fac­tor defin­ing the par­ti­san expe­ri­ence expressed by many writ­ers and poets in their post WW2 works. In the case of Yugoslav Par­ti­sans, fight­ing the inva­sion of Yugoslavia by the Axis pow­ers between 1941 and 1945, the impor­tance of ter­ri­to­r­i­al knowl­edge and of its sym­bol­ic under­stand­ing is well doc­u­ment­ed, espe­cial­ly via the wide pro­duc­tion of par­ti­san art (main­ly poet­ry and graph­ics) con­nect­ed to the mean­ing of forests, val­leys and set­tled out­skirts as places of strug­gle, but also sym­bols of ​“rev­o­lu­tion­ary cross­ing, from rooms to open space”.^[5] Edvard Kocbek, a Slovene poet who fought in the NOB (nar­o­d­noosvo­bodil­na bor­ba, Eng. People’s Lib­er­a­tion War), wrote in his diary from WW2 (lat­er pub­lished under the title Tovar­iši­ja, Eng. Com­rade­ship) the fol­low­ing quote by Saint Bernard: ​“Trust my expe­ri­ence, in the for­est you will find more wis­dom than in books”.^[6]

The rela­tion the Par­ti­sans had to the places of their action is almost sym­bi­ot­ic and rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent to the usu­al (wo)man–nature rela­tion. Land­scape is no longer a con­tem­pla­tive horizon—which it could only be with the nec­es­sary visu­al and con­cep­tu­al dis­tance between man and nature—but instead coin­cides with action; it is felt in its total­i­ty when a par­ti­san enters and expe­ri­ences it. Land­scape is, there­fore, no longer a sta­t­ic view but becomes dynam­ic, strong­ly relat­ed to the Par­ti­sans’ actions in space. This per­spec­ti­val shift of land­scape perception—moving from the optic to the hap­tic—made land­scape a place of par­tic­i­pa­tion, shar­ing, per­for­mance and move­ment and influ­enced the pro­duc­tion of mon­u­ments in Yugoslavia, as in oth­er parts of Europe. 

This trans­for­ma­tion from con­tem­plat­ed land­scape7 to lived land­scape is inter­con­nect­ed with the new sym­bol­ic inter­pre­ta­tion of land­scape itself. Land­scape could be the metonymy of free­dom, as the Ital­ian writer Ita­lo Calvi­no states: ​“The grass and the sun and they, walk­ing with their unbut­toned coats between the grass and the sun, were a new sym­bol, airy and enor­mous: what peo­ple call free­dom”.^[8] It could be also per­ceived as a land­scape of death, as in the poem by Karel Destovnik Kajuh Preko smr­ti stopamo v svo­bo­do (Through Death We Walk into Free­dom), where land­scapes are ​“landscapes/of death and dying”.^[9] Land­scape, there­fore, is a poly­mor­phic and float­ing con­cept depend­ing on a par­ti­sans per­son­al perception.

The deep rela­tion­ship between the Par­ti­sans and land­scape is clear when read­ing Par­ti­san authors: land­scape becomes the exter­nal man­i­fes­ta­tion of inter­nal res­o­nances, its vis­i­ble form sym­bi­ot­i­cal­ly express­es one’s feel­ings, fore­bod­ings and sen­sa­tions. When a partisan’s aware­ness enters a cri­sis, this is often reflect­ed in lit­er­ary texts through the rela­tion­ship between them and land­scape becom­ing unsta­ble, as if the human fig­ure is no longer inte­grat­ed in space.

While fight­ing, the Par­ti­sans per­ceived them­selves as con­sub­stan­tial with land­scape, both sym­bol­i­cal­ly and strate­gi­cal­ly: they blend­ed into the land­scape, meta­mor­phi­cal­ly adapt­ing them­selves to the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment. The chthon­ic expe­ri­ence of land’s depth, which hides and saves, espe­cial­ly dur­ing sweep­ing actions, has a strong mean­ing (and remains a strong mem­o­ry) since it is intrin­si­cal­ly con­nect­ed to the shock of almost touch­ing death.

These war expe­ri­ences were shared by many Yugoslav artists and archi­tects who in the post­war peri­od ded­i­cat­ed them­selves to design­ing mon­u­ments: the archi­tect Bog­dan Bog­danović, for exam­ple, was a Par­ti­san in the resis­tance move­ment, the sculp­tor Dušan Dža­mon­ja did not fight, but vis­cer­al­ly felt the war as a refugee in Ser­bia, the sculp­tor Vojin Bak­ić lost his three broth­ers dur­ing the war, etc. In their texts and inter­views these artists and archi­tects fre­quent­ly pay atten­tion to the top­ic of the monument’s space: the rela­tion­ship between mon­u­ments and authen­tic land­scapes of struggle.

