"Resonances of Conflict" -
Miloš Trakilović on Memory, Displacement and Artistic Testimony

What role does memory play for you and how do you work with it?

Miloš: I think this depends on how one defines temporality and on the politics of one’s location. For me, memory is tied to how I have gotten to experience this world. Namely, I was born in November 1989, which was a very turbulent moment in history, and I was born in Yugoslavia, at the edge of its disintegration into the Bosnian War. I have gotten to know and experience the world through this collapse and conflict in the early 90s as I spent my childhood until 1995 in this context and we later arrived as refugees in the Netherlands. Conflict and memory are big topics in my work, displacement additionally complicates these categories because you carry a memory and then suddenly you find yourself displaced in another sociopolitical context where there’s no collective recalling of it.

Also, it was a specific time frame in the 90s, where you had a switch from the analogue towards the digital, with more and more proliferations of images and representations, and specifically the war in Bosnia at that time was one of the most documented and broadcasted conflicts. It was a different paradigm then, the television paradigm, which meant that images were broadcasted and known in a really centralised way. Later these images became inseparable from my own memories through their constant repetitions and circulation in the media.

All of this prompted me, from quite an early age, to question the power of images, their claim to notions of truth and normativity as well as how they technologically operate, how they disperse and how they circulate. I think the majority of my work has been addressing the temporal aspect of conflict, it is something that has been present throughout my work as a topic of investigation, thinking through what conflict means, in the sense that it’s obvious that an image of war is not war. In the same way conflict is not over when the peace treaty is signed. There are so many more dimensions to it.

Considering the experiences and themes visible in your work, would you describe your practice as political?

Miloš: If you would have asked me about being a political artist maybe five years ago, it would have been a totally different answer. There’s always been a sense of urgency for me to express things precisely because during the majority of my life I’ve been in Western contexts, where there was seemingly less of an urgency or experienced threat of potential conflict, and this has shifted tremendously now. More conflicts erupted and developed in the last couple of years, so not only the discourse but interests and the collective consciousness have shifted regarding the threat of conflict. The way I work has changed, because for me it was always important to try and find some sort of logic or process things in a personal way, but then there is always the challenge, how to bring in a wider perspective or a wider audience. In many of my earlier works, I placed myself more prominently in the work as a sort of speaker or maybe a performer, for example in lecture performance formats, which interestingly enough maybe mirrored the broadcast television 90s moment as a way to somehow affirm my own existence or control over this narrative.

Displacement and conflict feature heavily in your work, do you think it could be positioned in relation to the notion of trauma?

Miloš: I resist this topic or this term, I think a lot of people sometimes link what I do to this terminology, but I don’t find it productive, because to me it implies something insular and if anything, with my work I’m looking for complicity, for complicit relations that go beyond victimisation or insular experiences. How do we open up perspectives of entanglements, where you can have a personal story, not from a position of victimisation, but it can narrate something and uncover the mechanisms through which we’re all entangled and involved? I often think if you are only a victim, you have no agency whatsoever to move away from that role, you’re just stuck in a position that doesn’t move. The term feels very framed. That’s why I prefer the word conflict. Conflict in whatever shape or form, whether it’s an armed conflict, a personal conflict, an inner conflict or an interpersonal conflict. The state of not being able to communicate anything to the outside world about it constitutes trauma. I think the moment you engage with it or you communicate something, you’re already outside of it.

Do you think that art, specifically your art, has a particular impact on history-telling or understanding history?

Miloš: Art is a vast category. It depends on how you accentuate it and how you define a mechanism of representation. Art has been hugely politicised and used in various ways throughout history from propaganda tactics to collective remembrance, so it does play an active role in shaping and understanding history. But for me, it’s more of a testing ground. It’s a domain where you can communicate things without necessarily chasing results or an immediate understanding. It’s communication in the end, it has the capacity to move.
This is also how I view art and why I dedicate my life energies to art-making, because when it works, it moves you emotionally, it stimulates you intellectually, it does something. It’s the opposite of being static. And this is the challenge in whatever situation you are in life, to keep going somehow. In a way, art is also a testament. I think this is also important, to have testimonies and to tell stories not from our point of view, but also on behalf of those who are no longer with us.

You already touched on the 90s as a period of change. Looking at the tools you’re using now, do you think that digital tools lend themselves to being especially useful for fragmented stories or storytelling?

Miloš: Not per se. I think there are also several paradigms now that are interlinking. With the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, for instance, there was a strong push toward a kind of technological universalism, we began speaking in terms of usership and user-based systems, as if everyone belonged to the same flattened category. I find that tendency problematic. From that point of view we need personal perspectives, but then how to do that without falling into the trap of identity politics and so on, this is exactly what the field of art can be useful for. I do think that within this paradigm of technological universalism it’s ever more important to have personally rooted or personal stories of being and belonging. Now with another recent technological jump to generative technologies and AI, it’s even more sinister in the operational domain of how exploitation works and how these things are implemented to function in our lives.

Roland Meyer for example wrote about how AI is inherently nostalgic, because it’s always working with what has been.

