Balkan Matters! Material Cultures in the Balkans, 25–27 September 2025

The conference in Marseille, dedicated primarily to the material culture of the Balkans, also featured a strong focus on heritage-related themes. One of the highlights was the panel Museums in the Balkans since the 1990s: The Invisible, the Silent and the Loss, where researchers discussed museum representations of violent conflicts that, by overlooking or only superficially addressing peace initiatives, tend to naturalize violence as an inevitable outcome of social tensions.

Throughout nineteen thematically diverse panels, a common thread emerged: an exploration of material culture not merely as an object, but as an active agent—one that carries memory, political potential, and alternative forms of identification, and thus plays a key role in shaping social relations.

The presentation by Eva Fekonja, a member of the research programme group, examined constructions of the “Balkan voice” within specific ethnographic contexts. It focused on its entanglement with the idea (and ideology) of the natural voice and on the traces of essentialist and primordialist thought patterns that are expressed through the affective register.