Site-Specificity: The Site before the Form

What char­ac­ter­izes site-spe­cif­ic art is that the site where the work is placed has a fun­da­men­tal role in how the work is con­ceived: it is ​“con­ceived with the site in mind”.^[12] With this spe­cif­ic atten­tion to the loca­tion of the sculpture/work of art, a change also occurs in the way the view­er is con­sid­ered. In fact, site-speci­fici­ty is not solved only with the spe­cial posi­tion the set­ting gains, but it also includes a dispace­ment of the spectator’s atten­tion from the work itself towards the envi­ron­ment the object and the view­er are part of.^[13] If for the min­i­mal­ist sculp­ture of the 1960s this meant an atten­tion to the rooms where the sculp­tures were includ­ed and to the viewer’s posi­tion towards the room and the work of art,^[14] for the memo­r­i­al pro­duc­tion of the same years in Yugoslavia, sim­i­lar­ly to the Amer­i­can Land Art pro­duc­tion, this meant a stronger atten­tion to the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment and the land­scape into which the mon­u­ment and vis­i­tor were immersed, it meant defin­ing land­scape as the mate­r­i­al (one of the mate­ri­als) of the art­work, nature as part of a pro­duc­tion pro­ce­dure and the sit­ed­ness of vision^[15] as the cen­tral point of some of the best memorials. 

With­in the cul­tur­al debate of the 1950s, 60s and 70s in Yugoslavia, the term site-speci­fici­ty was nev­er used. How­ev­er oth­er terms and sen­tences expressed the same inter­est towards the top­ic of sit­ed­ness: var­i­ous artists and crit­ics wrote about the ​“rela­tion to the place” the mon­u­ment should devel­op,^[16] or about the mon­u­ments as spa­tial sculp­tures that should ​“com­plete the exist­ing ambiance”,^[17] or about the cen­tral role of the observer’s point of view,^[18] etc. In the fol­low­ing sec­tion I will ana­lyze dif­fer­ent voic­es from dif­fer­ent peri­ods, com­ing to the con­clu­sion that sit­ed­ness—or a monument’s contextuality—was one of the most dis­cussed top­ics of inter­est when design­ing and writ­ing about con­tem­po­rary mon­u­ment production.

In 1953 the Slovene archi­tec­ture jour­nal Arhitekt pub­lished a sur­vey on NOB mon­u­ments built from the end of the war until then, ask­ing three ques­tions: 1) What do the inter­vie­wees think about the present pro­duc­tion? 2) How should we view these mon­u­ments: ​“with the eyes of those who will come after us” or should we be led by our present incli­na­tions? 3) What is the qual­i­ty of Slovene pro­duc­tion in com­par­i­son to mon­u­ments built in oth­er Yugoslav republics? Sev­en archi­tects^[19] and one politi­cian^[20] were inter­viewed, among them two of the most pro­lif­ic archi­tects in Yugosla­vian memo­r­i­al pro­duc­tion in the years to come: Edvard Ravnikar and Bog­dan Bogdanović. 

In 1953 the two archi­tects were in very dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions: Bog­danović had only built the Jew­ish Memo­r­i­al in Bel­grade (Spomenik jevre­jskim žrt­va­ma, 1951–52), while Edvard Ravnikar had already com­plet­ed sev­er­al memo­ri­als, includ­ing his best known project, Kam­por Memo­r­i­al (1953) on the island of Rab, designed togeth­er with Miloš Bonča, Savin Sev­er, Branko Koc­mut and Marko Šla­jmer (the last two were also inter­viewed by Arhitekt in the same sur­vey), and some of his most poet­ic mon­u­ments, like the Hostage’s Ceme­tery in Begun­je and Dra­ga pri Begun­jah (1952÷53), con­sid­ered at the time one of the best exam­ples of spa­tial mon­u­ments.^[21] Edvard Ravnikar in his con­cise answer, and the young Bog­dan Bogdanović—at the time 31—with his elab­o­rate text, expressed very sim­i­lar ideas on how a mon­u­ment should relate to its context. 