Miloš: Yes, that is also the premise for me to do this work, because it inherently has history embedded in the way that it operates. There is a technological implication that incorporates the past and I think I embraced this also not only technologically, but also conceptually with "564 Tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usually a Love Song)" by looking at a particular moment in history and time and placing it in a present moment and context. I’m used to working with film and moving image, so "564 Tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usually a Love Song)" started as an experiment or test, mostly to challenge myself and this idea that AI is this corporate black box domain that we as users don’t have a lot of control over. But I think it’s a creative tool like any other. So this was also a challenge for me in collaboration with my brother-in-law, who is a software developer, to think about how we could develop our own pipelines. It started out as an experiment to learn some new tools and to uncover this black box idea and bit by bit develop things that became in the end implemented in the work.

What was the conceptual starting point of "564 Tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usually a Love Song)"?

Miloš: I started doing the piece in 2023 after October 7th and everything that happened afterwards left me at a loss for words. For me, my usual way of working has a lot to do with language, with writing, with articulating and seeing a repetition of horrors in the world I felt like I couldn’t respond to the world that I lived in with means of language. This was one element but also, like many of my other works, this one also has a personal departure point, which is that I have experienced the war in Bosnia largely sonically, because we were mostly sheltered in the house and were not allowed outside.
This is somewhere stored in my system, remembering and responding to these types of tonalities. I thought it was really interesting that if you listen to music from the late 80s, early 90s in the former Yugoslavia, how it was arranged, and the tonalities that were used, it was really intense in a way that almost implied the coming of some catastrophe. I wanted to test this more in a sort of "objective way" and of course building your own technology or technology as such is always partially biased so it’s never fully objective, but somehow mathematically, I tried to calculate if indeed there was a sort of increased dimension of these types of tonalities in the cultural musical production of that time. So the main premise for me, for this project, was the guiding question, could the Bosnian War have been predicted in the music of that time?

We had to think about how we were going to make an architecture that we can then use and retrain with data sets to test this hypothesis. We ended up using a model that was originally trained to recognize bird sounds. Because bird sounds and their frequency and tonality respond to a lot of the sonic elements of war and warfare, and then we trained it with a lot of data sets. We tried to source as much as we could from the Balkan wars, but a great deal came from the ongoing war in Ukraine , because it is very well digitised. It’s a really vast set of sounds, anything from bomb drops, machine guns, but also sirens, and then we unleashed it on the musical production of Yugoslavia from November ’89, which was the fall of the Berlin Wall to April ‘92 , which is the beginning of the war in Bosnia. It extrapolated all these sounds and calculated according to a quite complex system of metrics by which it found correlating tonalities and interestingly enough it would rarely be something that I would have picked out or recognized. These extrapolated music fragments became the source material for this work. So it’s in the end fragments from 564 real musical tracks. I was really interested in the atmosphere of that pre-war time. There was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of dread in the air and people couldn’t really predict how it would play out. I found this such a compelling state to be in, a state that also responds to a lot of our positions now in the current day and age of insecurity. Somehow you anticipate something that is bound to happen, but we don’t really know what or how.

Finalising the work, I started thinking about love songs and how ballads are structured. So we developed a new final model that was trained to repeat the sequences of a love song. It takes that library of sounds and in the moment processually tries to synthesise them according to the logic of the love song. When you think of love songs, you think of something maybe joyful or something soothing you can sing along to, but this piece is quite the opposite. It’s a sort of unsingable love song that has no beginning or end, and it’s quite sinister at times. At other times, it’s also really gentle and melodic, depending on how this model tries to piece it together. I think there is an interesting element when you are in the installation for a longer time, you can really start noticing the struggle that it has to piece these fragments together, so this sort of friction is also a poetic element of this work, but it depends also on the moment when you enter and how it compiles these elements, once it’s booted, it does what it wants. For me, this has been interesting breach from my usual way of working, but the work also serves as a closing chapter of a body of work that I’ve been developing in the last five to seven years that in various ways has dealt with the temporalities of conflict, memory, displacement, and the different ways technology is implicated or involved.

What important connections do you see between memory and temporalities?

Miloš: Memory and temporality are interlinked. The fact that we have recallings or memories breaks up the linear perception of time. I have works like "All But War Is Simulation", which is a didactic lecture-based work that tries to come close to the definition of war, also from the point of view of lived experience, and the closest definition that I could come to is that it’s a state in which everything gets forcefully reconfigured. Everything is so much more intense and the usual perceptions of temporality are completely upside down. And not only in that moment of living through or being in a state of conflict, but also afterwards. I think this is also a generational aspect, for example, for me and my generation born in the late 1980s, we don’t have this temporal framework of pre-war, like my parents’ generation have. This is something that I’ve discovered in many conversations with the generation of my mother, they had a whole life before, war is a sort of anomaly, and then life goes on. But for my generation it’s something that proliferates and multiplies, it’s a constant reconfiguration. When we think of time we have a tendency to think in a linear projection, but temporality implies multiplicity, configuration, it has dimension, a body. I find this endlessly fascinating, it remains a central space for me to explore through my work.

Thank you so much!