Against Oblivion:
Queer Memory and Audiovisual Heritage in Southeastern and Eastern Europe
- Abstract
- This editorial introduces the special issue Queer Memories. Emerging from the 2024 goEast symposium, The Other Queers – Cinematic Images from the Periphery of Europe, and the 2025 Autumn Film School Against Oblivion: Queer Film and Memory at the Slovenian Cinematheque, the issue responds to what we call the “double erasure” of regional queer stories and heritage, marginalised both within local cultural memory frameworks and within dominant global queer historiographies. The editorial outlines how neo-conservative straightwashing and longstanding institutional exclusions shape what becomes visible as history, while also challenging West/East binaries that cast queer culture in the regions we focus upon as either lagging or imported. We conceptualise queer memory as an infrastructure of survival and a set of practices through which memories of queer lives and culture are produced and transmitted: through archives and metadata, circulation and access, aesthetic form, and grassroots labour. The editorial then situates the issue’s contributions – from debunking socialist-era censorship narratives to questions of archival ethics, queer memorial cinema, synaesthetic film form, and conversations with queer practitioners and regional filmmakers – within a broader regional momentum of queer initiatives that use memory in activist ways. The issue demonstrates that Southeastern and Eastern European queer audiovisual heritage is not a peripheral afterthought, but a crucial vantage point for rethinking queer historiography, cultural heritage, and queer temporalities today.
- Keywords
- Southeastern and Eastern Europe; queer studies; queer film; queer archives; queer activism; queer memory; memory work; LGBTQ+; queer histories; goEast film festival; Ljubljana Autumn film school.
- Table of contents
- no
This special issue of Apparatus on queer memory and film began to take shape at the 2024 goEast festival symposium, The Other Queers – Cinematic Images from the Periphery of Europe, held in Wiesbaden, Germany. There, a vibrant community of academics, artists, and activists engaged in queer cultural work and research came together to tackle/discuss a central question: “How do we tell a story of becoming ourselves?” In other words, how can we speak about queerness in or from Europe’s supposed peripheries – in this case, Southeastern and Eastern Europe –, that is, contexts in which queerness has often been omitted from official histories and marginalised? The urgency of this question lies in the fact that queer stories and cultural heritage from the region have been “doubly erased”: excluded from local collective memory frameworks and sidelined in global queer histories, leaving the persistent impression that there were no queers in the East (see Šepetavc and Serdyukova 2024).
This double erasure not only distorts the past; it also structures the present. Within neo-conservative frameworks, queerness (used here to denote bodies, identities, and sexualities outside cis-heteronormative and patriarchal frames) is frequently presented as imported from ‘elsewhere’, while heteronormativity is championed as rooted in the local past – a now jeopardised traditional ‘ideal’ to be reproduced in the future (cf. Sleptcov 2018). This political straightwashing is also enabled by the long-standing marginalisation of queerness in official memory narratives and sites of memory preservation and presentation, such as museums, archives, cinemas and cinematheques, festivals, and other cultural institutions (cf. Dunn 2016). When public histories are presented as exclusively heterosexual, communities are encouraged to perceive themselves as having always been only heteronormative. This latter narrative has indeed been a steady part of the rhetoric of right-wing nationalist governments and groups in many parts of Southeastern and Eastern Europe in recent decades, for instance in Hungary, Russia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, or Serbia. Without necessarily condoning it, institutions that omit marginalised, e.g. queer histories and cultural production from their research agendas, programmes, and exhibitions, willingly or unwittingly contribute to supporting this narrative. Many of these institutions undoubtedly work under unenviable pressure in contexts where giving space to marginalised memories and communities risks drawing harsh forms of financial and political retaliation. It is therefore all the more important that, where and when possible, marginalised histories, including queer memory, are highlighted and the picture of autochthonous heteronormative societies is thus troubled.
At the same time, global cultural narratives have often reinforced similar simplifications from another direction. For decades, queer cinema, art, and activism were assumed to belong primarily to the ‘West’, appearing in Southeastern and Eastern European civic and artistic concerns only after socialism had been replaced by capitalism, and the region’s supposed conservatism by European liberalism. This linear trajectory – from lesser to greater freedom, visibility, and creativity – reproduced a binary between an open-minded ‘West’ and a monolithic ‘Eastern Europe’ perpetually trying (and failing) to catch up (Takács and Kuhar 2007; Kulpa and Mizielińska 2011).