Mon­u­ments should, ​“when devel­oped spa­tial­ly, enable a real and gen­uine expe­ri­ence”, states Bog­danović,^[22] while Ravnikar, stress­ing the impor­tance of cor­rect sit­ing, hopes for the pro­duc­tion of solu­tions which ​“com­plete the exist­ing ambiance and cre­ate a new bal­anced envi­ron­ment”.^[23]

Three years lat­er^[24] Bog­danović writes a lengthy arti­cle regard­ing the impor­tance of posi­tion­ing mon­u­ments in space, describ­ing exam­ples from dif­fer­ent Euro­pean cities (Place la Con­corde in Paris, Piaz­za del Popo­lo in Rome, Kar­lův most in Prague, Amaliem­borg Slot­plads in Copen­hagen etc.) while illus­trat­ing some of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of the rela­tions between objects and space. After describ­ing how ancient pop­u­la­tions dealt with mon­u­ments and con­sid­er­ing how Renais­sance and Baroque artists used to build mon­u­ments and what effects they could achieve, he points out that ​“very often the qual­i­ty of a mon­u­ment depends on the way it is posi­tioned in space”.^[25] More­over, he high­lights that at the cen­ter of his own reflec­tions there is always man, that every­thing should be con­sid­ered in rela­tion to his posi­tion in space and his rela­tion to the objects he shares space with.^[26]

In the 1960s reflec­tions around mon­u­ment spa­tial­i­ty became more com­mon and more advanced, as, for exam­ple, those reflec­tions of the art crit­ic Antoane­ta Pasi­nović and the art his­to­ri­an Eugen Franković, both from Zagreb and writ­ing in 1966.

In the jour­nal Živ­ot Umjet­nos­ti, Antoane­ta Pasi­nović pub­lished an arti­cle express­ing mod­ern ideas about the role of space in the design of memo­ri­als. Her arti­cle is strong­ly inspired by Hen­ri Focillon’s book Vie de formes: Éloge de la main (1939), new­ly trans­lat­ed in Yugoslavia in 1964 with the title Živ­ot obli­ka: pohvala ruci. Titled ​“Spa­tial Analy­sis of the Mon­u­ment,” the arti­cle rec­og­nizes in the spa­tial project of the mon­u­ment the main char­ac­ter­is­tics for the monument’s qual­i­ty. Using Focillon’s quotes ​“the space is the place of the work of art”^[28] or ​“the work of art is the mea­sure of space: it is form”^[29], Pasi­nović stress­es the impor­tance of spa­tial­i­ty, devel­oped with­in memo­r­i­al projects. In the same arti­cle she states: ​“Up until now we con­sid­ered a mon­u­ment through its tem­po­ral­i­ty, through its his­tor­i­cal deter­mi­na­tion. How­ev­er, ask­ing our­selves about the moti­va­tion and about the result­ing the­mat­ic func­tion­ing of the mon­u­ment, we over­looked its real­i­ty, its speci­fici­ty, its mode of being and exist­ing. The mon­u­ment, how­ev­er, exists as a form, as a sculp­ture, as a spa­tial real­i­ty”.^[30]

Eugen Franković’s arti­cle, pub­lished in the same issue of Živ­ot Umjet­nos­ti as Pasinović’s, starts by ascer­tain­ing that mon­u­ment sit­ed­ness is usu­al­ly, in the major­i­ty of projects, espe­cial­ly in the case of minor mon­u­ments of local impor­tance, not con­sid­ered at all. He defines three ways in which the mon­u­ments do not take the con­text into con­sid­er­a­tion: 1) The mon­u­ment, seen as ​“impos­ing on the land­scape” (orig. ​“nametan­je pejza­žu”), cre­ates a con­flict with the envi­ron­ment. He gives the exam­ple of August Augustinčić’s mon­u­ment in Ban­ja Luka; 2) The mon­u­ment ignores the envi­ron­ment as if it was a ​“stiff­ened scene show­ing to the view­ers its autonomous play, now— by chance—here, spir­i­tu­al­ly tem­po­rary, but phys­i­cal­ly per­ma­nent.” Here he refers to Van­ja Radauš’s works; 3) The third rea­son for the avoid­ance of a landscape/monument rela­tion is the sculptor’s self-suf­fi­cien­cy (orig. ​“samod­o­voljnost kipara”). The ​“best (actu­al­ly worst) exam­ple” is, again, Augustinčić’s mon­u­ment to Moša Pijade on the bat­tle­field of the Pro­le­tar­i­an Brigades.

“The men­tioned prob­lem with space demands our atten­tion as it is an indi­ca­tor of cru­cial sig­nif­i­cance since the rela­tion between the space (envi­ron­ment, ambiance) and the mon­u­ment is the rela­tion between still­ness and change showed by the monument—here [on the rela­tion between the mon­u­ment and space] lies there­fore all the weight of the expe­ri­ence”.^[31] Here Franković opens the top­ic of the monument’s expe­ri­ence, rec­og­niz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a com­plex rela­tion­ship between the mon­u­ment, the envi­ron­ment and the per­ceiv­er, and since ​“com­mu­ni­ca­bil­i­ty is the func­tion of all pub­lic mon­u­ments,” the monument’s sit­ed­ness is what gives the ​“mon­u­ment its char­ac­ter, the core of its appear­ance and significance.”

