Tales from the Peripheral: Melancholy and the Other of the Post-Yugoslav City

How to approach the post-socialist urban transformation without evoking the label of the post-socialist? What does it mean to curate a city? How to interview people without actually asking questions? How to apply the smallest urban scale of all—e.g. the one of an individual apartment—as a method for socio-cultural analyses? Why (glazed) balconies matter? In this testimonial of the post-Yugoslav everydayness, I visit the lives of cities of Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Niš (Serbia), and Podgorica (Montenegro), and those that (re)shape, (re)make, contest, and appropriate them on a daily basis. I bring together different roles, altering between a city dweller of Yugoslav origin, a curator, an ordinary human being, and a researcher, operating on scales of micro and macro, private and public, being personal and political, getting close and away. This is a free-flow and a free-form reflection on the research I did in the outskirts of Europe, a personal diary, an ode to unconventional and creative methods, a catalogue of objects and spatial practices that constitute a particular post-Yugoslav melancholy, and a portrayal of the post-Yugoslav Homo Faber, whom I consider the mastermind behind the post-Yugoslav urban space project.