Some urgent ethical questions that clearly emerged in the Balkans after the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia overlap with aesthetic issues of representation in art and film. The paradoxes of humanity that have recently appeared, and the problem of the frequent and uncritical circulation of various representations of these paradoxes, need to be looked at in political, cultural and gender terms. The urgent need to rethink the particular paradoxical processes arose from the juridical reduction of universal human rights and freedoms and the paradoxes of the cultural and political translation of these processes through representations that engender and gender »bare life«. If »bare life«, as described in Giorgio Agamben’s famous book »Homo Sacer«, is a life stripped of any value and form, the question remains whether this condition can be represented and whether any rules can be imposed on artists proceeding with such a representation.¹
The human rights issues cannot be isolated from the gender issues and from representational politics. Therefore, at the very beginning, it should be stated that the importance and relevance of the interrelation between the paradoxes related to racism and the »promotion and protection« of human rights and the cultural translation of these paradoxes would be in danger of being ignored in any discussion that focused on either of these two issues separately.
The different ways in which images of »bare life« and »homo sacer« are constructed within today’s Balkan context, and how they are reinforced by the specific cultural, gender, ethnic, racial context, have become urgent issues. The critical analysis of different examples of representations of »bare life« in the visual arts, literature, film and theatre needs to focus on how they reinforce or deconstruct the exclusion entailed by the concept of »homo sacer«.
Especially relevant is Agamben’s proposal to apply the »camp« as a paradigm of modernity and of political space in terms in which politics becomes biopolitics; homo sacer is virtually equated with the citizen and the reality of the camp extends to include the contemporary city in general. This concept can be used to theorise the detention centres where the detainees are stripped of their rights in the name of sovereign power and protection of the population, but it can also be expanded to entire city territories such as Shuto Orizari, a municipality in Skopje with mostly Roma inhabitants.
In order to address the urgent needs of future political development and European integration, the post-socialist societies in the Balkans face the necessity of adopting new political criteria that often prove incompatible with the existing political culture and the rather exclusive ethno-nationalistic frameworks. It can be argued that in many Balkan states there are racially denigratory attitudes towards the Roma people, Albanian, Turkish or other minorities which result in discriminatory practices in the state-run justice and educational system. Obviously, the concept of »bare life« is linked to the question of representation in two ways: both as its symptom and as its product. The limits to the possibility of representing »bare life« seem to question the possibility of any other representation today. This produces the following dilemmas: Do we urgently need to start re-thinking the already established hierarchies of the existing regimes of representation and try to develop new more appropriate representational means? Or should we agree that any representation of »bare life« is impossible and try to circumvent any representation altogether?
The »zones of indistinction« and states and spaces of emergency are not always visible, but they can easily become objects of representation. Different representations can be analysed within the framework of the indefinite suspension of law that characterises »states of exception« and their normalization within society. The representation of the Roma people is one case of a stateless paradigm of the contemporary human condition, similarly to the refugee paradigm of Hannah Arendt. The fate of the Roma population can be discussed in terms of the limits of the nation-state and citizenship, and the schism between biological and political life. Like »homo sacer«, in many Balkan countries Roma have a biological life but no political significance, even though they are omnipresent, if not in the centre of the city, then on its outskirts.²

[b]Patterns of representation in art[/b]
The cultural translation of political regimes of representation into images occurs precisely in order to conflate and blur the vectors of different power structures and movements. It is important to route all these issues through delicate landscapes of multicultural environments and contexts. My example comes from the Balkans. In such environments, visual representations can produce unexpectedly severe disruptions within contemporary democratic processes and the justice system, as happened in the case of the semi-documentary film »The Shutka Book« (2005) by the Serbian film director Aleksandar Manic. The way in which Roma people are represented in this film is questionable for several reasons.
There are about seventeen main stories in the film, in which the individual characters occur under their real names or nicknames. However, their personalities are mostly overshadowed by the responses of Dr. Koljo, the narrator whose voice is present from off-screen, even when he is not present on the screen. In this context I am concerned not only with a multifaceted critical interpretation of the way in which the Roma people’s lives are visually depicted in the film, but also take into account the audience’s clearly manifested reaction to it.
Here I stress the importance of reflecting on the strong message of the unexpected public »performance« of the collective body. I am actually referring to the organised protests of discontent that were provoked by the film launch on 02.02. 2006. During the Skopje première at the cinema »Kultura« and for several nights afterwards, around 100 Roma people from the self-governed municipality of Shuto Orizari in Skopje, better known as »Shutka« (a district in the north of Skopje that, since the catastrophic earthquake of 1963, has been inhabited by 50-65,000 people and has been self-governed since 1995) protested against the way in which their community and Roma individuals were represented in the film. They most of all objected to their representations as poor, primitive and exotic masters in sensational and absurd skills such as ghost-busting, spiritual healing or sexual »enterprises«, but never in any intellectual or educational accomplishments.
After the first screenings of the film in Skopje there were several statements of discontent published in Macedonian newspapers and on local and national TV stations.³ Especially interesting was the difference in the reports on these protests shown by two local private TV stations run by Roma owners, »BTR« and »Shutel«; this was due to the involvement »Shutel« TV in the film production and the fact that it was mentioned by name. The paradoxes of this case include the fact that, even though the film was severely attacked for not recognising the rights of the Roma community, pirate DVD copies of Manic’s film can be bought on the streets of Shutka. This shows how popular the film became despite all the controversy.
The need to extend the discussion of Agamben’s concepts, such as »zones of indistinction«, »state of emergency«, »spaces of exception« and »bare life«, to the field of visual representation in contemporary art and media comes from the need to re-think the way in which such representations shape culture through politics and vice versa. Even though the representations of »bare life« in this film can be interpreted as showing »not quite bare life«, being far from the complexity and severity of the most extreme phenomena of other examples of »bare life«, they are of extreme importance for understanding how culture translates into politics and, conversely, how biopower works through the cultural realm.
When Giorgio Agamben discusses the extreme situation of »camps« in contemporary cities and the distinction between life, »bare life« and death in such contexts, he mostly focuses on the relation between sovereignty, »biopower« and exemptions from the rule in moments when a »state of exception« is proclaimed. However, Agamben does not reflect in detail on the issue of different visual regimes of representation and on the ways in which images of »zones of indistinction« are perpetuated in contemporary art, film and media.

