Digital Heritage: Co-Historicity and the Multicultural Heritage of Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

The author discusses digital practices of preserving and representing multicultural heritage, first against the backdrop of dominant, official and often (nationally) exclusivist practices of “doing heritage”. The former are understood as tools for preserving, developing and embedding cultural heritage in wider experiential spaces, while the latter often serve as the tool for homogenisation and sanitisation of na- tional cultural and social spaces. To do this, the author focuses on presences and absences of WWII, socialist Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav migrant heritages in contemporary Slovenian digital spaces, i.e. how digital media are used to present and preserve these variegated heritages. In order to interrogate the practices and strategies of defining and managing heritage in the digital media environment, the author discusses several vernacular interventions as re-presences of the Yugoslav past. With respect to the specificities of the techno-cultural environment in which the topic “lives”, the author introduces the concept of“co-historicity” to denote the ways affective media practices facilitate contemporaneous “be- ing” in different, individualised, mediated and mediatised re-presences of the past.