It is precisely here that queer memory work becomes indispensable. The memory of rebellious, politically potent queer cultures and materials from Southeastern and Eastern European contexts is never merely a matter of the past. It constitutes an infrastructure of survival. Queer memory workers and activists insist that regional queer lives have existed, have mattered, and have produced culture – before, during and after state socialism – even when institutions pretended otherwise or actively worked to erase those traces. In Southeastern and Eastern Europe, this insistence carries double weight: it challenges the local regimes of denial perpetuated especially by the right-wing actors mentioned above, while also unsettling the global, Western-centric geographies of queer knowledge that, as mentioned, have too often positioned the region as lagging, peripheral, or silent.
Against these two forms of erasure, queer communities throughout Southeastern and Eastern Europe have been building their own memory infrastructures – archives, festivals, museums, publications, curated screenings of queer images made under socialism – and preserving ephemera because no one else would. In places such as Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia), for instance, queer cultural infrastructures have been built and sustained since at least the 1980s, including the Slovenian LGBT Film Festival (first organised in 1984 as Magnus Festival – Homosexuality and Culture) and the Lesbian Library and Archive in Ljubljana that created spaces for queer memory to circulate publicly. In recent years, the whole region has witnessed a wider surge of queer memory initiatives actively storing, framing, and circulating regional queer histories. Memory, especially mediated and curated queer memory that can reach a wider audience, has thus become a vital resource: for community-building, for challenging heteronormative narratives, and for linking past struggles to present practices of care, solidarity, and socio-political imagination. Circulating through films, screenings, festivals, publications, and archives, it creates shared reference points that can travel through audiences and across generations.
In this spirit, the exploration of queer pasts – and of how they are imagined, contested, and carried into the future in Southeastern and Eastern Europe – continued at the Autumn Film School Against Oblivion: Queer Film and Memory (2025), curated by the guest editors of this issue at the Slovenian Cinematheque. Centring both the urgency of archiving and the ongoing vitality of queer cultural production, the programme traced how queer memory is curated, mediated, and transmitted across generations and borders. It brought together screenings and conversations with filmmakers, round tables on queer archives and curatorial practices, and lectures by scholars focusing on memory initiatives and modes of transmission.
The Film School was one node within a broader regional momentum: a growing ecosystem of festivals, archives, research projects, and community-driven practices dedicated to uncovering, preserving, and re-circulating queer heritage in Southeastern and Eastern Europe. Several of these efforts, and the questions they raise, are addressed in the contributions to this special issue.
In “Deconstructing the Imagined Queer Censorship in State-Socialist East-Central Europe: The Case of Hungarian Cinema”, Kata Benedek challenges the persistent assumption that state-socialist authorities systematically suppressed queer cultural visibility for politico-ideological reasons. Combining qualitative analysis of legal frameworks and censorship practices with a quantitative mapping of the Hungarian cinema landscape during socialism, Benedek finds no evidence of systematic state-level queer censorship. On the contrary, the article shows that queer representation circulated with institutional support, including the distribution of 92 foreign queer films and the state-financed production of nine Hungarian queer feature films. The intervention urges us to read socialist-era queer artefacts as part of cultural history in their own right, rather than treating them as rare “exceptions” or simple acts of subversion against an allegedly uniform regime of repression.
From there, the issue widens the lens from what gets remembered to how remembering happens – through archives, collections, and the infrastructures that determine what can be found, preserved, digitised, and re-circulated. Dagmar Brunow’s “Audiovisual Heritage at Risk? Queer Perspectives on Digital Film Archival Collections” foregrounds archives not merely as repositories but as epistemic infrastructures through which history, memory, and belonging are produced as queer lives remain unevenly recognised within film and video collections. Although the article focuses on case studies in Sweden, the United States, and Germany, the experiences, blind spots, and practical solutions developed within these established initiatives are pivotal for thinking through the recent mushrooming of archives in Southeastern Europe, including both shared challenges and important regional specificities. Focusing on the ethical and political implications of digitising and circulating queer audiovisual heritage, Brunow demonstrates how decisions about access, description, and metadata shape recognition, legibility, and vulnerability – raising questions of consent, retrospective exposure, and the ethical stakes of visibility when past materials circulate in new digital contexts. The article argues for an ethics of care centred on relationships and accountability, highlighting micro-archives as crucial sites of situated, care-based knowledge, while also reflecting on what can be gained or lost when such practices are translated into larger institutional collaborations and frameworks.
