2018 Doc route: Yugoslavia Doc route: Yugoslavia
The programme “Doc Route: Yugoslavia” rises from an imaginary place – a place that, depending on the position of the story-teller, belongs either to the past, or to the future, or even, in some cases, to both. If one re-imagines it as a space and community of the past, its image and sound resonances become less and less abstract, taking the form and shapes of strong documents in and of the present, showing the way people and places from the past were once inscribed or described.
Established radical ideologies persist mostly thanks to a culture of silence, until some people start to talk, to ask, and try to transform (even their own) homes into spaces of (ideological) confrontations. Writers, artists, film-makers from all parts of the imagined Yugoslav land raised against the intellectually repressing primordial nationalistic ideologies of the nineties who were tearing apart not only the idea, but also the body of the community. And although the communities opposing the madness and breaking the obedient silence have taken new forms that don’t manage to establish themselves as progressive opposition forces, they still function as some kind of a warning to the carriers of the dominant traditional ideologies. They confront the shared practice of obedience, the pleasure, even, in obedience. They disrupt the rule of the ethno-nationalist polity.
These communities intensify the present to break with the continuous insistence of the populist-nationalist demagoguery of the glorious past. They revive the concept of responsibility attached to meeting and respecting the Other, and value it over the peace and unity of the silent non-oppositions.
The images of present-day non-conformists sprout from the glimpses, moments, even from the cuts of the images of the non-conformists before them. They grew up with their seen and unseen images, with shown and hidden family albums and stories. Thus, their present inscribes new echoes into the archives of our childhood, all of our childhoods, and the ones before us and after us in the peaceful land of brotherhood and unity, where images are in colour, and vacations are regular. Where punk is the ultimate social disobedience. They all say they were punkers, don’t they?
To re-enact from the archives holidays on the coast, the wedding of mum and dad, the last “Day of Youth”, the beginning of the wars: will this re-enact all our pasts? So that all the pasts – even the past of our past – will reappear, and finally be set free, as uncontested as every fully imagined imaginary past can be? Will we finally imagine ourselves and our imaginary place in the present? Will we finally meet the present, and talk to the present?
Will this recreate home?
Will this recreate the notion of us?
Will this stop all those who see war as our common? If we talk loudly about the present and us, will it be loud enough for the remaining obedience to past ideologies of ethnic purity to stop? How loud is loud enough for the war lords, the perpetrators, the war criminals to hear that we take no pride in their crimes? How loud is loud enough for the chauvinists, colonialists, patriots of all kinds to hear that the war is over and it killed us all? We are the reborns, and we do remember every victim and every survivor. And we will find their remains, their stories, their bones, their images. We will share them.
Former Yugoslavia or future Yugoslavia is a territory typically described by past or, as some would claim, future conflicts. This idea of the presence of an all-pervading conflict is what often translates into its imagery: contrasting, expressive visuality, often built from clashing, passionate, even tumultuous and haunting images…
We tried to incorporate diverse but distinctive cinematic works, produced over the last ten years by authors who somehow maintain the idea of Yugoslavia, both in terms of production – marked by creative collaborations across the territory – and in creative terms – marked by explorations of the cultural and political landscape(s) of the region as a whole.
Families gathered and separated around the imaginary community, while melting visions and projections of the different generations crystalized into utterly new discourses. The strongest disrupted the common sense of belonging with wars and conflict. They contested symbols, separations and divisions of all kinds. Some re-imagine present and future avant-garde communities based on old and new shared languages and symbolic expressions, so as to (re)create old and new shared spaces of imagination.
Shared language.
Shared images.
Kumjana Novakova
A programme by Kumjana Novakova.
In the presence of Dana Budisavljević, Ibro Hasanović and Mila Turajlić.