Ana Sladojević
In: [Counter-]Monuments. Memory Practices in Public Space, edited by Maria Engelskirchen, Ursula Frohne, Corinna Kühn and Marianne Wagner
To be published by May 2025.
(please do not distribute except for teaching purposes)
*I owe some of the reasoning expressed in this text to the film screening and panel discussion held at the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) in Belgrade, on May 20, 2023.
Have you been there? 1:11
Who has the freedom to forget? 15:50
The film Aphasia is a complex, thoroughly investigated artistic reflection in three acts. As a term derived from medicine, aphasia refers to the difficulty or impossibility of verbal reproduction following the compromise or injury of speech-regulating centers. Used metaphorically, however, it describes social under-articulation that continues to obscure and normalize certain acts of systemic dehumanization. Two particularly strong tropes in Aphasia go hand in hand. One is technological progress and another is self-representation. Both are embedded in the imperial and colonial ideologies and their dichotomies, which produce radical vulnerabilization, and hence the imperilment of certain bodies.
Taking the longue durée approach, Jelena Jureša lays out a trajectory of similarities between the lack of enunciation in Belgium regarding the colonial genocide committed in Congo,[1] the refusal of Austria to acknowledge its role as an accomplice of Germany in the Holocaust during World War II, and the absence of recognition or true repentance in Serbia for the genocide committed on behalf of the state in Bosnia in the 1990s. Bearing in mind the invisible yet constantly brewing violence, Jureša points out that the escalation of such violence is not isolated or singular in its occurrence, but rather is the expected outcome of long processes of racialization, from which no one is exempt.
We’ve come a long way. 4:29
Illuminated. 3:11
The spiral gesture that guides us through the film allows us to grasp how the same subject is both produced by and the producer of the systemic, consensual dismissal of certain truths. The film starts with a male, presumably white, impeccably accentuated voice speaking in English, narrating with enthusiasm the mythologies of “discovery” of other lands, depicted as blank spaces on the map. The “boyish” desire for adventure echoes in images that encompass the lethal endeavor of colonial conquest. These include scenes of the brutal hunting and killing of animals, the accumulation of taxidermied carcasses in museum storage,[2] wounds caused by the production of firearms in Belgium (which were used to conquer lands but also in Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Este Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, instigating World War I), the atrocious, punitive severing of people’s hands in Congo, and the massive extraction of ore, rubber, and wildlife from Africa. Caught in the maelstrom of destruction that began with a seemingly naive wish for exploration, the voice gradually distorts, losing confidence and certainty. Not being able to keep up with the reality of imperial carnage, it collapses into clusters of incoherently assembled words and screeching, inarticulate sounds.
A life has to be intelligible as a life in order to become recognizable. 5:27
Your Golden Hair [3] 28:17
The taxonomies in museums and archives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries corresponded closely with the modern nation-state project, itself built upon establishing difference against those who—based on racial, religious, ethnic, and other criteria—did not belong. Despite the fact that in Europe, matters of race, racialization, and racism remain taboo, atrocities in the overseas colonies were never really outside of European realities—Europe is where they were engineered. Eugenics, which thrived in Europe during the World Wars, paved the way for experiments on racialized people and, consequently, for mass murders. The second act of the film features the Austrian medical doctor and anthropologist Rudolph Pöch—infamous for stealing human remains for his studies—who established the classification of individuals into ethnic and racial groups and captured such methods on film and in photography.[4] Using these recordings as found footage, Jureša interpolates them amid sequences of the so-called Heimat films—a string of nationalistic kitsch imagery that instructs how one should appear in order to belong to a “homeland” and nation. As two sides of one coin, these sets of images unambiguously spell out the racialized hierarchies that continue to inundate European realities.
