Abstract

Maps drawn by cultural policies and the arts have accompanied the political and territorial rearrangements of South East Europe during the 20th century. At the beginning stands the Yugoslav avant-garde movement Zenitizam. It proclaimed the ʺBalkanisation of Europeʺ as a programme of creative destruction of established aesthetical-ethical and political systems, to be achieved by unleashing the Balkanic force. Delineating the semantic shifts in the reassessment of the terminus technicus ʹBalkanisationʹ, the cultural and artistic topographies reveal the coherence between politics, violence and art. The paper discusses these topographies and the implicit strategies of demarcation that are in contrast to stereotyped concepts of the Balkans and Yugoslavia. In these strategies, ʹBalkanisationʹ manifests itself as a figure that runs opposite to the delimitation of geographical, political and cognitive spaces.