Anamarija Horvat’s “Searching for Queer History: LGBTQ Representation and National Memory Narratives in the Region of Former Yugoslavia” opens with a sharp contemporary paradox: Ivona Juka’s film Lijepa večer, lijep dan / Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day (2024, Croatia, Poland, Canada, Cyprus, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) set in 1950s Yugoslavia was selected as Croatia’s Oscar contender, yet premiered in a marginal venue and, by late 2025, had still not reached wider national distribution. This partial visibility is further complicated by reports of underfunding and allegations of censorship tied to its queer themes, revealing how struggles over queer memory extend beyond representation to the conditions of circulation. Horvat uses this case to frame a broader regional tendency she terms queer memorial cinema: films that intertwine queerness with war, national trauma, and historical culpability, staging LGBTQ+ pasts within and against dominant national memory narratives. She situates these works within a structural problem of queer memory-making: because intergenerational transfer of queer pasts is often disrupted or erased within official or familial memory infrastructures, queer historical transmission frequently depends on mediated forms such as film and television, rendering cinematic memory a key (and contested) site for imagining belonging.
In “Angels of (Queer) Histories: Synaesthetic Films by Anatoly Belov and Oksana Kazmina”, Olena Syaivo Dmytryk approaches queer memory through sensation, examining the interconnection of senses, affect, and (queer) histories in the fragmentary, unfinished films Seks, likuval’ne, rok-n-rol / Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll (2013, Ukraine) and Sviato zhyttia / The Feast of Life (2015, Ukraine) by Anatoly Belov and Oksana Kazmina. Reading these works as synaesthetic cinematic experiences, the essay argues that their intertwining of sound, visuality, touch, movement, and temporality can re-orient audiences, alter consciousness, and foster solidarities. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Raymond Williams, Syaivo Dmytryk frames the films as capturing emergent “structures of queer feeling”, tracing how melancholy and “high spirits” can function politically: not as private moods, but as embodied forms of dissent, vulnerability, and collective hope shaped by broader historical shifts.
Neja Berger’s “Grassroots Queer Archiving in the Balkans: A Conversation with Jelena Vasiljević and Safira Boeder” brings the issue’s concerns directly into the realm of practice, treating archiving as both survival work and a form of resistance. Opening with a 1990 letter from one activist to another that resurfaces decades later as a cherished artefact, Berger – in conversation with archivists Jelena Vasiljević and Safira Boeder – traces how queer histories are not simply “found” but actively produced through labour: collecting, digitising, cataloguing, negotiating access, and creating the conditions for intergenerational transfer. Focusing on the Arkadija Archive in Serbia and HomeSpace in Albania, and the emerging Balkan Network of Queer Archives, the text shows how queer archives continually navigate contradictions of visibility, balancing legibility and recognition against the risks of outing, surveillance, and extraction. In doing so, it foregrounds a key editorial theme of this issue: queer memory as an ongoing negotiation among languages, categories, and competing narratives of the past, rather than a single, settled history.
Finally, Tisa Troha’s “‘Reality Doesn't Impress Me That Much’: A Conversation with Kukla at the 2025 Autumn Film School Against Oblivion: Queer Film and Memory” brings queer memory into the present tense of artistic reflection, generational experience, and cultural recombination. Centring the work of Slovenian director Kukla within a post-Yugoslav milieu, the conversation rejects nostalgia as a simple longing for the past. Instead, it frames Yugoslav remnants as material for new imaginaries: the generation that came of age during the transition of Western Balkan states from Yugoslavia to nation states, from self-management socialism to neoliberal capitalism, relates to this heritage not as lived experience, but as an “architectural graveyard” that nonetheless opens questions of reusage, community, futurity, and belonging under capitalism. The dialogue traces Kukla’s method of reanimating inherited cultural fragments (intuitive, mythical, and affect-driven) into an aesthetic capable of holding contradiction, vulnerability, and “gentle disruptions”, creating space for queer and trans lives to be imagined otherwise.
