Youth Relay

This series focuses on batons produced for the Relay of Youth, an annual event held in former Yugoslavia between 1957 and 1987 to mark the birthday of President Josip Broz Tito on 25 May. Each year, a new baton was commissioned from an artist from one of the federation’s republics and carried across the country in a continuous relay, passed from hand to hand by citizens before being ceremonially presented to the president. As both object and ritual, the baton functioned as a symbolic device of cohesion: a unifying thread intended to stitch together the federation’s diverse territories through a shared narrative of antifascist struggle and collective belonging.

These objects operate as what Cibic terms “historical ready-mades”—forms that were embedded within state choreography and circulated as instruments of political meaning. The relay itself staged a collective performance of unity, in which the baton became both a carrier of ideology and a materialisation of continuity. Its trajectory across the landscape inscribed a symbolic geography, binding the republics through gesture, repetition, and participation.

In Cibic’s photographic series, the batons are isolated from this choreography and presented as still lifes. Their surfaces are inhabited by moths, introducing a vanitas dimension that foregrounds decay, transformation, and the erosion of meaning over time. Once charged with the promise of cohesion, these objects now register the fragility of the narratives they were designed to sustain. The thread they once symbolised is no longer intact, and the continuity they performed has been interrupted.

The titles of the works refer to the final bearer of each relay—the individual entrusted with handing the baton to Tito. This gesture, once positioned as the culmination of a collective act, is here reframed as a singular point of transfer, foregrounding the moment in which symbolic value is both concentrated and concluded.

Within this framework, the series reflects on the afterlife of political gifts and their capacity to persist as images once their original function has dissolved. The photographic work becomes itself a secondary relay: an act of transmission that preserves, reconfigures, and exposes the ideological charge of these objects, while simultaneously marking its transformation into a souvenir of a political project no longer in operation. With support by the Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade.