By allowing Ex-YU Rock centar to lose its space in Skenderija and to have to close, Sarajevo has officially given up its cherished status as Ex-Yugoslavia’s Capital of Music. Regardless of what led to this loss – it reveals a collossal failure of policy.

Sarajevo’s Ex-YU Rock centar could and should have been a central institution for music lovers from all over former Yugoslavia and beyond. It was the only museum in the world dedicated to presenting YU Rock – (Ex-)Yugoslavia’s very own rock scene, vibrant and wildly successful at that.

It wasn’t for lack of trying that it failed. The small team of volunteers who organized the museum from scratch and who mobilized the public gave their best and beyond.

Official Sarajevo and official Bosnia just never really cared.

This shows also in the quite apparent lack of obituaries for this unique institution.

Local and regional media largely focus their attention on powerful stakeholders, and not so much on new, innovative and interesting initiatives, public or private.

If local or national politicians don’t give a damn about you down there, eventually no one does.

There are many reasons they don’t: You belong to no party, or at least not theirs, you have the wrong first name, your cousin isn’t the party boss‘ secretary car mechanic, you didn’t express your gratitude through an envelope.

Any and all may have applied to the team that made Ex-YU Rock Centar possible, and probably all did. But there was another component as well. And that we can say regardless of whether the rumors are true that a local bigshot with good connections wanted to make a killing out of the location the museum occupied for close to three years in Dom Mladih in the Skenderija complex.

A Reservoir of Rebellion

What the museum showed was simply too cultural and too democratic.

YU rock was modern music for all, in Yugoslav times and now. Even though partly heavily embedded in regime propaganda in Yugoslavia, it had always been a reservoir of freedom of thought and expression, of criticism, of rebellion, even.

This is true today as well, no matter whether we speak of the bands of the golden times who are still almost absurdely popular, or of their successors.

There is a reason why most local politicians show their reverence to turbofolk stars and starlets, and a lot less to rock stars. This goes for Bosnia as much as any other successor state of Yugoslavia.

That turbofolk shit is ideally suited for political representation, pretending to be folksy and all. YU rock ain’t.

What Makes it Worse in Bosnia

What makes it worse in Bosnia than in other places is its complicated political structure. With so many layers of government, every political stakeholder can shift responsibility to someone else.

The closing of a regionally and internationally important museum – small though it may be – is actually one of the less dramatic symptoms. Just google Donja Jablanica.

Or, if you want to restrict this to cultural policy, read here about the still unsolved status – after 30 years – of Bosnia’s National Library, with the same applying to the country’s Historical Museum, and how those institutions, along a few others, have been in a limbo ever since Dayton.

Still, just letting the world’s only museum of YU Rock shut down feels painful in the city that was to Yugoslavia’s rock scene what Nashvill is to country music. This is not an exaggeration.

The city still prides itself with the many important YU rock bands coming from Sarajevo, and much of its cultural policy still lives off the good old times.

At the same time, they let the only institution in the world close that dedicated itself to exactly that music.

It Wasn’t Just Another Private Museum

Yes, Ex-YU Rock Centar had always been a private initiative.

With a few exceptions such as the Historical Museum, that’s the only way anything culturally worthwhile happens in Sarajevo nowadays.

Almost all the cultural space is occupied by old time bighshots who have not produced anything worthwhile since probably the war, or some rebel chic wannabes who get some public funding thrown after them to distract from exactly that.

Whatever interesting happens culturally in Sarajevo is almost exclusively made possible by artists exploiting themselves, and/or financed by internationally funded NGOs or foreign representations.

In the niches in between, a lot of commercial crap is flourishing, including a plethora of private museums cannibalizing each other, and taking away attention, visitors and exhibits from public museums.

Last year for instance, a museum called Tito Sarajevo Yugoslavia opened up in Ferhadija. It does offer some caringly curated Yugo nostalgia, and it that sense gives a bit of an idea of everyday life in Yugoslav era Sarajevo. It’s not a complete ripoff, but clearly commercially motivated. No staff, all electronic, and overpriced.

A few months ago it got some competition: There is a museum about Sarajevo in the 1980’s.

It’s obvious that both – very small – institutions compete for the same target audience.

From a cultural as well as a scientific point of view, at least one of them is superfluous. This goes touristically as well, if one just looks at the dozen or so mainly badly curated and overpriced private museums in the city center.

This is privatization and commercialization of public memory and of history.

How a finally well funded Historical Museum could curate all these exhibits, how it could present them to a hopefully large public, how much this would do to dispell the often uncritical nostalgia those private museums peddle, or, if they don’t, their sensationalizing of Sarajevo’s dark times.

Though private, Ex-YU Rock Centar was the one museum that didn’t fall into that category.

It always took its job seriously. It made the best of what it had. And it was important, unlike the umpteenth YU nostalgia or the umpteenth private Siege of Sarajevo museum.

(The Historical Museum has a great permanent exhibition about the Siege of Sarajevo. Well curated, expanding, scientifically and didactically excellent. Exhibitionwise, you don’t need anything else.)

A Little Help Was All it Took

Still, the Powers That Be in Sarajevo let it down.

It wouldn’t have to look for another location otherwise, and close down in the meantime – in the best of cases, that is.

Either it could stay in Skenderija, or another location would have long been found.

The mere existence of all these private museums all over Sarajevo shows there is enough space for such enterprises. Political will is all it would have taken to find a permanent home for this museum.

True, to anyone who has ever seen it it was clear that Ex-YU Rock centar was still developping and growing. Even with all respect and admiration for the team’s enormous efforts and its exhibitions – it did have a makeshift charme that only goes so far.

Given what means the team had at their hands, they had done and achieved more than anyone could reasonably expect of them. What it would have taken was some help to grow. Additional funds, advice, attention.

Ideally, Ex-YU Rock Centar should have become a public museum on the long run, owned by the city, with its initiators having a say via a trustee board or working there as curators.

Now, it’s obviously struggling for survival.

One would like to say it’s been abandoned by local politicians. It’s just that they were never really interested in the first place.

That this could happen in (Ex-)Yugoslavia’s Capital of Music says all there is to say about culture politics in Sarajevo and in Bosnia.

We might as well say: By letting the museum close, the city has officially given up its status as Ex-Yugoslavia’s Capital of Music.

We can only hope that the Centar’s team around Will Richard, Valery Perry, Freddy Lindsay and Sabina and Igor Pašić-Šutalo don’t get discouraged by this setback and manage to find a solution, and, most of all, a permanent home for their museum that has so much to give to all music lovers.

Get a better impression about Ex-YU Rock Centar and its work in this reportage.

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