Salerno University course focuses on Slovenia's band Laibach

(ANSA) - BELGRADE, APR 3 - A university course, most likely the first in Europe, dedicated to the iconic Slovenian band Laibach and its contribution to Slovenian, Balkan, European, and global culture will open in mid-April at the University of Salerno at the Department of Cultural Heritage Sciences, as part of the Master's Degree in Performing Arts and Multimedia Production.
    The course, titled "See You in Hell—The Laibachs between three Dissolutions: Yugoslavia, Europe, the World," with professor Gabriele Frasca, will enable students to dissect the artistic history of Laibach and the so-called 'Neue Slowenische Kunst,' born in the early 1980s in a Yugoslavia heading toward disintegration. This still-alive cultural phenomenon remains inescapably linked to what historian Hobsbawm called the "short century." And this century, you can read in the course presentation, is - again paraphrasing Hobsbawm - also synonymous with "landslide, or landslides," all of which Laibach observed with a keen eye and then set to music or video.
    Landslides and crises such as the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, the crisis of 'former Europe,' the ever-increasing totalitarian thrusts sweeping through the West and the rest of the planet, all with the return of the fear of nuclear war in the background, themes that Laibach have never neglected.
    Formed in 1980 in the mining town of Trbovlje, in what was then Yugoslavia, Laibach has become one of the vanguard bands on the world music scene. In recent years, in addition to their music, they have sparked a row for a concert in inaccessible North Korea and for a scheduled performance in Ukraine that was later canceled amid controversy after the band called the ongoing war "a geopolitical conflict between Russia and the United States on Ukrainian territory." Gabriele Frasca is also a writer and an expert in English-to-Italian translation. He recently edited the Mondadori Meridian on Samuel Beckett. (ANSA).