Youth Cultural Centers in SFRY 

Youth Cultural Centers in SFRY
Lectures and discussion (2012)
Tuesday, June 12, 18 – 20:00
Magacin. 4 Kraljevića Marka, Belgrade

Branka Ćurčić (Kuda.org) and Dušan Grlja (ex-Prelom kolektiv) 

The lectures dealt with the broader socio-political and cultural context of Yugoslav self-management socialism, general tendencies and changes in the cultural policy of the SFRY, and especially 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 “society” – and given to the management of 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, than established as the Youth Cultural Center “Sonja Marinković” in 1978, until the final renaming of this institution as the Cultural Center of Novi Sad in 1984, in which status it remains to this day.

The lecture discussed the work of these social institutions, which were 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.