The goEast and Ljubljana symposiums, as well as this resulting special issue, are part of a broader regional effort to preserve, circulate, and analyse queer memory and heritage on its own terms. The articles and essays assembled here show that understanding queer memory is never only a matter of recovering what was lost, but also of examining how histories are produced in the first place: through the stories we tell about censorship, through curatorial and institutional decisions, through distribution and access, through metadata, aesthetic form, and the everyday labour of archiving and curating. This special issue asks what happens if we take queer memories, art, and theories from the so-called peripheries of Europe as a starting point for thinking about queerness – about queer theory, temporality, politics, and history. Such endeavours are especially urgent now, when queer communities and their stories are under threat from intensifying anti-LGBT+ politics and, in contexts such as Ukraine, war and displacement. Yet, the region is also witnessing a remarkable proliferation of queer memory initiatives and individuals who are not only filling the gaps left by historical erasure but, by working from and for the region, shaping plural, locally grounded queer temporalities.
Jasmina Šepetavc
Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies, University of Ljubljana
jasmina.sepetavc@fdv.uni-lj.sil
Katja Čičigoj
Institute of Philosophy, Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt/Celovec
katja.cicigoj@aau.at
Bio
Jasmina Šepetavc holds a PhD in Gender Studies and is a researcher at the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include film, popular music, feminist, and queer theory. She has written for various magazines and journals, including Ekran, Dialogi, Kino!, Družboslovne razprave, Studies in European Cinema, and Studies in Eastern European Cinema. She is a member of the editorial board of the Slovenian academic journal Družboslovne razprave, and was previously part of the editorial team of Feminist Encounters, where she co-edited (with Natalija Majsova and Katja Čičigoj) a special issue titled Peripheral Visions of Alternative Futures: Feminist Technoimaginaries. She is also on the editorial team of Ekran, a Slovenian magazine for film and television, and works as a film critic and film festival selector.
Katja Čičigoj is University assistant at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt/Celovec, researching topics in 20th-century European philosophy, critical theory, the philosophy of medicine and technology, and feminist philosophy. She published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in Feminist Theory, Bloomsbury Academic, Encyclopaedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers, Phenomenology and Mind, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, and Anthropos. She translated, co-edited, and wrote the scholarly introduction to The Dialectic of Sex (by Shulamith Firestone, /*cf., 2019) and edited a volume of peer-reviewed articles on the topic (/*cf., 2023). She coedited special issues of Feminist Encounters (on feminist techno-imaginaries with Jasmina Šepetavc and Natalija Majsova, 2025) and Studies in the Maternal (Visceral Bodies with Anna Argiró and Anna Johnson, 2024). She co-founded and co-coordinates (with Anna Ceschi) the research group “Simone de Beauvoir and Marxism”, part of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society, where she serves as Student Member of the Steering Committee. She is currently organising the 2026 conference of the Society, “Beauvoir and Reproduction: Politics, Labour, Biology, Lived Experience” (Klagenfurt/Celovec, May 2026) and planning an edited volume on the topic. Katja used to work as a film and art critic and selector.
Bibilography
Dunn, Thomas. 2016. Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past. Columbia.
Kuhar, Roman, and Judit Takács. 2007. Beyond the Pink Curtain: Everyday Life of LGBT People in Eastern Europe. Ljubljana.
Kulpa, Robert, and Joanna Mizielińska, eds. 2011. De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives. Farnham.
Šepetavc, Jasmina, and Yulia Serdyukova. 2024. “The Other Queers – Cinematic Images from the Periphery of Europe.” Symposium catalogue text, goEast film festival symposium. Wiesbaden.
Sleptcov, Nikita. 2018. “Political Homophobia as a State Strategy in Russia.” Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective 12 (1): 140–161.
Filmography
Belov, Anatolii, and Oksana Kaz’mina. 2013. Seks, lekarstvennoe, rok-n-roll / Sex, Medicated, Rock-n-Roll. Available at https://vimeo.com/88882032 (accessed May 1, 2025).
Belov, Anatolii, and Oksana Kaz’mina. 2015. Prazdnik zhizni / Feast of Life.
Juka, Ivona. 2024. Lijepa Večer, Lijepi Dan / Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day. 4film, Quiet Revolution Pictures, ORKA Production Studio, Caretta Films, Depo Production, Tastemaker Studios.
Suggested citation
Šepetavc, Jasmina and Katja Čičigoj. 2025. Editorial: “Against Oblivion: Queer Memory and Audiovisual Heritage in Southeastern and Eastern Europe”. Queer Memories (ed. Katja Čičigoj and Jasmina Šepetavc). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 21. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00021.418.
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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