Artist book Brotherhood and Unity presents the author's seven-year visual research about the disintegration / breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Book tells the story about identity, about the unification and divergence of nations in former Yugoslavia. Olja Triaška Stefanović is photographing the presence of the past through abandoned monuments, monuments and memorial landscapes, empty and destroyed Yugoslavia architecture and visually analyzes the terms remembrance and forgetting in the context of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and her own memory and personal history. In the photographic essay, she combined her photography essay with her short texts, family archive photos and an archival newspaper from former Yugoslavia and it that way tells the story of the leftovers of a country that no longer exists.
The second part of the book presents four essays written by Slovak writers Martin M. Šimečka and Andrej Bán and art historians and professor Milena Bartlová from Prague and art historian Bohunka Koklesová from Bratislava, Slovakia. Essay are focus to issues of identity, remembrance and forgetting, brotherhood and unity and to the political situation and changes in Eastern Europe after 1989.
Imprint:
Brotherhood and Unity
Author: © Olja Triaška Stefanović
Photographs: © Olja Triaška Stefanović, 2012 – 2019
Editors: Olja Triaška Stefanović, Bohunka Koklesová
Texts: ©Martin M. Šimečka, ©Andrej Bán, ©Milena Bartlová, © Bohunka Koklesová
Graphic design: © Juraj Blaško
Slovak and Czech proofreading: Juliana Beňová
English translation: Elena McCullough, Paul McCullough
English proofreading: Ben Pascoe
Serbian translation: Stefana Paunović Rodić, Vladimíra Dorčová Valtnerová
Published by: Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava
Printed by: DEVIN printing house, s. r. o.
Paper: Arctic Volume Ice, Munken Pure
Typeface: Nitida Text Plus, Nitida Poster (DSType)
Circulation: 350,
First edition: 2020,
ISBN 978-80-8189-038-3
Book launch
City Gallery, Mirbach Palace, Bratislava, Slovakia
September 2020
"I wanted to make a book and tell a story about my generation, about our childhood stories and adult disappointments. Now after 30 years of fall of Berlin Wall and war in Ex-Yugoslavia, I think it is essential to tell a stories, to speak about importance of democracy and to bring closer to public stories of how bad nationalism and dictatorships can be and what look like life under the embargo and in isolation."
Olja Triaška Stefanović
Author of the book
Author of the book
