Branded sportswear has become a stereotype of Slavic cultures, worn across a broad spectrum from social media influencers to paramilitary forces as caricatured in Hollywood films about the Yugoslav Wars. When Miloš Trakilović calls from Berlin, though, his Umbro hoodie is a practical choice. It provides comfort in his current surrounds, a depot walled with cardboard boxes at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, as he prepares to open a new audio installation.
Born in Yugoslavia on the country’s final Republic Day in 1989, Miloš spent his early years in a conflict zone. His family moved to the Netherlands after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were killed. For a few years, the family lived in a refugee camp, later joined by other communities displaced by genocide, including from Rwanda. ‘I grew up in the generation called “Dutch Guilt”,’ Miloš says, referring to the failure of UN peacekeepers from the Netherlands to prevent the massacre, and the fast-tracked citizenship that followed. Yet in a country whose national stories more often tend towards amnesia than acknowledgement and reckoning, integration is not so straightforward.