For the first time in Yugoslavia an art crit­ic and art his­to­ri­an writ­ing about memo­r­i­al pro­duc­tion con­sid­ers space, how a mon­u­ment deals with it, how it com­pletes it and how the monument’s char­ac­ter is also built by the con­text as a fun­da­men­tal ele­ment of the mon­u­ment. What at the begin­ning was con­sid­ered only by archi­tects as the vital ele­ment of the real monument’s expe­ri­ence, after the 1960s becomes a shared belief: the sit­ed­ness of the mon­u­ment is a way of mak­ing the expe­ri­ence of the mon­u­ment rich­er, of mak­ing the view­er, by means of per­cep­tion, the sub­ject of the work.

Giulio Car­lo Argan, an influ­en­tial Ital­ian art crit­ic and his­to­ri­an, describ­ing the opus of the sculp­tor Dušan Dža­mon­ja, address­es sev­er­al key top­ics about Džamonja’s NOB mon­u­ments, but also gen­er­al­ly about mon­u­ment sculp­ture in Yugoslavia notes that ​“The mon­u­ment, before being a form, is a site”.^[32]

Authentic Forests and Memorial Practices

Among all the dif­fer­ent rur­al land­scapes where the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Strug­gle was fought, forests—as places which are hard­ly read­able, wild and fragmented—had a cen­tral role in the Yugoslav par­ti­san war­fare. This role could be rec­og­nized from the fact that sev­er­al forest­ed ter­ri­to­ries where WW2 took place after the war acquired the sta­tus of nation­al parks, not only because they were char­ac­ter­ized by nat­ur­al beau­ty, but most notable because they con­tained impor­tant traces of the war, which the new social­ist state would pre­serve, as they were the exact loca­tions where the Par­ti­san war and the Social­ist Rev­o­lu­tion, which Yugoslavia rec­og­nized the need to nur­ture, took place: these areas were defined as forests with his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ter.^[34]

The authen­tic loca­tions of war events were not always of direct inter­est to peo­ple and pol­i­tics. In fact, espe­cial­ly in the years imme­di­ate­ly after the end of the war, ​“to remove war marks” was one of the most repeat­ed slo­gans that could be inter­pret­ed by ver­ba­tim meaning—removing the traces of the war in cities and landscape—or as refer­ring to the peo­ples’ mem­o­rie of the war.^[35] Only after 1948, with the Res­o­lu­tion of the Inform­biro^[36] and the split between Tito and Stal­in, which had con­se­quences regard­ing the eman­ci­pa­tion of art pro­duc­tion, there emerged the need to pre­serve the sites of the NOB, objects and doc­u­ments. In fact, part of the Sovi­et strat­e­gy when deal­ing with WW2 events in Yugoslavia was to dis­cred­it the role of the Yugoslav resis­tance move­ment, incor­rect­ly giv­ing the Red Army cred­it for the vic­to­ry against the Axis pow­ers, since the Yugoslav resis­tance move­ment had won sev­er­al war cam­paigns four years pri­or to the arrival of the Red Army in Yugoslavia.^[37]

Apart from the polit­i­cal moti­va­tions behind the grow­ing inter­est in the mark­ing and car­ing for authen­tic places of strug­gle, the top­ic of a place’s authen­tic­i­ty, espe­cial­ly when con­nect­ed to nat­ur­al con­texts, became an impor­tant poet­ic leit­mo­tif, for those authors—most of them architects—who derived the con­cepts for their mon­u­ments from the ​“obser­va­tion and expe­ri­ence of the place”^[38]

In the 1950s the top­ic of site-authen­tic­i­ty was not so wide­ly dis­cussed among sculp­tors, archi­tects and crit­ics. Stress was placed on a monument’s mate­ri­al­i­ty and dura­bil­i­ty^[39], the monument’s mon­u­men­tal­i­ty^[40], fig­u­ral­i­ty ver­sus abstrac­tion^[41], con­tex­tu­al­i­ty^[42], the monument’s neglect^[43], mon­u­ments ver­sus art-mon­u­ments^[44]; all these top­ics would remain of inter­est in the fol­low­ing decades.

An archi­tect who already in the 1950s devel­oped a sen­si­bil­i­ty toward the top­ic of authen­tic sites or war events, and con­se­quent­ly the idea of land­scape as a palimpsest of mem­o­ries that the mon­u­ment should try to inter­pret, was Mar­jan Šor­li. Šor­li was a Slovene archi­tect who took part in the resis­tance move­ment (under the name Janez Viher), built sev­er­al mon­u­ments, all of them upon the site of the event the mon­u­ment was commemorating. 

