After the opening of Tito’s Bunker: the Forum on the Biennale.

SPEECH by Simonetta Lux at the 1st FORUM on the 15th December 2009 at the COLLEGIUM ARTISTICUM, SARAJEVO (BiH), on the project for the BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, D-O ARK UNDERGROUND which will take place in KONJIC (BiH)

Firstly, I would like to thank you for having invited me, as Director of the Research Centre MLAC – Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea of La Sapienza University of Rome, and as a scholar and the coordinator of the Transitional Studies research group, focused on the Caribbean (Cuba), Africa and now the former Yugoslavia.
Studies focused, I wish to say, primarily on the people/artists. People already recognized in the international field of art, the work of whom in a certain moment was intertwined with events that were more or less bloody, more or less induced by interests different in respect to those for the good of the population, in contexts of transition, from one political-economic regime or structure to another.
You say, in the rich description of the project of a Biennale of Contemporary Art, D-O Ark Underground, Konjic (BiH), which rightly obtained the CECEL (Council of Europe Cultural Event Label) European label of cultural attention, that this soon to be future location for art (a secret location, intended for the defence of the former Yugoslavia, a non-aligned state during the cold war, a place founded on the idea and logic of the fear of war), insomuch as secret, insomuch as an intact deposit of symbols and signs that represent your previous social, economic, political and ideological system, intact, in contrast to what happened to the monuments of the more than recent past, destroyed (1) during the war (1992-1995) that completed the dissolution of Tito’s Yugoslavian federation, will build a unique and anti-traditional framework from a psychological and intellectual point of view.
In truth, the Parliament of Sarajevo was rebuilt straight away, but, unfortunately, the same has not happened for the same city’s wonderful Library, that contained over a million texts and documents, antique and recent, of great worth for the history of the tolerant, multi-ethnic and multi-religious culture of Bosnia Herzegovina.
Certainly, this choice, which we know at the beginning was of the artist Jusuf Hadzifejovic, is significant. And is in itself able to immediately capture the attention of a Europe that was too neutral to not be defined as indifferent, towards the genocides that bloodied the Balkan region, at the end of the century.
But there is something more important, a sort of new start, from the end of the former Yugoslavia. As though to say: from the transitional phase we pass to the cultural and political project.
A transition brutally and violently interrupted by the combined hegemonic assault of Slobodan Milosevic (Serbia) and Tranjo Tudjman (Croatia) “assisted – wrote Toresini – by the Serbian and Croatian nationalist apparatus”, through a mass media constructed and exploited inexistent ethnic-religious conflict, based on the delirious racial theories of Jovan Raskovic and the psychiatrist Radovan Karadic.
“The lie of an ethnic and religious war, reported as such even by the Western media, and then condemned to miserably reveal its business content”, wrote Paolo Rumiz in his introduction to Il Tunnel di Sarajevo. Il conflitto in Bosnia-Erzegovina:una guerra psichiatrica?, edited by Angelo Lallo and Lorenzo Toresini (I ed. 2004, IV 2007), respectively, a researcher at the Centre of Studies and Research in Mental Health and Human Sciences of Merano (BZ), and the director of the same Centre, as well as the head physician of the Centre of Mental Heath of Merano.
“Sarajevo was buried under bombs because it was a multicultural, multiethnic experiment, to prevent it from becoming a paradigm. (…) But Bosnia would have disappeared and Sarajevo would not have been saved without the courage of the population’s force of resistance, that preserved the city from cultural and social destruction” (Angelo Lallo).
“The little Bosnia – wrote Lorenzo Toresini – with the wish to confront itself, instead of delegating, of convincing, instead of winning, of communicating, instead of building walls, can, together with many other Bosnias, contribute to function as a model (…) for the world’s big, which, with the logic of war and arms, are leading the world to destruction”.
The city of Sarajevo, from which the current cultural project began, together with the group of intellectuals, artists, poets and critics that are launching it, is confirming itself as the European symbol of inter-ethnic and religious tolerance and peace; that the former Yugoslavian federation’s ordinary citizens shouted to the world and Europe in vain, whilst being subjected, between 1992-1995, to political-military violence of every nature.
Not in vain, rather.
We can see it here, by your presence, critics, artists, directors of theatres and museums, of cultural centres, Radio and TV journalists, from every part of the former Yugoslavia (2); all people known in Europe, who were operating in culture and contemporary art before the upheaval of the Nineties.
One only needs to mention, amongst everybody, Borka Pavicevic, who, in Belgrade, lived with the consequences of her laic, democratic, interethnic cultural ideals; in a word, cosmopolitan.(3)
These presences and the project of creating a series of info-points and the realization of a series of forums, meetings, conferences, to take place, apart from in Sarajevo, in many other centres and cities, not only of Bosnia Herzegovina, but also of Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, as well as in European countries, to achieve the final realization of the international contemporary art event, appears to be full of life as well as reconciliatory.

