Jasna Jovicevic

This project investigates how the legacies of Hungarian avant-garde jazz, forged under Cold War censorship and cultural negotiation in the 1960s, continue to shape the hyper-identities and practices of contemporary musicians in Hungary and Serbia. The avant-garde idiom, developed by figures such as György Szabados in conditions of political surveillance and artistic constraint, was more than resistance: it articulated authenticity through experimentation and fusion with local traditions. Today, these legacies remain embedded in the identities of musicians who navigate between global jazz circuits, national histories, and socio-political realities. In Serbia, the absence of a strong avant-garde lineage has generated different strategies of adaptation and negotiation, reflecting semiperipheral cultural positioning. Methodologically, the project adopts a transdisciplinary approach that combines archival research, social anthropology, ethnography, and artistic practice. In doing so, it advances decolonizing methodologies in the humanities by dissolving rigid disciplinary boundaries and affirming artistic research as a site of both knowledge production and social critique.