Anamnesis is the process of evocation. It is always a mental activity. Collective anamnesis exists as a set of processes that, through their intersection, enable certain heuristic and genealogical aspects for understanding shared experience, especially when it comes to a social confluence—that is, a space that generates exchanges and articulations.

Rex Cultural Centre is involved in hosting, producing, and co-producing alternative cultural and artistic creations¹ (Nebojša Milikić).

But before we proceed further with the anamneses of our interlocutors, we will establish a reference point for understanding the archival and the complications implicit in its material. Since it is housed in mental chambers that, worn by the present, are less easily presented as a coherent narrative, the problem of the archive arises precisely when determining access and attempting to constitute a chronology.

Part of this problem belongs to a generationally disparate relationship, or rather, a gap in continuity; it can also be defined by the general context of a post-Yugoslav country plagued by this new form of Eastern European locus—not only in its relationship to other Eastern European countries and their artistic and social systems and processes, but also to those with which it emerged from the communist experience, which also had different centers and paradigms of development, perspectives, and scopes in the overall complexification of relations and reflections towards Western European postulates, and with which it becomes networked and differentiated through the shaping of art-historical narratives and flows.

Another part addresses the educational system that ignores recent and current phenomena, failing to encourage research stations as parallel streams of art-historical, academic curricula; or agencies that directly operate and build the scene's life, simultaneously orienting its emancipatory future through activities and exchanges realized by organizing the most diverse events, as discussed and implemented by Biljana Tomić, for example.

---

The second problematic framework more specifically relates to the prolificacy of activities, which are not always accompanied by material traces or directly produced; but also to the nature, or character, of these activities and productions. On one hand, they emerge precisely in that vibrant field of the extra-institutional, thereby a polarized spectrum of poetics equated with politics, a kind of deconstruction, at one point even configuring principles of the interface, taking the given as a medium for mediation, shifting orientations and addresses; the city as a medium; from the center to the periphery, also, ultimately... revealing the ontological aspect of economically and traumatically secured closure towards art, but also the space for working on guidance by focusing on producing a discursive field with the testing of interventional functions.

---

Available material traces cannot constitute an archive independently; crucial complicity in this endeavor is the speech of actors as a navigational system for reconstruction. Comparisons and ellipses, digressions that connect into a contingent complex of the dynamics of the independent scene at the time, which, according to one of the actors, emerged from the neoliberal, pro-capitalist, and anti-Milošević wing of the 90s, and its discontinuities. As a generating platform, contextually performing the logical function of an operator, Rex achieved pioneering status in certain networking strategies and enabling specifically new production, subsequent to paradigm shifts and disruptions in the political-economic, i.e., state, front. At the turn of the new millennium, Rex outlines forms of modernity, conditions, and necessities of the upcoming horizon, with projects whose inclusive character directly intervenes in the social fabric.

Serbian society has successfully avoided the pain of modernization for decades; (Branimir Stojanović) yet modernisms masked the pain with the imperatives of modernization. Saša Stojanović's "Sanduk za XX vek" (Chest for the XX Century) and Nikola Džafa's "coffin filled with the past" pose the question: what would you get rid of when transitioning into the XXI century? Where the XXI century could today be replaced with "the next year": what would you get rid of when transitioning into 2021?

The past remains narrow and insurmountable. With unresolved questions, where is modernity? And were we even modern at all?

A burdened past demands the organization of insights into earlier patience for difference, and we can say that in this environment, modernism never ceased. It is a kind of camouflage, as well as social discipline: The trick is to avoid modernization and capitalism, but is it also a trick?

---

Civilians in uniform – quote: we must help provide the democracies of Southeast Europe with a path to a prosperous common future <culture> a unifying magnet more powerful than the attraction of hatred and destruction that threatened to tear them apart. This statement could smoothly be inserted into any cultural-political context then or now; the quote is actually from a transcript of Clinton's address upon the cessation of the bombing and is an example of para-camouflage very characteristic of current manipulation processes.

---

Dictates define types of identities and valorizations during the 90s. Everyday survival plus the everyday effect of politics, transitional transformations, and cultural reconfigurations. Background, impoverished, suffocating curtain. Obscuring the view towards norms, by expressing protest forms of normality: hiding everything not trending in history or some intermediate space (Darka Radosavljević) The ephemerality of the epoch has been extended; today everything is hip.

Norms – Paradigms – Changes They change in relation to social, political, material, and production needs as virtual compensators with the condensation of abundant productions. It can be crystal clear that the frozen art from '93 has largely melted over the present, from which it appears to be only just emerging like some leaden tide. -ethics are frozen through interests in faster forms of electronic communication, more effectively equated with an aesthetics that acquires corporate functions for maintaining the freezing process.

---

Excursus: Every paranoia is justified, given thatare among us – one interlocutor said… oh, they are all extended arms of the academy, who will never, deliberately never allow, i.e., enable real, I mean professional cooperation; they are simply evil; the alternative scene never existed like that in Belgrade [sic] it's all networks, independent culture which, if you ask me, wasn't even then etc – all emperors are naked; rex nudus or was it related to the photograph for the origin of the world; a hermaphroditic chimera perhaps; anyway, it was something cryptic: there are two bastions… built specifically, scenographic architectonics of the main space; I also see swings in the background – at least the man brought postcards, and someone would say you can't talk nonsense anymore; and you'll see what I'm talking about – in general, the question remained good,

What is most important to the youth in the picture?

---

_{**document by Zoran Naskovski, recorded during a conversation on June 7, 2020.}

---

_{*The text was written on the margins of the research project Rex Prepa(r)king on the occasion of its 25th anniversary.
***The draft does not represent a definitive determination, but rather an abstract of its eventual establishment.
1 The use of italics serves to replace quotation marks. Periods at the end of each paragraph have been omitted to emphasize the impression of inconclusiveness.}

---