I would now like to say a few words on the subjects that seem to be central to the project: the theme of identity, and the relationship between marginal and dominant culture.
There is no doubt that the objective of any cultural action, like this project of a Biennale of Contemporary Art, is the construction of an imaginary that will be not only publicly shared, but political.
In short, it contributes to the removal of obstacles to social and democratic development in the Balkan Region, the biggest of which, you will say, is getting over and “accepting the past”.
I would like to say right away that, in my opinion, it is not a question of accepting or getting over the recent past; it is more a case of – leaving judgements on the precise and individual responsibilities to the international tribunals – leaving it behind.
Who, in fact, could be able to accept the event, the last of the Nineteenth Century, of criminal assault and genocide, which, moreover, was shown to be outclassed by the extraordinary civil and cultural resistance?
I believe that culture, and the intellectuals of art and contemporary artists in particular, have to see themselves in the more general contemporary economic-political context in which they work. An international and European context, and therein, prepare themselves for the witnessing and designing of a present-future.
And if the central question of identity, that is the acceptance of diversity, together with the primary principle of tolerance, is cogent not only in the so-called Balkans, but – as we see – it is at least also in Europe, a response cannot be given imploding within distorted mentalities with which here, in the Nineties, there were constructed the inter-ethnic tensions and were carried out the Nazi-style procedures of genocide.
I would say, more so, to look at how the extremely strong motion of tolerance and democracy here, founded on respect for identities, is contradicted in its essence by the world of the globalized economy. 
And the economy and the finances of global brands, for their own success, tend to flatten and negate identities and differences.
And since without economy, the mourning of the past or pasts cannot be processed, any discourse must see itself within a project of alternative economy, its own and specific, of which – if you think about it – here there are all the premises. A compatible development, founded upon renewable energy and the already peculiar production of biological agriculture. As well as in the leading sectors of communication and information technology.
As Obama is attempting in the US, and as Europe would also like to, and as we are vainly attempting in Italy as well.
As for the role of the artists and this Biennale (that follows the other two that took place in Sarajevo before 1990), they certainly must be seen in the role of catalysts for a more generalized dialogue – that, moreover, was never interrupted, even in the last few dark years of violence – that will certainly take place.
It should not be forgotten that most never ceased the peculiar “narrative” and traces of memory in their work during the flagrancy of the events. Artists, poets, authors, those who take to the field with a sense of responsibility towards the new generations, well known, as we know, in the international world of art, and also legitimised by the so-called System that dominates western art, can testify to their fully legitimate presence and equality in the international scene (one only needs to think of Jusuf Hadzifezovic and Ilja Soskic). Many of them, in their work, both during the Seventies and Eighties as well as the Nineties, when many were constrained, by certain conditions (for example inter-ethnic weddings) or by their non-violent ideologies, to flee both from the war as well as from the concentration camps, have never stopped their superior friendships and exchanges with all the different areas of the former Yugoslavia, intervening with works and actions in territories that others saw as “enemy”.
Therefore, with this project, that will also tell of the perseverance of the extensive cultural circuit, even in times that violently demanded to reject them, will speak also of the alliances with the greatest European and International artists: from equal to equal, and not marginalized in respect to dominant. 
Certainly, in imagining the construction of a present-future, the building will be above all for the new generations, a model that cannot but be “original” (i.e. conscious), in comparison to the “dominant”, in force in Europe and the post-industrial globalized West.
The “common” character of “no man’s land” (a “place of construction of the imaginary”) is the only fertile place of change and development.

