Performance, Space, Utopia

Cities of War, Cities of Exile

S. Jestrovic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137291677
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Over 20 years after the war in Yugoslavia, this book looks back at its two most iconic cities and the phenomenon of exile emerging as a consequence of living in them in the 1990s. It uses examples ranging from street interventions to theatre performances to explore the making of urban counter-sites through theatricality and utopian performatives.

Part I
Belgrade: The City of Spectacle

THE SPECTACLE IS NOT a collection of images; rather, it is a form of social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle

In my attempt to understand and explain Belgrade as a city of spectacle, I turn to Guy Debord’s famous concept. It suggests that the nature of spectacle is all-encompassing and its power seductive. Of course, Belgrade could never have epitomized Debord’s metropolis of the highly developed Western world. As a city situated on its geographical and economic edges, the ‘wonderments’ of Belgrade are not manufactured so much through power and capital, but rather through a permanent state of crisis.

In 1967, when Debord wrote The Society of Spectacle, his seminal work that inspired the student uprising in France in 1968, Belgrade was the capital of socialist Yugoslavia under the steady and firm rule of President Tito. Nevertheless, the events in France and the United States had an impact on the students of Belgrade University, who were dissatisfied with the existing social climate and began protesting in June 1968, much in the manner of their fellow students in France. The root of their dissatisfaction was not capitalist society, but the increasing inequality of their socialist state. The students, joined by a number of faculty members, ‘occupied’ the Faculty of Philosophy over a period of several days. Just when the riot police were about to take over, President Tito, surprisingly, appeared on national television to address the students and to welcome their criticism. Reportedly, Tito then joined the protesters in the traditional dance of kolo symbolically marking the end of the student unrest. As a result, the protests were quickly defused and the status quo was restored. In The Society of Spectacle, Debord distinguishes between two kinds of spectacular power – the concentrated, which has epitomized regimes prone to totalitarianism; and the diffuse, which has represented the Americanization of the world. The spectacular power that shaped Belgrade in the late 1960s in its capacity to absorb and water-down political unrest – as embodied in Tito’s sudden alliance with the protesting students – and, under different guises into the late 1980s, epitomized a velvet-gloved version of Debord’s concentrated spectacle.

In her book, How we Survived Communism and even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić describes an Eastern European version of the other aspect of Debord’s notion – the diffuse spectacle:

In the newspaper and on TV revolutions looked spectacular: cut barbed wire, seas of lighted candles, masses chanting in the streets, convulsive embraces and tears of happiness, people chiselling pieces from the Berlin Wall. A famous Hollywood director once said that movies are the same as life with the boring parts cut out. I found that this was precisely right. The boring parts of the revolution had simply finished up on the floors of television studio cutting rooms all over the world. What the world has seen and heard were only the most dramatic and symbolic images. That was all right, but it was not all. Life, for the most part is trivial.

(p. xiv)

The main trait of the Americanization of the world, which for Debord is the core of the diffuse spectacle, has to do with the ‘freedom of choice to the vast range of new commodities now on offer’ (Comments on the Society of Spectacle, p. 8). Filtered through the modern media, the end of communism and the disintegration of the Eastern Block – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the carnage in the Balkans – might appear as offerings for consumption, but that is not the only aspect which turns these events into spectacles. Drakulić highlights the process of ‘editing’ and the part it plays in the Hollywoodization of the events. In this fictionalization of Eastern Europe however, the loss of the trivial is not so much a loss of the ordinariness of existence, as a loss of its political complexity. Spectacular society of any kind thrives on simplifications. The freedom of choice that the diffuse spectacle brings presupposes a cancellation of ambiguities that provides a Hollywood ending for the fall of the Berlin Wall, or a consumer-friendly, good guys versus bed guys scenario of the bloodshed in the Balkans. The question is: how do the perception and the memory of the real, from the perspective of both onlookers and participants, impact the relationships and actions in a society? What is the actual guiding force – is it a complex reality both extraordinary and banal, riveting and boring? Or is it a somewhat less ambiguous but more entertaining version?

