The site-specific installation “Communal dwellings“ was shown at the Cultural centre “Parobrod”, 2013, part of the “Duplex” exhibition program, Curated by Mihael Milunović.
Communal dwellings
“A foreigner shall be restricted or prohibited from moving and staying in a given area in the Republic of Serbia if so required by the reasons for protecting the public order or security of the Republic of Serbia and its citizens, or on the basis of an international treaty.”
Law on Foreigners (“Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia”, No. 97/2008)
“Fairy: So? What is that? What are you doing in that corner? It’s like you’re cooking-up a conspiracy. It’s time to go. I decided that the Light will be your chief. You will all follow her as you are obeying me, and I entrust her with my stick! The children will visit their grandfather and their grandmother who are dead tonight. Out of discretion, you will not follow them. Let them spend the night in the circle of their deceased family. During this time, you will save everything you need for tomorrow’s journey, which will be long. Now, get on your way, everybody in your place! “
Maurice Maeterlinck, Blue Bird
Emigration is one of the triggers of traumatic cycles that form the character of those societies that have caused it, as well as those that were formed by migrations. Ethical attitudes towards the forced displacement of civilians in peace and war reveal not only the relation to history, but also the character of contemporary societies and their political programs. The societies that cyclically cause migration, but are also self-renewing through migrations, are associated in this work with the treatment of emigrants from the Reich, a tragedy that left a sufficiently deep trail in order to regain the empathic perspective of the victims, as well as the differences in their presentation in a contemporary, interpretative debate. Decisions, statements and documents related to the emigration of the European Jews via Danube through the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, on the eve of its accession to the Tripartite Pact, have opened the view on the genesis of the “Semi-dependent state” that worked before the official breakdown – the propaganda striving to “nazify” the society, the adoption of Nazi laws and laws, the formation of “communal dwellings” for refugees, as well as profiting on the economic and political changes that these developments have created. The destination to which only a few have fled, was then formed on the growing dicrepancy of the emancipatory promises of Herzlian “Altneuland”, and the eugenic selection barring access to a new society. The social hierarchy of the part of Israel’s state-owned apparatus has already been realized in the formation of a new society, but also the empathic distance from the endangered, even before the official start of mass destruction in Europe. One of the results of the “new man” and its society was de-facto capital of the future state – Tel Aviv, a brand new city, built on the fulcrum of utopias and conflicts, whose forms were celebrating life by receiving immigrants. Each approach to the subject leads to the sharpening of the similarity of the outcome of empathic dissociation from victims and their humanitarian situation, and in societies on nominally opposite ethical postulates. However, to attempt at juxtaposition is necessary, precisely because art does not share the history’s distance from the subject, nor its attachment to its militaristic-national, ideological interpretation. It can still point to the loss of texture and details of life, erased by the apropriative destruction of education and commemoration of the Holocaust and Genocide, a culture positioned for the “day after witnesses”. Art, unlike history and cultural policy, could still be the driving force of discourse on the civil history of war.
As an artist, I’m interested in places that are part of the repetitive process. Permanent residence in familiar locations results in a cumulative exposure to subjects that, although deepening the possibility of analysis, pardoxically, narrows the field of work. The initial speed of recognition and embedding into the subject is part of the methodological framework that suppresses the context in the field of research and analytical processing of archival material, avoiding the mediation of the immediacy of experience. In this methodological condition, the thematic dealing with the history of the Holocaust and Genocide through the current state of architectural heritage and the historical narrative in post-transitional normalization, in fact, documents the process of constant de-politicization of the speech of minority memories, under the pressure that by accepting the projections of the dominant majority they will secure their further survival.