Where Them Stray Dogs At

The book Where Them Stray Dogs At presents the work of a collective of authors who perceive Belgrade as a conceptual starting point. Although the subject matter of the book is rooted in a single specific place, the authors explores the broader meanings and identities that have long been attributed to the so-called Balkans as a cultural region. Through diverse approaches, the collective creates a series of fragmentary yet inevitably interconnected commentaries on themes such as authenticity, migration, urban transformation, and balkanism. The subtitle of the book, Liminal Thoughts on Balkanism, Gentrification, and Nostalgia, suggests the transitional character of the unanchored, sometimes even wandering perspectives of the authorship. Through reflection on their own positions and the tension between personal and collective narratives, the individual approaches in the book interconnect into a layered exploration of liminal spaces between development and decline, past and present, belonging and alienation. The book was preceded in 2023 by an exhibition project of the same name at Galerie FaVU, which presented works by the authors of the individual chapters: Jiří Gruber, Barbora Ilič, Risto Ilič, Tamara Spalajković, and Milica Živković. The exhibition explored the various ways in which Belgrade is currently both romanticised and exploited — whether by newcomers or by those who live there and actively shape the city. This motif subsequently carried over into the book, which engages with the theme not only critically but also empathetically, seeking to understand the transformations, motivations, and contexts from which frequent stereotypes about Belgrade arise. Encompassing personally motivated and often intimate texts, the book may thus also serve as a basis for understanding the events and protests currently taking place in Belgrade. Risto Ilič focuses in his chapter on the physical transformation of the city, mapping through research interviews with representatives of the Belgrade cultural scene the disappearance of significant buildings and city districts and the impact on the capacity for self-organisation and collective resistance. Barbora Ilič, in several chapters that serve as a guiding thread throughout the book, attempts to understand what attracts newcomers — whether tourists or members of the diaspora — to Belgrade. Through her own platonic relationship with Belgrade, she reflects on the position of existential foreignness and on the contemporary aestheticisation of nostalgia and its growing popularity on social media. The chapter by Tamara Spalajković continues in this vein with an intimate exploration of the identity of those who migrate and the paradoxical feelings of returning ‘home’. Through travel notes from a journey to her native Belgrade, she conveys the alienating atmosphere of bureaucracy and the physical and abstract borders that precede the possibility of an imagined return. The idea of Belgrade as a place that is both a promise of home and a source of trauma is also reflected in the chapter by Milica Živković, who addresses female identity in ‘Balkan’ culture from the 1990s to the present and its influence on the romanticisation of toxic relationships — whether with the city, the country, or actual persons. By contrast, Jiří Gruber, drawing on his own experience of living in Belgrade, focuses on male stereotypes associated with Serbia and their commercial exploitation in the form of the so-called ‘Slavic’ accent.