In the 1953 Arhitekt sur­vey, he affirmed, ful­ly in line with his prac­tice: ​“To mark the his­to­ry of the NOB in the place where it hap­pened is for sure our most nec­es­sary task. It is a pity sev­er­al par­ti­san graves were moved from beau­ti­ful places in nature to ceme­ter­ies, where they drown among all the oth­ers”.^[45]

The top­ic of the authen­tic­i­ty of a site was close to those archi­tects and sculp­tors who, beside rec­og­niz­ing the impor­tance of spa­tial­ly ​‘col­lab­o­rat­ing’ with a cho­sen monument’s loca­tion, built their poet­ics in rela­tion to the event that hap­pened in the spe­cif­ic place: beside Šor­li, who worked main­ly in the 1950s and ear­ly 1960s, the archi­tect Zdenko Kola­cio and the sculp­tor Zdenko Sila ded­i­cat­ed some of their best mon­u­ments to faire le site of a spe­cif­ic event. Sev­er­al mon­u­ments built in the sites of suf­fer­ing, through their spa­tial orga­ni­za­tion, with an archi­tec­tur­al or sculp­tur­al vocab­u­lary, tend to mark spe­cif­ic points in space, as if they were attempt­ing to explain and point out how the event took place or how the space was orga­nized at the time the event occurred.

In the cre­ative minds of Yugoslav artists and archi­tects who pro­posed mon­u­ments recall­ing spe­cif­ic WW2 events, forests became sources of deep poet­ic poten­tial, where the for­est itself, with its ver­ti­cal geome­tries, frag­ment­ed lights and irreg­u­lar grounds, played a cen­tral role in the monument’s design.

The fol­low­ing four exam­ples, very dif­fer­ent in form, size and (what kind of lan­guage? Mate­r­i­al, struc­tur­al, tec­ton­ic?) lan­guage, illus­trate how forests were inter­pret­ed as places where vis­i­tors could have an inti­mate expe­ri­ence with the mon­u­ment, devel­op a psy­cho­log­i­cal con­tact and build a per­son­al rela­tion­ship with mem­o­ry and commemoration.

Monument to the Revolution on Mrakovica
Dušan Džamonja & co., 1972

A for­est of high pines, dark light enter­ing between them, no grass or low bush­es, only the pines and the earth under them. The hill is marked hor­i­zon­tal­ly by three-meter-long low con­crete blocks, func­tion­ing as stairs and giv­ing a rhythm to the ran­dom growth of trees and to your walk­ing. On the top of the hill, at the end of an almost rit­u­al walk, a large light clear­ing and in the cen­ter of the eye’s focus a tall con­crete cylin­der, com­posed of dif­fer­ent ver­ti­cal seg­ments. The sculp­ture is encir­cled by con­crete blocks and walls and around them, again, the conif­er­ous for­est extends limitless

These words describe the vis­i­tors’ encounter with the Mon­u­ment to the Rev­o­lu­tion on Mrakovi­ca, one of the peaks of Kozara, a moun­tain in the north­west­ern part of Bosnia. The mon­u­ment, built between 1970 and 1972, was designed by the sculp­tor Dušan Dža­mon­ja togeth­er with the archi­tect Mar­i­jana Hanžeković and con­struc­tion engi­neer Miro Rak. 

The mon­u­ment memo­ri­al­izes one of the heav­i­est and most famous, using the words of Josip Broz Tito,^[47] hero­ic and mov­ing, bor­row­ing Dušan Džamonja’s vocab­u­lary,^[48] strug­gles of the People’s Lib­er­a­tion War in Yugoslavia. 

The foun­da­tion­al con­cept of the mon­u­ment was to evoke both the sense of oppres­sion of the Par­ti­sans and the local pop­u­la­tion being encir­cled and the mag­ni­tude of the strug­gle of those par­ti­sans who man­aged to fight, break­ing through the forced encir­clement and scat­ter­ing in the for­est. When speak­ing about this mon­u­ment, Zdenko Kolacio’s^[49] words res­onate: ​“The event is the basis. Some­times even a frag­ment can lead to a solu­tion”.^[50] The inter­est­ing oper­a­tion Dža­mon­ja made is the trans­for­ma­tion of the descrip­tion of the events in the Kozara moun­tains in a spa­tial vocab­u­lary: the mon­u­ment, in fact, besides rep­re­sent­ing a sym­bol in the his­to­ry of the Kozara epopee, trans­forms it into an expe­ri­ence­able space where the visitor’s liv­ing, mov­ing, react­ing body dis­cerns phys­i­cal­ly rather than opti­cal­ly.^[51]

A mon­u­ment with­in a land­scape is a mark­er of the site’s speci­fici­ty that with­out it could not be leg­i­ble, it func­tions as a machine à observ­er, a barom­e­ter to read land­scape^[52] in a phys­i­cal, his­tor­i­cal and sym­bol­ic way. A mon­u­ment with­in a land­scape is also a pause in space, it is what makes the mon­u­ment-space and site sig­nif­i­cant: it rede­fines the expe­ri­ence, refo­cus­es our atten­tion and calls to the his­to­ry of the place: a mon­u­ment brings time’s echo into space, which, through such a mon­u­ment as Džamonja’s—that bases its sig­nif­i­cance and trans­mis­sion of mean­ing on the inclu­sion of man’s bod­i­ly experience—becomes embod­ied, pal­pa­ble, phys­i­cal.

