On June 5–6, 2025, MEMPOP project members Natalija Majsova, Owen Kohl, and Vjeran Pavlaković participated in the international conference Memory, War, and Social Coherence: Bringing Together and Tearing Apart, held in Mikkeli, Finland. The event brought together scholars exploring the intersection of memory practices, war, and identity formation across diverse historical and geographic contexts.

The MEMPOP team contributed to the conference with a project panel titled “Mnemonic Aesthetics and Strategies of War and Transition in Popular Culture.” The session focused on how cultural forms, especially visual and narrative media, mediate public memory in times of transition and post-conflict reconstruction in the 21st century.

Natalija Majsova presented Wartime Agency and Post-Yugoslav Film: Implication as a Posthuman Category, where she explored post-Yugoslav cinematic reflections on the memory of war, arguing for the significance of a posthuman perspective and ethic to articulating ways of understanding agency, such as that of the implicated subject.

Owen Kohl contributed with The Stakes of Storytelling and Solidarity’s Multimodality, examining the multimodal nature of memory work in transitional societies. His talk focused on how, in the context of post-Yugoslav hip hop, narrative practices, spanning various media, can forge solidarities and challenge hegemonic memory narratives.

Vjeran Pavlaković presented The Muralization of War: A Comparative Approach to Graffiti, Murals, and Memory Politics, analyzing how street art functions as a medium of memory politics in divided and post-conflict societies. His comparative perspective, accommodating case studies from Europe and North America alongside the post-Yugoslav space highlighted the intermediality and intertextuality of mnemonic murals.

Their panel contributions reflected MEMPOP’s central research questions on the cultural production of memory and its role in shaping post-socialist and post-conflict imaginaries.