The first wave of published histories of punk focused on the well-known bands and the larger cities, but since that time there has been an explosion of new information about smaller scenes and the bands that helped make those scenes. Of course, many zines in the past balanced a focus on the local with links to national and international punk, often via scene reports. However, the proliferation of personal websites, blogs, and social media outlets created opportunities for individuals to share their personal connections to historical punk and for people around the globe to learn about collective histories. We can read stories, see photos, and watch videos that document unique and common qualities of different scenes.
Marina Gržinić is a philosopher, theorist, and artist who splits here time between the Institute of Philosophy at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She moved to Ljubljana at a time when punk was being discovered and inspiring some people in the former Yugoslavia to make their own scenes. She describes a unique scene in Ljubljana that was grounded in the politics of the time, where punks sought to both enact socialist ideals and resist some of the communist bloc norms. Photography and other visual arts were crucial features of the growing punk scene in Ljubljana and she actively participated in that scene through her work at the ŠKUC Gallery. Most recently, Marina has been involved with the curation of exhibitions that present the politics of Slovenian punk in the 1970s and 1980s as well as punk’s links to a variety of parallel socio-cultural shifts in Slovenia.
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