The rela­tion between Džamonja’s mon­u­ment and the sur­round­ing pine for­est con­sists of dif­fer­ent ambiances with spe­cif­ic atmos­pheres cre­at­ed by the way archi­tec­ture and the for­est correspond. 

The first for­est-defined ambiance is that of the entrance stair­case to the memo­r­i­al area. From the low­er plateau we see in front of us a com­pact stair­case in the shape of an amphithe­ater. Via visu­al exten­sion the for­est behind this first stair­case grad­u­al­ly thick­ens as the stairs pen­e­trate the veg­e­ta­tion while at the same time los­ing the com­pact form they have at the begin­ning. Here begins the first of the sev­er­al dema­te­ri­al­iza­tions: the stairs lose their mas­sive for­mal aspect, their well-defined form and pre­cise mar­gins, adapt­ing to the shape of the land, leave the space to the tree trunks grow­ing between them, emerg­ing as hor­i­zon­tal lines among a mass of verticals.

When first climb­ing the entry stairs the mon­u­ment is not in view, we are immersed in the dark atmos­phere of the for­est, walk­ing under the crowns of the firs. As Dža­mon­ja high­light­ed on sev­er­al occa­sions, this ini­tial ambiance is per­ceived by the vis­i­tor through their body while slow­ly ascend­ing; this ascen­dant move­ment func­tions as a ​“psy­cho­log­i­cal prepa­ra­tion for the expe­ri­ence” of the mon­u­ment.^[53]

At the end of the stair­case a clear­ing opens to the vis­i­tor. At its cen­ter and pushed towards the back stands a ver­ti­cal­ly frag­ment­ed cylin­dri­cal tow­er sur­round­ed by mas­sive con­crete blocks. 

The main body of the mon­u­ment devel­ops around the cylin­der and behind it anoth­er forest­ed ambiance invites the vis­i­tor to the ter­mi­nal space of the com­plex. Behind the cylin­der are 13 radi­al­ly ori­ent­ed mas­sive con­crete blocks. They mir­ror the geom­e­try in front of the cylin­der, but here they are four-meters high, heav­ier and big­ger. They invite us to walk between them, with­in their dark­ness, and here the conifers start to appear between the con­crete. And as it hap­pened on the stair­case, where some con­crete slabs left space for the fir trunks and roots, in some spe­cif­ic spots the con­crete walls, even if fol­low­ing the geom­e­try of the radi­al lines, adapt their sur­face to the pres­ence of trees, becom­ing con­cave, host­ing the trunks. 

At this point the memo­r­i­al space becomes mys­te­ri­ous­ly labyrinth-like. Explor­ing this part of the mon­u­ment enables us to see that it is actu­al­ly quite diver­si­fied, char­ac­ter­ized by small ambiances which already intro­duce us to the inti­mate atmos­phere of the com­mem­o­ra­tive space. Behind these blocks lays the last stage of the itin­er­ary: a round wall enclos­ing part of the for­est. This inti­mate space serves the pur­pose of com­mem­o­rat­ing the 9,922 par­ti­sans who died in the fight­ing on Kozara moun­tain. The pres­ence of the conifers’ crowns above our head, fil­ter­ing the light that soft­ly acti­vates the ground are indi­rect and del­i­cate and are fun­da­men­tal in cre­at­ing the atmos­phere of expe­ri­ence. Here the rela­tion­ship between nature and cast con­crete blocks becomes near­ly sym­bi­ot­ic, mon­u­ment and nature share a mutu­al mime­sis.

