MEMPOP.org at the MEMPOP.eu final conference

MEMPOP participated in the final conference of the project with the same acronym – Mnemonic Aesthetics and Strategies in Popular Culture: Murals, Film, and Popular Music as Memory Work. At their final conference, Decolonization Strategies and Memory Work in Popular Culture, held in Ljubljana on 20–21 April 2026, our associated researcher Astrea Nikolovska presented preliminary findings from the collaborative paper “Seams of Ambivalence: Populism from Below in Serbia and Georgia,” co-authored with the MEMPOP post-doc Laura Mafizzoli. The paper developed from Astrea Nikolovska’s earlier blog post on the MEMPOP website and grew into a comparative collaboration exploring how everyday popular commodities and vernacular aesthetics register political ambivalence and populist affect from below. In Ljubljana, Nikolovska focused on the Serbian case, analyzing souvenir socks depicting political figures and “strongmen” in Belgrade as minor objects through which geopolitical uncertainty, irony, and contested moral positioning are materialized in everyday popular culture.

The intellectual exchange between the two MEMPOPs started in July 2025 during the MSA conference in Prague, when the two projects organized a roundtable “Popularizing Remembrance: Populism, Pop Culture and Memory Politics.” The Ljubljana conference offered a further opportunity to deepen this conversation and to reflect on how popular cultural forms participate in the production, circulation, and contestation of memory.