WORKING GROUP SC: Methodologies of commemorating sites of suffering

 

[BLOK] in cooperation with the Working Group Four Faces of Omarska

Readers’ group, public competition, workshop; SC – Savska 25, 13, 14, and 15 October 2012, 2:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Round table, SC – Savska 25, 15 October 2012, 8:00 p.m.

 
The need of speaking openly about the use of SC venue as a transit camp during World War II, and the fact that it has often been passed over in silence and missing from the official history of the locality, we have launched a cooperation with RGČLO and invited a number of people who deal with commemoration practices, individually or within institutions. We do not seek to answer the question “How should we commemorate the suffering at SC during World War II?”, but to raise a number of new questions and open up new ways of reflection, in which we will detach ourselves from the traditional approach to commemoration through sculptures and memorial plaques, in an attempt of thinking commemoration as a permanent process, a public space for resonating voices and knowledge that have been suppressed in the dominant historical narratives and representations. It is precisely that “suppressed knowledge” that serves as one of the starting points for RGČLO, an open platform that reflects upon the construction of memorials through the medium of Social Sculpture. By cooperating with RGČLO, we are applying the methodology of group work, which does not imply a fixed collective, but an open platform for “singular plurality.” Through readers’ groups, an open competition, and a three-day workshop on the topic of methodologies used in commemorating the sites of suffering, as well as a round table to discuss these crucial issues with the wider audience, we seek to include the problem of facing fascism (both historical and contemporary) into the public discourse and to explore the methods by which it will also remain a part of it.

The Four Faces of Omarska is an art project in process, which explores the strategies of memorial production from the position of those whose experience and knowledge have been subjugated, rejected, and excluded from public memory and public history; it reflects on the memorial site from today’s perspective, making visible the continuities and discontinuities of all the three epochs and four faces of Omarska: the mining complex of Omarska, an open pit metal mine during the socialist era; the concentration camp as a site of mass killing and torture during the 1990s and the wars on the territory of former Yugoslavia; the mining complex in majority ownership of the multinational corporation Arcelor Mittal; Omarska as a shooting locality for the historical ethno-blockbuster produced by the current Serbian cinema, called Saint George Killing the Dragon.

The three epochs and four faces of Omarska are deeply interconnected. They speak of the erosion of Yugoslav community, the fall of self-managing socialism, the brutal robbery of social property, and the destiny of its inhabitants in the post-war capitalist society.

The starting motif and framework of the art-theoretical Working Group Four Faces of Omarska is a critique of the recent cultural production in Serbia. It explores the following questions: Which policies stand behind these cultural and artistic practices, and what is the role of cultural and artistic production involved in the revision of the socialist past, as well as the denial and erasure of historical events from the 1990s that refer to war crimes? These issues are discussed on the example of the film Saint George Killing the Dragon, as well as the active participation of cultural policies in the construction of a new Serbian national identity and national history. Working Group Four Faces of Omarska takes as its starting point the attitude of Monument Group, according to which the system of representation is involved in the production mechanisms of war, violence, and terror, so that art and its apparatus participate in the continuation of war by other means.