Jugoplastika: Plastics and Postsocialist Realism

This essay examines plastic—its production, dissemination, and removal—as a complex ontopolitical problem in the times of postsocial realism, a condition of possibility of imagining and living (and dying) in the spacetimes of perpetual transition toward contemporary European society. Focusing on Jugoplastika, a factory for the production of petrochemical products, Filipović shows the ways in which plastic becomes a pluritemporal, multimaterial, ontopolitical hyperobject, from the finished product, such as toys for children, to the waste deposited at the largest landfill in Serbia, near Belgrade. Occasional spontaneous ignitions at the landfill transform waste plastic into smoke, changing the urban “olfactoscape.” Filipović claims that events in Belgrade’s olfactoscape reveal a crumbling infrastructure built during the modernization of socialist Yugoslavia. The discourse of a “ruined” landscape and the promise of a “clean” future are inextricably connected to the flows of capital and the financialization of the environment, which is seen as necessary in the transition from a ruined postsocialist state to contemporary European society.