Monument to the Fallen Fighters of the Pohorje Battalion
Branko Kocmut, Slavko Tihec, 1959

The event this mon­u­ment recalls is spa­tial­ly sim­i­lar to the one behind the Kozara memo­r­i­al. In the exact site where the mon­u­ment is locat­ed, on the 8^th of Jan­u­ary 1943, the Pohor­je Bat­tal­ion lost all its fight­ers after being encir­cled by the much more numer­ous Ger­man forces. The mon­u­ment stands on the site of the Par­ti­sans’ last fight: high pine trees, an obscure silence and light that bare­ly reach­es the ground define the mon­u­ment-space – the site of the Pohor­je Battalion's base. Six­teen years after the event, when the archi­tect Branko Koc­mut and the sculp­tor Slavko Tihec were com­mis­sioned to vis­it the site and pro­pose a mon­u­ment, they found the remains of the sheds the Par­ti­sans used for liv­ing and sur­round­ing them the trench­es where­in the Par­ti­sans had fought their last bat­tle and died. The area is approx­i­mate­ly a 100m diam­e­ter cir­cu­lar shape. The first pro­pos­al by the two artists was to fell the trees that occu­pied this area and, with this void in the mid­dle of the for­est, to sug­gest to the vis­i­tors that they were in a par­tic­u­lar place, prepar­ing them for the encounter with the mon­u­ment.^[54] This cir­cu­lar clear­ing recalls the cir­cle the Ger­man forces formed around the par­ti­san base, a spa­tial idea with sim­i­lar premis­es to Džamonja’s solu­tion for Kozara: in that case the sense of oppres­sion of being encir­cled was pro­duced by the con­crete blocks almost squeez­ing the bod­ies of the vis­i­tors when they would reach the cen­ter of the cylin­der, while in this case the sen­sa­tion of being sur­round­ed would be giv­en by the pines them­selves sur­round­ing the clearing.

Lat­er this clear idea, which would not need a sculp­tur­al ele­ment, was aban­doned and the memo­r­i­al place was con­ceived more tra­di­tion­al­ly, e. g., includ­ing a cen­tral sculp­ture and some small­er archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments. The remains of the bat­tle posi­tions are marked by thir­ty-one small stones of almost cubi­cal shapes posi­tioned in a circle—the idea of the cir­cu­lar clear­ing was there­fore replaced by these con­crete blocks. The names of the Par­ti­sans who died in the bat­tle are inscribed on one side of each of the blocks—one block for every fall­en Par­ti­san. With­in this cir­cle are four­teen larg­er stone plates that seem­ing­ly lev­i­tate over the ground. These plates mark the posi­tions of the trench­es where the par­ti­sans fought. And final­ly, on the site of the battalion’s com­mand lays the largest stone plate that serves as a pedestal for two bronze fig­ures, a work by the sculp­tor Slavko Tihec. 

Mark­ing spe­cif­ic loca­tions of small build­ings con­nect­ed with par­ti­san life with abstract archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments was com­mon prac­tice among archi­tects and artists work­ing with memo­r­i­al spaces. Big abstract con­crete stones mark the posi­tions of the build­ings of the Par­ti­san hos­pi­tal in Grmeć (a project by Ljubomir Denković, inau­gu­rat­ed in 1979), abstract shapes—recalling Robert Mor­ris’ beams from 1965—help the vis­i­tors under­stand the mas­ter­plan of Javor­ni­ca par­ti­san hos­pi­tal (project by Zdenko Kola­cio, 1980–81).

The entire memo­r­i­al com­plex exudes a sub­tle hor­i­zon­tal pres­ence among the high pine trees and allows the for­est to exist as an intact tes­ti­mo­ny to the events, high­light­ing only built struc­tures and trans­for­ma­tions of the place. It does not illus­trate what hap­pened, it sim­ply marks what might have been for­got­ten, com­post­ed and absorbed by the woods.

Memorial Cemetery in Dovar
Ružica Ilić, 1958

Where­as in the pre­vi­ous two exam­ples are locat­ed in for­est con­texts and devel­op a fer­tile rela­tion with it, here we’ll approach the con­cept of the liv­ing mon­u­ment (živ spomenik)—the idea that the mem­o­ry of the trag­ic events of WW2 should be kept alive not by con­ven­tion­al mon­u­ments, but by liv­ing mon­u­ments, i.e. mon­u­ments made of nat­ur­al ele­ments or nat­ur­al areas, usu­al­ly forests, which, because of impor­tant events that took place there, gain the sta­tus of mon­u­ments or, as in this case, the sta­tus of parks (spomen park). The idea of a liv­ing memo­r­i­al instead of an onject-based mon­u­ment became a pop­u­lar dis­course cen­tered around mon­u­ment prac­tices in the late 1950s, ​‘60s and ​‘70s.

Debates per­tain­ing to memo­r­i­al parks began to appear at the end of the 1950s. Some of the first arti­cles deal­ing with park-as-memo­r­i­al emerged in the jour­nal Crve­na Zvez­da in 1956.

