ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the sensescapes of wartime Ljubljana and early socialist Yugoslavia as remembered by an older sensobiographic walker born in the late 1930s. The historical contextualisation of sensory remembering demonstrates the significance of the olfactory and gustatory aspects of everyday life in (pre-)socialist times as experienced as a child and as an adolescent. The background of these sensory memories is underscored. For the older sensobiographic walker, the first two decades of intensified modernisation in Yugoslavia, which restructured socio-cultural, economic, political and sensory aspects of everyday life in urban space, are reflected in the twofold production of taste as the industrialisation of taste and as ‘ensensement’ with socialism. Methodologically, the study of the transformations of multisensory lived experiences is approached through transgenerational sensobiographic walking. The method emphasises the dynamics between the two participants, namely between the grandmother and the granddaughter. In reconstructing past sensescapes and discussing the walking experience through the urban environment with the present, both walkers demonstrated through reflective transgenerational narratives and shared memories how sensing can be relational, intrapersonal and common. To explain the sharing of the sensible, the paper proposes the notion of ‘commonsality’.