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(1) See the project description at Contemporary art in the nuclear bunker of Konjic (Sarajevo, Bosnia Erzegovina) and at Biennale Of Contemporary Art, D-O Ark Underground, Konjic, BiH. Description of the project”

(2) People present and participating officially in the Forum at the Collegium Artisticum of Sarajevo on the 15th December 2009: introduction by the curator Edo Kozic; the artist Jusuf Hadzifejovic; Branislav Dimitrijevic (Art Historian) from the Republic of Serbia; Petar Cukovc (Art Historian, already the director of the Museum of contemporary art of Cetinjie) from Montenegro; the Directors of the Biennale Project’s Associate Centres, namely: the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic Srpska in Banja Luka; the director of the Gallery Collegium Artisticum in Sarajevo; Simonetta Lux (Art Historian) director of the Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea of La Sapienza University, Rome (European Partner of the Biennale); Borka Pavicevic (who will be discussed bellow).

(3) Christian Elia (http://www.pacereporter.net, 12/02/2008) meets Borka Pavicevic, the Serbian playwright in a fight to decontaminate her country from nationalism: who founded the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade in 1993.
For this, in 2004, she was awarded the Hiroshima Foundation Prize for peace and culture, for her cultural activities in favour of tolerance, reconciliation and respect for human rights.
“The idea of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination was born when I and many other people realized, at the beginning of the Nineties, that Serbia was being prepared for war by the rhetoric of the regime. We wished to create a place where dissent would have asylum, a place that, through the language of theatre, fought the xenophobia with which the concept of the former Yugoslavia was being destroyed, and the legend that this had represented. We all know what happened, but we were also in the besieged Sarajevo, to keep a light alive that all those who were critical could see. We fought and we continue to do so.”
Francesca Rolandi, www.osservatoriobalcani.org from 21.05.2009
“The third edition of Dani Sarajeva, the show that reconciles Serbs and Bosnians in communal cultural spaces, has ended. Around 300 artists from Sarajevo have presented their own works in Belgrade. The thoughts of Borka Pavicecic, from the Centre for Cultural Decontamination
The third edition of the Dani Sarajeva show (the days of Sarajevo) has arrived, which takes place in Belgrade as part of the initiative by the TIHR, Youth Initiative for Human Rights. The idea from which the project was born is that of reinforcing, and in many cases creating, relations between young people who come from different areas of the former Yugoslavia. The chosen vehicle is art. The period in which the festival takes place, the month of May, has an intrinsic meaning, as it wished to recall the start of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992. One of the aims that the festival openly proposes is that of favouring a process of awareness of the wartime events of the Nineties, and of stimulating a debate on even the most controversial themes. (…)
Borka Pavicevic, director of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, declared herself to be extremely satisfied by the event: “It is the crowning of a long work, that began in the Nineties with exhibitions on Sarajevo, Tuzla, Srebrenica. From this year, for the first time, we have also had institutional backing, in particular from local government, which is without doubt positive. In a certain sense, time has worked in the right direction, from the moment that we were able to do that which was not possible a few years ago with the show on Srebrenica, which was refused an institutional space. The work of civil society is that of putting pressure on the government. In respect to the festival, in particular, I believe that the debate that took place on the 17th of May, the international day against homophobia, was very interesting. For once, a diversity that was not the national one was talked about, the pressures of religious authorities on civil society were underlined and certain myths that had entered into the collective consciousness were demystified”.

Translation: Lincoln Dexter, Masters in Contemporary Art Curatorship