From the late 1980s to the present day, Belgrade has become a city that reinvents itself through various forms of spectacle. Elements of both – the concentrated and the diffuse spectacle – have shaped Belgrade as a city of competing and contesting spectacles and counter-spectacles. In 1989 – the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the peaceful collapse of communist regimes across Europe, and of the Chernobyl catastrophe – Debord published Comments on the Society of the Spectacle only to diagnose that the spectacular society had entered a new and even more powerful phase. Debord recognized that the two types of spectacular power – the condensed and the diffuse – have amalgamated into an integrated spectacle that now permeates all of reality. For Debord, the synthesis of defused and condensed spectacle has been shaping a global system of domination marked by features such as generalized secrecy, increased technological renewal, and the integration of state and economy. Yet in the integrated spectacle of liberal democracy, he recognizes roots and traits of both capitalist and totalitarian regimes:

Whereas Russia and Germany were largely responsible for the formation of the concentrated spectacle, and the United States for the diffuse form, the integrated spectacle has been pioneered by France and Italy. The emergence of this new form is attributable to a number of shared historical features, namely, the important role of the Stalinist party and unions in political and intellectual life, a weak democratic tradition, the long monopoly of power enjoyed by a single party of government, and a need to eliminate an unexpected upsurge in revolutionary activity.

(Comments on the Society of Spectacle, pp. 8–9)

In the late 1980s, from a cultural and political climate that shares most of the aforementioned attributes of the integrated spectacle, albeit in different proportions and different ideological frameworks largely dominated by a combination of communism and nationalism, Belgrade emerged as a spectacular city.

The same year that Debord’s Comments were published, Slobodan Milošević reached the peak of his popularity and became President of Serbia, further fuelling the nationalistic frenzy across the country. Although his regime thrived on Tito’s legacy of concentrated spectacle, a society of integrated spectacle started to emerge in tandem with nationalism, offering itself as a new ideological possibility and even a new lifestyle, not only in Serbia but across Yugoslavia. It appeared on different levels from the awakening of individual religious zeal to the introduction of pluralism into the political system giving rise to numerous political parties, most of them with nationalist orientations. At the time of Debord’s suicide in 1994, the spectacle of bloodshed in the Balkans, filtered and packaged for consumption through mass media, emerged as yet another form of integrated spectacle. This integrated spectacle acquired new layers, hovering between images of mass graves on one side, and the wonderments of the capitalist market on the other.

Aska and the Wolf : counter-spectacles

Against this backdrop, Belgrade has embodied a spectacle of both radical integration and resistance, where the binaries of the concentrated and the diffused spectacle have given way to an even deeper ethical ambiguity. Belgrade became a Janus-faced city: the centre of Milošević’s war-mongering machine and the focal point of its most stubborn resistance in Serbia – with numerous intertwined and problematic layers in between. For over a decade, downtown Belgrade was turned into a stage of political struggle where performance and daily life, politics and spectacle, state power and its opposition, constantly competed. Belgrade became a site where dramaturgies of political protest were exercised. These activities fell in line, by and large, with the global protests that, as Baz Kershaw argues, have ‘developed a new range of performative strategies. Through these strategies, protest has gained new kinds of synecdochic relevance to its socio-political contexts, and this suggests that it has drawn on new sources for radicalism in performance.’ (The Radical in Performance 109–10).

The events of political protests against the regime (from 1991 to 2000) emerge as counter-spectacles since they try to resist an imposed illusory unity. Debord claims that the ‘spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.’ (Comments to the Society of Spectacle, p. 12) However, the counter-spectacle, even when it tries to invent its own means and its own vocabulary, does not seek an alternative to the spectacular, but its contrary. For the political protests of the Serbian opposition, spectacle was a necessary strategy of both maintaining the momentum of the resistance and of capturing the attention of the world media.

It was late Saturday morning on 9 March 1991, three months before the civil war, when the first big riot of the opposition against the regime of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević took place. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the heart of Belgrade – then the capital of Yugoslavia. Protesters filled the main city square around the monument of Knez Mihailo in front of the National Theatre and were spreading out into the main pedestrian zone of Knez Mihailova street. They demanded free media, open access to information and called for an end to Milošević’s presidency. When the police tried to prevent the leaders of the democratic opposition from addressing the crowd, Vida Ognjenović, the artistic director of the National Theatre, opened the door of the building and allowed the protest to continue in the theatre balcony.¹ To stop the riot, the regime deployed the army, sending tanks into the streets of Belgrade. The protest became violent, the police fired water cannons and tear gas at the protesters, stones were thrown at shop windows, cars turned upside down. Walking home from the protest through back alleys, eyes still itchy and watery from the tear gas, I remember passing people with bruised faces and broken noses, and yet the only thing I could think of was Patti Smith’s song ‘People Have the Power’.² In a way, that particular slice of real life was so extraordinary and dramatic to experience, that in that given moment, it could only be comprehended through metaphors and vocabularies not so much of politics, but rather of performance. Hence the Patti Smith song emerged in the midst of chaos.

