Urban Nostalgia in the Music of Požoň sentimentál

Chapter 5 discusses nostalgia and avant-garde art in Bratislava with a case study of the musical group Požoň sentimentál. This chapter argues that although nostalgia is a feature of the postcommunist urban scene, Bratislava residents and many other Central Europeans are not nostalgic. Drawing on the ideas of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the chapter proposes that Bratislava avant-gardists make postmodern reparative readings. The chapter details how during the 1990s and early 2000s, Požoň sentimentál dramatized the city as it had existed a century earlier; alongside older writers and performers such as Egon Bondy, Požoň sentimentál explored forgotten motifs of the city’s history. The chapter describes how the group’s humorous enactments provoked controversy around the artistic canon, played with the city’s sonic environment, and prompted discussion over representations of the city’s former ethnic and confessional groups, especially the Jewish population decimated by the Holocaust.

Art · Art history · Confessional · Ethnic group · Literature · Musical · Political science · Population · Postmodernism · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theology · Visual arts · Anthropology · Demography · European Cultural and National Identity · History · Law · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Philosophy · Sustainable Urban and Rural Development