When we talk about post-Yugoslav space and society, we enter the zone of anxiety induced by this geopolitical space with its permanent struggle between the nationalist myths and nostalgic past, impossible history and present crises, and finally, permanent hope and dystopian future. Today, Yugoslavia does not represent a geographical, but rather political subject, a social signifier of possible shifts towards consensual perceptions of meta-geographical meanings of the usually antagonized politics of belonging, instrumental in building a common historical knowledge. Inability to produce this knowledge on common grounds is a symptom of the war which is still fought in this area, yet by using different means, be they administrative, nationalist, economic, or political. The initial question in this common process of producing historical knowledge about Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space is whether we speak about a single war which indicated the end of the utopian era of socialism, as well as the end of the revolutionary, anti-fascist state of the Yugoslav peoples, or, on the other hand, what we have here is a succession of nationalistic wars which, by means of post-WW2 nationalist dissident resistance and armed transition of the 1990s, established the hegemonic system that exterminated people based on their nationality, religion, or other minority status, using the dominance in strength, weapons, population, and also greed, when it came to post-socialist privatizations, amassment of wealth through crime, state corruption, and other plagues of the war-time neoliberalism.
Places of tribulation, destruction, and terror, war trauma and the 1990s genocide, are the locations where Yugoslavia as a revolutionary creation lost its political articulation of the common past, as well as its social imagination of the common future. Politics of memory and the pacifist discourse of reconciliation, which have been generated since 1990s, have neutralized the need for political subjectivization based on revolutionary determination of Yugoslavia, as well as the need for the common historicization of the war. This was in fact a war in which Yugoslavia did not manage to overpower the nationalist signifiers of the oncoming so-called democratization of the society through neoliberal demands of the global, post-socialist, atomizing capitalism in which all newly established post-Yugoslav states merely become Balkanized periphery of the post-socialist Europe, each founded on its own war.
One of the examples which point to the impossibility of universal perception of the war and its past, forged among revolutionary history, genocide, and neoliberal presence, is the joint work by artists Lana Čmajčanin and Adela Jusić entitled I Will Never Talk about the War Again, dating from 2011. The work represents an attempt to make a disruption in the linear trajectories of historical violence and identitary/identifying stigmatization, epitomized in expressly brutal yet covert mechanisms of preserving systems of power, be they ethno-nationalistic, militant, class-based, patriarchal, administrative, or of any other kind. Having dealt with the war, its (in)human forms and traumas for years, in this joint work the artists confronted themselves, one another, and everyone else. This performative video work documents a succession of different affects evident in the voices and on the faces of the artists as they persistently repeat the eponymous sentence. In this work, the artists confront observers with many affective turns: from anger to satisfaction, from vocal acceptance to utter silence, from wish to reality, from possible to impossible articulation of the war. It is precisely that frozen and muted image of the impossibility to articulate the war, which becomes the point of rupture or, paradoxically, that which connects and creates what is shared: affective engagement and abject¹ confrontation with the war that everlastingly rages among and around us, because of what we, individually or collectively, are or are not, or ultimately (do not) accept to be.