One arti­cle^[55] com­ments on the result of the com­pe­ti­tion for the memo­r­i­al ceme­tery (spomen groblje) of Dovar, the east­ern area of the city of Tito­vo Užice. Describ­ing the win­ning solu­tion by the archi­tect Ruži­ca Ilić, the author uses the expression—possibly used by the archi­tect her­self—green archi­tec­ture (zele­na arhitek­tu­ra), to define the solu­tion for Dovar park. 

“In the area of the ceme­tery, a liv­ing tem­ple (živi hram) will be built. The walls of this liv­ing object will be formed by the high pine for­est, while the inte­ri­or will be a green and flo­ral mead­ow; in the high pine for­est there will be a belt of green paths. In the cen­ter of this mead­ow, a stone plate will be locat­ed with the names of the fight­ers who sleep togeth­er here. The most beau­ti­ful trees will car­ry the names of the dead, which will have, as the whole liv­ing tem­ple, a sym­bol­ic mean­ing: the mem­o­ries of the dead and their ideas devel­op and grow high­er and high­er”.^[56]

Here the archi­tect uses poet­ic words to express­es how memo­r­i­al con­tent could be sym­bol­i­cal­ly made man­i­fest­ed direct­ly through the pow­er of nature. The stone plate at the end of the memorial’s path marks just the cen­ter of the memo­r­i­al site: the land­scape that is the har­bin­ger of mem­o­ry, and the metaphor of the trees as the grow­ing of mem­o­ry is the mes­sage offered by spomen park.

Gorani
Participatory Movement, 1960s

The fourth exam­ple embod­ies the high­est stage of these mon­u­ments’ dema­te­ri­al­iza­tion, where even nature is not con­sid­ered liv­ing mate­r­i­al, but a pre­text for col­lab­o­ra­tive par­tic­i­pa­to­ry memo­r­i­al practices.

The Gorani move­ment is a move­ment of younger peo­ple which arose in Ser­bia in 1960 and, dri­ven pri­mar­i­ly by eco­log­i­cal ideals, first began to take care of the green­ery around mon­u­ments and lat­er designed mon­u­ment-forests, parks and tree-lined roads in places where sig­nif­i­cant events of the NOB took place. This move­ment shows that, simul­ta­ne­ous to the cre­ation of mon­u­ment parks and mon­u­ment ter­ri­to­ries that began dur­ing the same time, there was the emer­gence of dif­fer­ent memo­r­i­al prac­tices from below. 

The actions of Gorani some­times used spectacle—“In Požare­vac, on the Čačal­i­ca hill, for each of the 7000 shot patri­ots 10 red ros­es will be plant­ed. The hill will burn with red flames”^[57]—while at the same time hav­ing a strong educa­tive ele­ment with the devel­op­ment of eco­log­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal aware­ness and the pro­mo­tion of the need to nur­ture rev­o­lu­tion­ary tra­di­tions. With the idea of green mon­u­ments they shift­ed the atten­tion from the mon­u­ment-object (already felt as just a fos­silized memen­to of the past) to the mon­u­ment-land­scape, which is dynam­ic, alive, demands your engage­ment, espe­cial­ly in cus­to­di­al sense, and even­tu­al­ly expos­es the signs of your neglect. The author dis­ap­pears while the focus lies total­ly on the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry moment of col­lec­tive­ly plant­i­ng trees or tak­ing care of a monument’s surroundings.

Here Robert Smithson’s words about Fred­er­ick L. Olmsted’s New York Cen­tral Park resonate:

Memorial Forests as Activated Nature

The art crit­ic Jure Mikuž, in his cura­to­r­i­al text writ­ten for the exhi­bi­tion of four mon­u­ments ^[59] ded­i­cat­ed to events relat­ed to the People’s Lib­er­a­tion War at the Venice Bien­nale in 1980 wrote: ​“We can thus say that all these projects are inter­ven­tions into active nature [author’s ital­ics], which has its spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ter and whose ele­ments, sat­u­rat­ed as they are with sig­nif­i­cance, are in them­selves the most direct stim­u­la­tion of the spe­cial feel­ing of the place and its com­pre­hen­sion.” With the four exam­ples of forest­ed mon­u­ments and acti­vat­ed nature, through the analy­sis of the debates regard­ing the rela­tion­ship between the memo­ri­als and the places with­in which they are immersed, and while exam­in­ing the projects and scru­ti­niz­ing the ter­mi­nol­o­gy used to crit­i­cal­ly describe them, an extreme­ly com­plex com­pos­ite land­scape of the­o­ries and prac­tices unfolds in front of us—from expe­ri­en­tial mon­u­ments to eco­log­i­cal­ly aware par­tic­i­pa­to­ry experiments—which tes­ti­fies to the moder­ni­ty and in some cas­es even rad­i­cal­i­ty of Yugoslav memo­r­i­al practices.