[b]Camps as the matrix of modernity[/b]
It is precisely when »bare life« starts arguing against such definitions that the ambiguity of »inside« and »outside« becomes more obvious and shows the resemblance of the structure of the commune to a »camp.« It becomes a rule, a »nomos«, of the political space that we all share. By both excluding »bare life« and capturing it within the political order, the »state of exception« actually constitutes the hidden foundation upon which rests the entire political system.
The conceptualisation of the city as a disciplinary space surrounded by walls led to the historical processes of ethnic inclusion/exclusion. The clean-cut distinction between outsiders and insiders, between the subjects and outlaws, has been justified by many different architectural, social and cultural decisions. Agamben claims that contemporary city life is situated in »zones of indistinction«, and that an obvious prototype of spatial indistinction is the camp. While the camp originally was an exceptional, excluded space, surrounded by secrecy and walled-in, today it becomes a nomos, a hidden matrix of the modern. The visual distinctions between the inside/outside disappear, and, if they still exist, they are much more subtle and entangled. The production of the bare life that is stripped of form and value is extended beyond the walls to the society at large.⁴
In her critique of Agamben’s all too general concept of »bare life«, Judith Butler states that:

[Yet] such general claims do not yet tell us how this power functions differentially, to target and manage certain populations, to derealize the humanity of subjects who might potentially belong to a community bound by commonly recognized laws; and they do not tell us how sovereignty, understood as state sovereignty in this instance, works by differentiating populations on the basis of ethnicity and race, how the systematic management and derealization of populations function to support and extend the claims of a sovereignty accountable to no law; how sovereignty extends its own power precisely through the tactical and permanent deferral of the law itself.⁵

