For me, this was the time of misfortune, of the Yugoslav civil war that dragged me in and swept me away, without my consent or will. And not only the years of fighting, from 1991 to 1994, but also the years after the war, up until today. On my Return to Rome (1996) I found that the anti-Yugoslavian left was against me as I was a Yugoslavian of Serbian ethnicity, which I continued to defend, convinced of the strong injustice of the so-called (leftwing) differentialists. My rehabilitation for work, of which I was in great need, was never put into effect, on the contrary, I was isolated (bottled up) with a clear bias. 
The art scene, the museums and the foremost galleries, able to re-launch, promote and rehabilitate, were closed for me. The critics and other interlocutors, as well as the other artists of the centre, coordinated a total negation in my regards, so my position, after the war, in Italy and in France, was wiped out. This pushed me into existential unease, like that of the war, but without the aid of the international Red Cross. This is still the situation, now, in 2003. I was subject to the rejection of the entire art scene, apart from the two critics Simonetta Lux and Gabriele Perretta, and perhaps someone else, but who did not have enough courage… a useless unease… I undertook the project Teatro del Pane. It was my fist time in Castelbasso, in an international group exhibition called Trasalimenti. I found a Seventeenth Century oven, a relic that I restored. I made the women of the town (a medieval village of 49 people) bake bread: 25 homemade round loaves placed on the floor; in front of the oven, still warm and smelling of bread, there was a rustic white sheet on which I arranged “magic squares” and the loaves. At the back, on the wall, in a niche, I carried out a “tableau vivant”: sitting wedged into the hole with a bowler hat on my head, dressed in white. The old oven became a work of art, included in the show that (for me) lasted the length of the inauguration. 

During the Nineties I carried out the following public activities: 

1991-1995: During the civil war I did various interviews for newspapers, radio and TV, with a strong and clear criticism of the war. 
1994: I met with Otto Tolnai and participated at the “Mediawave” festival in Gyor, Hungary; with a performance together with Lea Tolnai, also participating as a member of the jury for “auteur films”. Combined with a TV interview for the Hungarian Eurovision programme. 
1998: I was part of the exhibition Punto di fuga by Simonetta Lux at the Palazzo Colonna di Genazzano, with the project Clandestini. Five people sat on a bench, facing the wall, without documents, without identity (that gain legality in the space and time of art); a project that was never realized.1999: At the Teatro Argentina, Rome, I took part in the conference on the artist Alberto Savinio, invited by Simonetta Lux. I carried out a “tableau vivant” as part of the round table discussion, with Einstein’s formula E=mc2 written on the cone (of black card) on my head (the photo was published in the “Corriere della Sera”), it was also taken on by the students of the Faculty of Letters as the axiom of the demonstration No to the armed intervention in Yugoslavia. Subsequently, I was invited to take part in an anti-war debate at the Faculty of Physics of “La Sapienza” University. 
1999: The journal “Lettre International”, by choice of Rebecca Horn: I was part of the group of artists selected to pay tribute to the year 2000, for the new Millennium. I did Teatro del Pane, published over two whole pages. This is how I ended the Nineties; the years of unease and tragedy. 

Dall’alto:

Ilija Soskic, Traphos, Installazione, 1991. Moderna Galeria, Ljubljana

Ilija Soskic, Poiesis disciplinata (i corpi di Platone), o Alea, legno e marmo, 1994, a VRSAC.

Ilija Soskic, E = Mc 2, 1999, performance eseguita durante il Convegno Le metamorfosi di Savinio, performance- tableau vivant (l’artista, copricapo ku klux klan di cartone nero, con inscritta la formula della bomba al fosforo con una matita da trucco), Roma, Teatro Argentina 14-18 aprile 1999.