The politics of memory, economy of war, and Yugoslav studies were engaged with by art and theory group Grupa Spomenik (The Monument Group) in their different discursive, exhibition, and performance practices, triggered by the impossibility of the construction and naming of a common monument dedicated to the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Grupa Spomenik was founded in 2002 by artist Milica Tomić, while its work has been participated in by the group’s full and guest members gathered around forensic, research, discussion, and exhibition projects, as well as by people who dealt with the war in any way, or merely survived it. The work on Yugoslav Studies and the forensic project concerning the Srebrenica genocide and entitled Mathemes of Re-Association brought up the question “What Does War Stand for Today?”, which in turn resulted in developing a translation art-project of the same name. This project was established as a platform which in 2010–2011 gathered translation groups of artists, theoreticians, activists, academicians, cultural workers, and other actors interested to participate in the work of Grupa Spomenik in different locations: Prishtinë, Ljubljana, Maastricht, Zagreb, Tuzla, Belgrade, Mostar, Berlin. The foundation of this collective art-theory work was the practice of translating the text by Catherine Hass (2010): Qu’appell- t-on une guerre? Enquete sur Ie nom de guerre aujourd’hui using the method of teacher ignoramus, i.e., the absence of any kind of authority in the production of knowledge and without prior knowledge of the source language.² Work on the translation produced a discussion about wars in the 1990s, and further on the permanent war, which was started in 2001 by the Bush administration as a form of combat against terrorism. The contemporary conception of war and its current meaning referred to in the text by Catherine Hass have raised a series of questions and resulted in the establishment of the network of basic terms in understanding the history of the SFRY³ war outside the existing narratives and mainstream politics. This artistic, social, and theoretical project, based on participatory translation and collective thinking, was conceived as a locus of creating common, socially engaged, and politically subjectivizing historical knowledge pertaining to the war. Through this project, Grupa Spomenik triggered political awareness of Yugoslavia within the location of the war, crime, and genocide, indicating the possibility of thinking this geopolitical space which we call post-Yugoslav from a common perspective. On the other hand, it pointed to the impossibility of conceiving a common name for the 1990s war within that geopolitical space, after the revolutionary ideology, i.e., its social utopia confined within the borders of the SFRY, had been lost.
Numerous artists and art-workers which deal with war, transition and the politics of memory share a sense of anxiety, which engenders an impossibility to think commonly about war within the space which has lost its geopolitical identification and once again become the Balkans, South Eastern Europe, or something else. Under the internal pressure of nationalist neoliberal politics in each individual post-Yugoslav state on the one hand, and the external pressure of the political exoticizing and neo-colonial understanding of the wars within the so-called region on the other, all those who participate in these overlapping geopolitical determinations of contemporary art scenes have remained “trapped” inside this post-Yugoslav signifier, striving to resist the violent geopolitics of marking their own identities.
Different means of geopolitical diversification – old ones such as the colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal mechanisms of social and geographical (re)production, and new ones such as the technological, information, forensic (scientific) and (techno-)cultural methods of social and territorial identification – are telling of the fact that our global world has become geopolitical space to which the majority of people do not belong. It has transpired that today it is quite impossible to determine any kind of geographically-specific belonging outside the global geopolitical map, which originates from the process of the neoliberal distribution of power. Speaking specifically of post-Yugoslav space during and after the 1990s, it is evident that the anxiety produced by this still functional geopolitical zone is intensified by today’s social and political circumstances: inhumane migration, climate change, global pollution, permanent war created inside the fissures of global capitalism as a means of its very own preservation. Both these contexts, the local and the global, testify to the impossible and “exhausted geographies”⁴ that we face in the 21st century. Many art practices, theories, exhibitions, and critiques embodied as political displays of such exhausted geographies today create those geopolitical zones of discomfort, such as the post-Yugoslav one, which refuse to be mobilized for territorial, national, ethnic, religious, economic or other geographies within the politics of global domination and (post)human exploitation. All those acts together shape the politics of today’s art, but the question of exhaustion still remains as an impossibility to break through an art system that adopts the neoliberal and precarious conditions of its own production.
Researching political geographies of the post-Yugoslav space within and through art today implies dealing with them temporally and spatially, via the particular and general meanings of (post-)socialist utopia and its ideology. This still undomesticated geopolitical zone between the center that has never been stronger (former West) and the post-transitional periphery (former East) has paradoxically been redefined in the so-called post-ideological terms: as Central, Eastern, or South Eastern Europe on the one hand, and the Balkan region on the other, whereby what the zone actually represents on the world map, in geopolitical terms, has never been given a clear political meaning. What appeared in the invertible re-Balkanization process, wherein the meaning of the Balkans indicates semiotic hysterics rather than a geopolitical concept, was a deep-rooted image of the Balkans as Europe’s bastard, its dark abyss at the turn of the 20th century. The process of social regression, from Yugoslavia towards the Balkans, has been marked with the nationalist politics of warfare, transitional economy, and political amnesia, which shows that this continuous geopolitical construction of space is by no means one-dimensional homogeneous resistance to the arbitrary politicization of space and time but, more likely, a geopolitical momentum of (re)producing the disturbing and antagonizing identities of the weak, the marginal, the other. Therefore, political exoticizing, social marginalization, and generating stereotypical colonizing knowledge of the Other (the Balkans) function as the basic political and ideological questions that the geography of belonging tackles – and so does art, in its search of the decolonized spaces of freedom.
