Youth cultural centers in SFRY
Lectures / workshop / exhibition (2012)

Lectures and workshops deal with the broader socio-political and cultural context of Yugoslav self-management socialism, the general tendencies and changes in the cultural policy of the SFRY, and especially with youth cultural institutions, through the paradigmatic examples of the Youth Tribune in Novi Sad and the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade during the 1960s and 1970s.

The example of the Belgrade Student Cultural Center (SKC) reveals all the complexity of the functioning of youth cultural centers in SFRY. Although it was founded and financed by the authorities – ie. the Yugoslav “society” – and managed by the University and the student organization, it became a place for the introduction of new forms of cultural and social activism combining the work of enthusiasts and volunteers with the work of paid professionals, simultaneously rejecting the divisions between producers and consumers of culture, creators and audiences. SKC played an important role in cultural education, production and dialogue using the available social resources for work and infrastructure, but it also represented a certain “proof” of the progressiveness of official self-governing socialism.

The Youth Tribune represents an institution that has gone through a series of transformations conditioned by social and political circumstances. It was founded in 1954 in Novi Sad as the Youth Department of the National University, transfered to the Youth Cultural Center “Sonja Marinković” in 1978, until the final renaming of this institution to the Cultural Center of Novi Sad in 1984, in which status it remains to this day.

The lecture will discuss the work of these societal institutions dedicated to culture and youth in relation to changes in policies, procedures and tendencies in different periods of the development of Yugoslav socialism, as well as today, when culture and public institutions are affected by neoliberal tendencies. These processes open up questions about the position of culture in the Yugoslav socialist system, about the potential of its socialization or (in)direct state management.

The lectures are also an introduction to a workshop called “Youth Cultural Centers” whose topic is the process of transformation of youth cultural institutions created during the time of socialist Yugoslavia into institutions of the national neoliberal capitalist state. A whole series of institutions in Yugoslavia at the time were initiated with the aim of opening space for youth, and as a starting point in our work we chose three institutions from Belgrade: Belgrade Youth Center; Student Cultural Center, Belgrade and Cultural Center “Student City”. Although these institutions were not founded with the same goals, all three have for a very long time shown strong support for alternative and autonomous artistic production, especially the younger generation. However, in the transition period of the nineties and the neoliberal changes of the 2000s at different levels, they moved their work away from the principles on which they were founded.