My World Is Disappearing Slowly is the title of the Slovenian adaptation and the opening line of Olga Dimitrijević’s award-winning play Darling Mine which won the Best New Play Award at the prominent Sterijino Pozorje Festival in 2014 and was staged to great acclaim in 2017 at the iconic Belgrade theatre Atelje 212. In this comic melodrama, we follow the fate of four Belgrade elderly women, “living archives of socialism,” as the author describes them, who are fighting for their rights in the contemporary neoliberal world.

The story unfolds in present-day Belgrade, a city transformed by aggressive development and speculative urbanism, not unlike in Slovenia, where luxury apartment blocks rise while the memory and character of the old city steadily disappear. It begins with the funeral of Ivana, a former partisan fighter. Her longtime partner Dragica is left alone, permitted to remain in Ivana’s apartment only until the arrival of Ivana’s son, who claims the property as his inheritance. Initially resigned to losing her home, Dragica slowly rediscovers the possibility of resistance after reconnecting with an old friend and her neighbour and begins to believe that it is possible to secure social rights even in this dirty, capitalist world. The struggle is by no means easy and requires a great deal of courage, which the protagonists draw from their experiences as young people in the former unified country and from the anti-fascist struggle.

The production of My World Is Slowly Disappearing focuses on issues of memory and transience, highlighting them through the incorporation of documentary archival material. Today, the memory of anti-fascist struggles around the world is being suppressed by neoliberal capitalist policies which are fuelling the rise of nationalist shifts in global and local politics. The dominance of patriarchal ideologies calls into question the women’s struggle and all the minority struggles of our recent past which are often sidelined or completely suppressed in mainstream historical narratives. My World Is Disappearing Slowly thus affirms the social need of remembrance not only from the perspective of superficial (Yugo)nostalgia, but also and more importantly through a utopian projection of the desire to believe that the Women’s Antifascist Front and Yugoslavia itself were projects that promised a fairer and better future  ̶   one we unfortunately never experienced: a future of equality, sovereignty, authenticity, and the celebration of liberties.