I never realised that Bruce Sterling had married Jasmina Tesanovic and lived in Belgrade for a few years. Well done Bruce. In this talk, he reflects on what Balkan society can tell “us”, by which he means of course the West. There’s a lot of good observations (if slightly obvious to anybody who’s spent any time in the Balkans) but towards the end he veers towards meaningless. Apparently the Balkans doesn’t have tragedy, but it does have fratricide – and here was me thinking that one of the cornerstones of (Greek) tragedy was slaughtering your own relatives. The division between “us” and “them” starts to look particularly odd when he starts talking about the Roma, who constitute a “them-them” – doubly alien because he sees them through the eyes of his Serbian peer group. It’s still worth watching, if only for his riff on the heroic nature of Yugoslav design.
UPDATE: Wow, that Vimeo embedding link really sucked. Fixed now!
Tags: Belgrade, Bruce Sterling, Jasmina Tesanovic