Skopje’s urban development is both utopic and heterotopic. As in Foucault’s renowned definition of the mirror as space, Skopje has been imagined as a fantasy, as a reflection of an ideal modernist beauty that in reality has turned into its opposite, into an obscure beast.⁶ Skopje’s centre was developed from scratch after 1963, when it was to a large extent destroyed by the above-mentioned catastrophic earthquake. The devastation led to an enthusiastic dream for rebuilding the city centre by means of an international contest. The renowned Japanese modernist architect Kenzo Tange won the international UN-financed contest that took place in 1965 as a result of the unprecedented world-wide solidarity. He thus designed the master plan for the reconstruction of earthquake-stricken Skopje.
Tange imagined a dramatic »city wall« that, as a continuous, medieval fort-like housing block, re-defined Skopje’s existing city centre, but provided little to engage with the already existing city structures. In fact, the project did resemble the shape of the real remains of the ruin of the medieval wall, only that what was once imagined as a form of protection from the enemy and a clear division into an »outside« and »inside« of the city now collapsed into an all-embracing and closed structure that left its own citizens outside. The »city gate« high-rise blocks still define the pedestrian gateway to Skopje’s city centre, as if the centre were the only urban element that counts.⁷
Today, there are still some undefined and undeveloped aesthetic and functional urban aspects of Skopje that make the social gaps and conflicts in Macedonian society even more evident. The obvious architectural differences between the left and right bank of the river Vardar are emphasised by the different ethnic and religious background of the majority inhabitants (Muslims in the North, Christians in the South). Thus, they underline the elitist monstrosity of the uncritical application of international modernism in the underdeveloped city that was pre-earthquake Skopje. In many ways this evokes Marshall Berman’s concept of a »modernism of underdevelopment«.
The conceptual tension reverberating in the phrase »socialist modernism« results from the apparent contrast between the terms »socialist realism« and »modernism«. Even though modernism brought many different concepts into being, one of its premises, at least in art, prevailed – its reversal of the hierarchies of representation, which ended up as anti-representative.⁸ This »iconoclasm« is the exact opposite of the focus on the »real« in »socialist realism«. However, it should not be forgotten that modernism had its avant-garde component that connected the aesthetic to the political, the singular to the communitarian. Unfortunately, within the architectural programmatic manifestos such as the ones proclaimed by Le Corbusier and Tange, the aesthetisation of the political often led towards inevitable alienation. In Skopje’s case, it also resulted in the reinforcement of the difference between political, social and cultural elites living within the »city wall«, and the socially and ethnically marginalised subjects (poor workers, or ethnic minorities) left outside the »city gate«.
Far from saying that the contemporary spaces are equivalent to Nazi camps, Agamben states that the logic of the camp tends to be spread throughout an entire society, and Skopje is only one of numerous similar examples of exclusive and divided urban environments that produce camp-like structures.
The emergence of camps only signals that the state of exception has become the rule and transforms the society into an unbounded and dislocated biopolitical place. »What happened in the camps so exceeds the juridical concept of crime« – says Agamben – »that the specific juridico-political structure in which those events took place is omitted from consideration.«⁹ Therefore, the exception explains, in the manner of a vicious circle, the general situation and itself. The situation of non-citizens and refugees actually reveals the underlying situation of all political subjects.¹⁰
Agamben’s question of what the juridical structure was that allowed such events to take place can be applied when discussing »cultural-political« and »juridico-political« structures that allow to artists to deal with different communities of marginalised people, homeless, refugees, subaltern ethnic groups, etc, in a way that not only mimes the already existing system of exclusion and isolation, but also produces new paradoxes. Some unexpected phenomena, neither ethically nor aesthetically justifiable, take place when artists neglect the dynamics of communities and individuals, so, even when initiated with the most positive intentions, such representations often end up contradicting to the initial concepts.
Although living in continuous existential crisis and literally on »the edge« of society, Roma people from Shutka have some success stories - but somehow they never reach the media. Therefore, it is important to question the dominant production of projects that see their main goals and achievements in miming the negative aspects of subalterneity.

[b]The camp as rule[/b]
Shutka is a space where the state of exception has acquired a permanent spatial arrangement. It is a community where the state of exception has started to become »the rule and where public and private, political life and economic life, the good life of the polis and the bare of life of the oîkos, become inseparable.«¹¹
In order to approach the issue of »becoming« a certain community, it is important to understand that »we« is not a subject in terms of self-identification, nor is that »we« composed of subjects or by a prescribed process.¹² Nancy reminded us that the aporia of the »we« is actually the main aporia of intersubjectivity, and he points out the impossibility of pinning down aby universal »we« that consists of always the same components.¹³ Interestingly enough, the always newly created »we« contains different parts and counter-parts each time when necessary, but it is never stated what happened to the previous parts/participants or what will happen after the project exhausts its sources. The »we« somehow is never fully and completely possible.¹⁴
Often the lack of the feeling of belonging to a common group, the lack of having common identity with the artist-initiator, prevents the expected effect. However, the clearly distinct »inoperative communities« that often refuse to be state »accomplices« in communitarian projects prefer to collaborate in art projects in which they trust.¹⁵
However, to return to the paradox of the case of the Roma protests against the film »The Shutka Book of Records«, the main reason behind these protests lay precisely in the fact that, what for the film director was a community predicated on establishing records in strange (and we can even say, funny) activities for the community itself, was not something that all individuals could share and identify with. The protestors seem to have reacted to the breached contract of »we«, since they felt betrayed and excluded from the »we« once promised by the film director Manic, who allegedly lived in Shutka during the shooting of his film, but failed to show the final product to the film’s main protagonists before it reached the international festivals.¹⁶
On the one hand, it can be argued that the community of the self-governed municipality and the Roma inhabitants of Shutka actually »took place«, that their »becoming« in the Deleuzean sense occurred exactly at the moment when they articulated their protest against being represented as a community that has something in common. On the other hand, one can easily agree that the protests were directed at the wrong address: that the main reasons for the permanent extreme situation of Roma communities in Europe and particularly in the Balkans rest elsewhere, and not in the film or representation in general.¹⁷
Nevertheless, my argument is that the impossibility of representation of »bare life«, the impossibility of translating it into any »appropriate« representation, is related to the paradoxical nature of community. Nancy’s remark that community happens within the interruption of singularity, fragmentation and suspension can help us understand the relation between singularity and represented community.¹⁸
It is obvious that this gap between the expectation of a critique of the existing problems on the part of the Roma community in Skopje, and the film director’s aim to give a mere »representation of the conditions of happiness, passion and total freedom that recognisable in this magic place«¹⁹ is what caused the confusion and finally the protests. The vicious circle between the inhuman social, economic and political condition of the Roma people and the representation of this condition as »total freedom« calls for an urgent disruption. Instead of moralising about different artists’ choices of different artistic representational means and regimes, the urgent question is rather how to do away with problematic representational politics and with its translation into a cultural form that enables the circulation of already existing stereotypes.

 

 

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