Different layers of the past, unreliable borders, and repetitive imaginations of the Balkans all reveal the problematic meanings of this geopolitical space in the attempt at redefining it in the post-historical and post-ideological geography of today’s neoliberal society. In her art-project titled Blank Maps (2016–2018), the above-mentioned artist Lana Čmajčanin visualizes this issue, using 32 selected maps which defined the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the last 551 years, since the Roman Empire until the signing of the last agreement for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as the Dayton Accords (1995). The point in which the artist’s project departs from previous readings and internalizations of geopolitical facts is the installation entitled 551.35 Geometry of Time. Contracting, overlapping, and summarizing the existing geographical, military, educational, and other relevant maps, as well as applying the usual cartographic methods and techniques of engraving, drawing, reproducing and, generally, representing, Lana Čmajčanin allows for a completely new insight into the statically objectivized history of this geopolitical space. She calls into question the geopolitical historicizing of Bosnian border, as well as the systemic fabrication of historical and geopolitical truths. Overlapped on a lit background these maps evidence border’s shifts, deviations and instability caused by colonial, imperial, conquering, migrational, martial, as well as ‘peace-keeping’ redesigns. Military and political inscriptions of statehood and sovereignty into the geographical landscapes of maps throughout centuries have become the most resistant and static loci of factographic history, which is never called into question despite constant changes in the dominant positions of power from which these maps are drawn. Monumentally conceived with a view to presenting “objective” borders, this installation makes incursion into the geometry of the course of history, since the expected and distinct borders are replaced with a palimpsest of previously subjugated and thus forgotten truths. Palimpsest as a metaphor, transposed from the textual into the domain of visual, questions the very linearity of historical time, as well as political and, above all, military strategies of geographical organization, thereby highlighting the repetitive patterns of creating (dis)continuous history and cyclicality of war. Čmajčanin does not only lend us a critical insight into the factually objectified and stagnant history of those who draw up geopolitical borders, she also makes visible the ebb and flow of borderlines. All these borderlines leave in their wake blurred grey zones of overlapping, dissolving, and reconfiguring entities which now call for the construction of some new and resistant artistic narratives: the ones of perpetual struggle against the forces which objectify, control and confine us, simultaneously keeping us in positions of political oppression and social exploitation, or in the state of perpetual crisis, that is, permanent war.
The art of resistance to imposed geopolitical determination, as well as constant endeavors to reconsider, question, and subjectivize it through ideologically emancipatory social politics, has brought about a condition of exhaustion, not only of this post-Yugoslav zone, but also beyond. In other words, the inability to leave the vicious circle of the geopolitical redefining of our everyday lives leads towards a permanent condition of conflicting geographies, with all the meta-meanings they bear due to the turbulent past. And in the present post-Yugoslav space, as the given examples of art practices show – most notably, Lana Čmajčanin’s Blank Maps – this past continuously signifies war. The attitude towards war in the politically engaged post-Yugoslav art is today not only marked by the politics of memory, facing war traumas, and the consequences of social deterioration, but also by an attempt to articulate common truth about the war, that is, to articulate the common place of the political subjectivizing of society. Post-Yugoslav art practices become a common denominator of what inevitably follows social utopia, which is resistance against the existing politics, which inscribe this geopolitical space with a dystopian world and its strategies of incessant identification between the conflicted, more or less significant, identities. These practices thus allow for the establishment of the new zones of revolutionary thinking and political consciousness of the liberated future society, at least within common meta- and counter-geographies, instituted through transgressive voices, visual inscriptions, aesthetic glitches, and other forms of artistic undertakings within and without the post-Yugoslav space.

 

Translated by Milan Marković and Tijana Parezanović

 

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