When meanings change and monuments stay: reframing the narrative of the “Monument to the Fallen Miners”

The “Monument to the Fallen Miners” in the Kosovar city of Mitrovica was built in 1973 to a project by B. Bogdanović. It is one of a large number of memorials built in order to construct a unified narrative and to contribute to the nation building process of multiethnic Yugoslavia. In this case, the monument was intended to recall a strike of miners during WWII against the occupying Nazi regime - it consists of two conical pillars with a mining cart atop. Being the miners of both Serbian and Albanian ethnicities, the conceived narrative was that these two ethnic groups (the two pillars) are unified in their battle against a mutual enemy. Since 2013, after years of warfare and ongoing crisis, Mitrovica is divided into two administrative units: the southern part of the city, inhabited mainly by ethnic Albanians and the northern part, inhabited primarily by members of the Serbian ethnicity. The perpetuation of unitarian meanings is hardly imaginable under the current provisional social and political conditions. How are the leftovers of a narrative of unity and regional congregation reframed today? How do they attach to the materiality of this iconic monument that persists in its physical presence?