[ Fragment, nos. 1, 2, 3-4, Podgorica, 1996-1997 ]

In 1996, the Montenegrin and Yugoslav cultural scenes were further layered by the appearance of a new journal entitled Fragment. Born in an environment wherein the basic intellectual obsession is the telling of the whole story, homogenous and self-enclosed, without fissures in meaning and sense, this periodical represents a product in many ways unusual. Its mosaical character, its polygeneric direction, a wide range of references and a theoretically clearly argued concept form a framework within which the heritage forming the basis of local cultural models is released from its metaphysical character and introduced into a web of contextual games which open it towards mixing with numerous other cultural traditions, as well as to constant re-shaping.

The starting point for the creation of Fragment was expansion of the output of the cultural department of the independent (political) weekly magazine Monitor from Podgorica. Namely, five years of work on analysing the local cultural scene and of attempts to establish contact with trends outside these small, enclosed Balkan societal entities created a specific atmosphere in the editorial team, inducing a need for a special publication which would be restricted to the area of culture, and have as its aim the offering of new interpretative and productive models.

The inner circle of contributors to Monitor's cultural department was already parallelly engaged on work in several fields and genres - from newspaper reviews and articles to essays, literary and theoretical texts and socio-political analyses of the cultural situation, in a tempo which was dictated by the weekly's publication schedule, as well as by the dynamics of the scene within which they operated. Fragment offered a wider frame inside of which all these currents could cross and overlap without hindrance and without any forcing of preferences, thus creating a kind of polygeneric puzzle containing fragments of discourse on literature, film, drama, music, philosophy, the visual arts, as well as representative samples of current local and international production.

The first two issues of the journal were marked by a thematic block entitled European and American Cultural Identity, which also offered several attempted sketches of the basic cultural topology of these cultural spaces and the dissociation of their identities, as well as analyses of the strategies for conquering this type of identity. In the context of the present-day Montenegrin cultural scene, this represented the opening of new areas of inquiry, no longer founded on the search for ways of establishing original contact with the local tradition, but on the quest for the most pragmatic methods of combining elements of different cultural traditions into provisional arrangements which do not aspire to wholeness. Therefrom the title of Fragment, which does not refer to a concise and packaged wisdom which is unravelled through interpretation and provided with a complete meaning, but to one of the numerous nodes on the network of cultural currents, a network which we can never represent to ourselves as a homogenous whole.

Issue no. 3-4, published early in 1997, is concentrated on two textual sections - Sex Pistols: A Second Reading and Netherlands Block. The former is thematically defined and linked to interpretations of the recirculation of the Pistols myth, twenty years later; the latter is the first instalment of a section through the ex-Yugoslav cultural scene in the Netherlands, and is thus defined not by the contents of the texts, but by the cultural and geographic position and origin of the authors represented. This double issue thus begins an investigation of an example of recontextualisation of certain cultural phenomena - in the case of the Sex Pistols, the change of context is basically a consequence of time, while in the case of the ex-Yugoslav authors in exile it derives from spatial dislocation from their original environments.

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