A few hours later, the official tally of the protest was announced: two people were killed – a young protester and a policeman – a number of protesters suffered serious injuries, and together with over a hundred of his fellow citizens, one of the leaders of the Serbian opposition, Vuk Drašković, was arrested. Late that night, disturbing, uncanny sounds could be heard in the city centre – regular traffic had disappeared as long convoys of tanks advanced down the city boulevards. They almost sealed off the zone around the National Theatre and the Knez Mihailo monument. The next morning, I walked to the protest site. Parts of the pavement were still covered in broken glass. The square and the surrounding streets were unusually quiet and deserted. The military presence and their tanks made the familiar city veneer seem strange. The scenery was dominated by grey sky and olive green metal.

In the afternoon, word was out that a peaceful vigil would take place near Terazijska Česma – a drinking fountain built in the nineteenth century in memory of one of Serbia’s rulers. The fountain was located on Terazije square, another city centre landmark, within walking distance from the National Theatre and Knez Mihailova Street. That day, the military closed off the area from traffic and, as night fell, the square and the Terazije strip filled with people, most of them university students. They demanded liberation for the arrested citizens and the resignations of the leading figures of the regime, whom they held responsible for the violent outcome of the protest on 9 March. The evening was cold and the atmosphere solemn. It felt as if the city was dissolving under the weight of tanks that stared blankly at us like gigantic caterpillars. Every once in a while there was a rumour that the authorities had decided to put an end to the protest and that they were sending in more tanks and soldiers, this time not just to throw tear gas. Soon after we gathered on Terazije, an improvised stage was erected in front of the fountain. One of the leading young actors at the time, Branislav Lečić,³ took the stage asking the assembled crowd to stay put until the army was recalled and the streets of Belgrade were returned to civilians. Almost without interruption, he remained on that stage for several days and nights serving as a kind of MC. Other local artists joined him, keeping the spirits of the protesters high and the constant threat of Milošević’s police and army at bay.

There is a story by Yugoslavian Nobel Prize laureate Ivo Andrić, titled ‘Aska and the Wolf’. Aska is a beautiful sheep that loves to dance. One day, while she is playing in the woods, the Wolf comes to catch her. Full of fear, almost involuntarily, Aska’s little body begins to move, morphing into a beautiful dance. She performs wonderfully, better than ever before. The Wolf watches, surprised, puzzled, bewildered, and Aska dances away into freedom. On those cold March nights in Belgrade, all the performing, singing, dancing, chanting, both on the improvised stage and among the crowd, was an intuitive survival strategy – an act of ‘bewildering the Wolf’.

Less then a couple of months later, the first victims fell to the ongoing sporadic military conflicts in Croatia; in the summer, after a short war, the Republic of Slovenia separated from Yugoslavia; and by the fall of that year, the conflict in Croatia had escalated. The city of Vukovar was destroyed and the coastal towns of Zadar and Dubrovnik were shelled, while thousands of refugees were fleeing Croatia towards Serbian and Bosnian borders. After March 1991, street protests against Milošević took place in regular intervals from anti-war processions and vigils in the early 1990s and the student demonstration in 1992, to a three-month-long street protest in 1996–97 and numerous public subversions by the political organization Otpor (Resistance),⁴ non-governmental groups such as Women in Black, and, last but by no means least, artists and alternative performance troupes including Dah Theater, Centre for Cultural Decontamination, Plavo pozoriste (Blue Theatre), Škart and others. Well-known scenarios of political demonstrations were replayed, often altered and rejuvenated by innovative concepts and through their use of wit and humour. In general, anti-regime protests responded to the various events that ensued in the dramatic political life of the region in a multitude of ways (Illustration 1).

Illustration 1 Kunstlager, ‘Photographing’ [Slikanje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cities of War, Cities of Exile
• Part I Belgrade: The City of Spectacle
• Part II Sarajevo: Imaginaries and Embodiments
• Part III City of Exiles
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index