{"id":126661,"date":"2015-03-06T19:49:43","date_gmt":"2015-03-06T18:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.recom.link\/upotreba-cinjenica-u-umetnickim-delima-pozoriste-2\/"},"modified":"2015-03-19T19:12:56","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T18:12:56","slug":"upotreba-cinjenica-u-umetnickim-delima-pozoriste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.recom.link\/en\/upotreba-cinjenica-u-umetnickim-delima-pozoriste\/","title":{"rendered":"Using facts in art :: Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bojan Munjin<\/strong><\/p>\n

To Be Present<\/h1>\n

\"IMG_9079\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you look at the Initiative for RECOM from a sufficient distance in time \u2014 from that Sunday morning when past wars were discussed alongside art and facts (within the Tenth International Forum for Transitional Justice in Post-Yugoslav Countries<\/a>)\u2014 that meeting in particular could be said to have offered a moment of cathartic sublimity, or a heavy grain of drama. At one point, as in the fourth act of Hamlet<\/em>, all the protagonists of the Yugoslav tragedy, which we cannot forget even after 25 years, were gathered together – its victims, witnesses, drafted soldiers, theatre (and film) artists, activists counting the dead and helped the living, and also those now adult, who were still very little and who watched the human catastrophe with horror. In fact, the lives of many of those present on that Sunday morning had been inscribed with the multiple roles, mixing professional resum\u00e9s with human sufferings, art with awful reality, refugee camps with stage lighting, scars on the soul with sadness on their faces. This muffled internal landscape could be felt among the participants while they were still sipping their morning coffee in preparation for the conference, whose superficial outward signs made it look like any other conference meeting under the sun. Something was missing that morning, however\u2014something only a post-traumatic therapist would be able to notice: people were talking in small groups, but there was no loud or casual laughter. Only violent death, like some obscene fact, and conscience as the one remaining human reflex, had brought all these people together, transforming the seemingly routine gathering into a site of potential and perhaps extraordinary humanity. Looked at impatiently and with hostility, art seemed like superfluous decor here, because\u2014as though we know all the horrors of the Yugoslavia war by heart\u2014 for two and a half decades now we have been feverishly reciting hundreds of names, both those of victims and of perpetrators; how people died but did not have to, and how it all was but did not have to be. We bicker and shout at friends and opponents alike, almost blind with our endless recounting of the horrors of Vukovar and Sarajevo, of the Storm<\/em>, or of the refugee column near Kosovska Mitrovica, so that we are ready to die again if need be, proving only how deeply unhappy we are about all that happened, which we could not or did not want to prevent, and for which we cannot forgive ourselves or others. And so, to these people who have been swallowing fear and despair for so many years, a session entitled Using Facts in Art<\/em> could have sounded like an act of brazen insensitivity or some intellectual affectation. But that would have been the case had we been talking about comedy or humorous soap opera, or theorizing theater that morning. But that morning we were dealing with performances that spoke of past wars. The only \u201chumour\u201c there was perhaps black humour, also known as \u201claughing under the gallows\u201c\u2014the kind of humour that prevents people from going mad before the horror, similar to that of the artists who use irony and contempt for those facts that were about to devour us at the time of the war.<\/p>\n

There was a screening of an introductory video with segments of six theatre plays that dealt with the war in Yugoslavia and the facts surrounding it. One segment, from the play Hypermnesia<\/em>, directed by the Sarajevo director Selma Spahic<\/strong>, was especially \u201efunny\u201c, because it showed crazed residents of a Sarajevo skyscraper whom a soldier at the border orders into lines by nationality and then asks to sign a document confirming that they are voluntarily leaving their property…<\/p>\n