Reclaiming public space: Feminist history (re) writing of Southeast Europe

Public space is gendered and never neutral. Across Southeast Europe, like in other regions, urban landscapes bear the legacy of war, nation-building and patriarchal heroism.  Absent are women, minorities, and queer communities, whose experiences have been marginalised or erased. Yet amid silences over their labour, resistance, and trauma, a quiet insurgency is emerging. Feminist artists, grassroots collectives and activists are reclaiming space and memory. In this piece, I engage with such activist and creative practices in Southeast Europe, which seek to disrupt dominant national narratives. As ephemeral and provocative these interventions might be, they shape memory not through stone or bronze but through action, performance and community involvement.

Gendered tropes, geopolitics and memory

Feminised metaphors often play a central role in portraying Southeast Europe as backward and unstable. These tropes help sustain geopolitical inequalities and have far-reaching implications for identity, sovereignty and power. Western representations of the Balkans – a term frequently used to refer to Southeast Europe – heavily rely on gendered imageries, particularly the feminisation of the region as the Other. Such projections, especially in the context of ethnic violence, feeds the narrative that this particular territorial space must be tamed, protected or dominated by a rational Western “male” power.

In recent decades, scholars have increasingly emphasised space not as a passive backdrop to history but as an active force in shaping memory, identity and power.  The “spatial turn” prompts us to ask what we remember, where remembrance happens and who gets to remember. In Southeast Europe – a region marked by shifting borders, contested histories and post-conflict memory, this perspective offers important gender insights. It evokes questions about whose stories are commemorated in public monuments and about which traumas are preserved in museums and which are buried beneath urban redevelopment.  What also needs to be addressed is why certain bodies, particularly female and queer, are excluded from public acts of remembrance.

Examining the intersections of space, gender and memory in Southeast Europe is essential to understanding how both public and private realms sustain or subvert dominant narratives of nationhood. Commemorative traditions reflect patriarchal frameworks: war memorials glorify male heroism, while women’s roles in resistance and post-conflict reconstruction are overlooked. LGBTQ+ histories are largely absent, and Roma communities remain structurally excluded from memory scapes and historical representation. Yet the exclusion of marginalised groups from national memories inscribed in urban landscapes, commemorative rituals, and everyday spatial practices does not go uncontested. Feminist activists have built counter-memories that resist silence and erasure.

Living monuments and feminist cartographies

In cities such as Sarajevo, Prishtina, Belgrade and Skopje, women artists and activists are using the streets as canvases and stages to confront historical silences and gendered erasures. Emerging feminist counter-narratives, including activist cartographies, public performances, grassroots organising, and digital mapping projects are disrupting hegemonic memory and reclaiming spatial visibility. Through performance and street art, these practices carve out spaces of resistance and remembrance – where official histories have failed – and actively reconstruct the landscape of memory with gender and intersectionality at the core. In this way, their actions reveal a deeper truth: that memory is not only about what is preserved but what is made visible.

In Prishtina and Sarajevo, the annual FemArt Festival and PitchWise Festival of Women’s Art and Activism, organised by Artpolis and the CURE Foundation, respectively transform the cities into living feminist archives. Through visual art, spoken word and performance, they celebrate women’s resistance and peace activism. These are not just cultural events but living monuments that challenge the static, male-centric memorial landscapes of Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. They function as alternative rituals of resistance and solidarity, contesting the state’s monopoly over memory by creating mobile, emotional and embodied spaces of remembrance. In Zagreb, where fewer than five per cent of streets are named after women, the feminist collective Vox Feminae has challenged gender imbalance in urban toponymy. These activists have developed alternative urban tours and proposed new street names, bringing to light forgotten antifascist heroines, writers and labour rights activists.

Street art by the feminist collective Haveit in Prishtina uses public performance to build a subversive archive. In one notable action in front of the Kosovo National Theatre, the artists symbolically “shaved away” the oppressive patriarchal system. In another powerful intervention, the four members of Haveit: Vesa, Lola, Alketa and Hana: kissed and performed on Prishtina’s main pedestrian street on Valentine’s Day in 2014, disrupting heteronormative norms through queer visibility and embodied protest.

These spatial interventions are both performative and political.  By disrupting the everyday use of public space, their performances challenge male-dominated narratives that shape collective memory and the symbolic landscape. Together, these feminist interventions reclaim space as a site of memory, insisting that what is remembered, and how it is remembered can and must be rewritten.

Further reading:

Kuzmanić, Ana/ Perić, Ivana (11 December 2018): Croatia, where the streets have no (women’s) names. European Data Journalism Network. https://www.europeandatajournalism.eu/cp_data_news/croatia-where-the-streets-have-no-women-s-names/

Prtoric, Jelena/Idrizi, Jetmir (12 June 2019): Haveit Collective: When we get angry, we use it for our art. Feminsterium. https://feministeerium.ee/en/haveit-collective/