The golden imperial light. 6:17
We have come a long way. 5:07
Exploration, conquest, and control over space and time come together in yet another object: the Golden Record, a disc with data about life on Earth. Its lifespan is anticipated to be approximately 1 to 5 billion years, and it is currently moving at the farthest point in the cosmos ever reached by an object made by humans, mounted on Voyager 1—the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. The opening audio message is by the former President of Austria and two-term Secretary General of the United Nations Kurt Waldheim—it is his voice that marks the second act of Aphasia, about thirty minutes into the film. Delivering the greetings aimed at aliens on behalf of the whole of humanity, in a paramount act of self-representation that owes as much to the imperial paradigm as other ideologically charged media such as museums or photography, he says: “we step out of our solar system into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship: to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.”
With a keen eye for the cracks in discourse, Jelena Jureša juxtaposes the Golden Record message and excerpts from an HBO “mock trial,” produced under the title Waldheim: A Commission of Inquiry (1988). Namely, three decades before becoming a globally significant politician, Kurt Waldheim was involved in Nazi crimes committed in World War II in Yugoslavia. During this televised event, criminal justice experts observed and debated the strength of actual evidence against Waldheim regarding his role as a Nazi officer, for which he was never officially prosecuted.
Exhibit 411/6. 35:21
A short clip from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, established to process the war crimes of the 1990s, opens the third act. The court registers the evidence number for a photograph taken by the American photographer Ron Haviv during the war in Bosnia. Although we do not see the photograph in the film, it is narrated by other means, in language and movement. Haviv recorded the moment immediately after the assassination of three people in the street of their hometown of Bijeljina, on April 2, 1992. Ajša Šabanović (also known as Tifa), Hamijeta Pajaziti, and her husband Abdirami Pajaziti, were killed in broad daylight for being Muslims. The perpetrators of this crime were the Serbian paramilitary (which was in fact state-funded), known as “Arkan’s Tigers,” three of whom appear in the photo.[5] One of them, captured from the back, in the act of a kick aimed at Šabanović’s head, is Srđan Golubović, a.k.a. DJ Max, well known in the Belgrade goa-trance scene of the 1990s.
On je poput nas. 53:12
Barbara Matejčić, an investigative and activist journalist from Croatia, led interviews with people who belonged to the subculture of electronic music, understood in 1990s Belgrade as underground, urban, and anti-war. Their accounts—as she shares in Aphasia—reveal that many of them knew that DJ Max was in fact the person in the photograph. However, they seem to find ways to re-frame, explain, or absolve him of his part in the war, to keep the idea of the anti-war youth culture of 1990s Belgrade, and hence of themselves, intact. Matejčić stresses one such statement: “he is just like us.”
On je poput nas. 53:18
These words continue to ominously hover over the repeating, hypnotic rhythm of electronic music by Alen and Nenad Sinkauz. They accompany the dancer and choreographer Ivana Jozić, who de- and re-composes the elements of the infamous photograph into different sets of movements The repetition is conjured up by her outfit and hairstyle, which make her Matejčić’s perfect twin. This is where all similarity ends, as, contrary to the journalist’s constrained demeanor, Jozić uses intentionally masculinized, forceful, and at times explosive choreography in the deeply charged and somewhat disturbing fugue that follows. The dancer’s body emulates, adapts, changes, rebels, re-enacts, screams, and repeats it all, as a traumatic, fragmented, unresolved memory that, just like a thorn planted in the flesh, continues to infect.
Have you been there? 1:11
The obscurity in which the unyielding spiral of silence seemingly perpetuates feels so impenetrable, and the rhythm so entangling, that I find myself completely unprepared when I come face to face with the DJ. In the diffuse light that dawns on a party, the fourth wall breaks down as he glances straight at me/us/Matejčić (who recorded him in Belgrade in 2017).
Aphasia establishes a precise diagnosis of a sinister, repeating disregard for another life. It is inscribed in our gaze and in our bodies by different technologies of (self-) representation that construct racialized hierarchies of being in this world. They are so intertwined with everything we do, that they have become imperceptible to those who have the privilege of remaining unmarked—of occupying seemingly neutral, morally transparent positions in such hierarchies. It will take countless rehearsals to unlearn such a normalized imperial framework that makes us not only accomplices but perpetrators. An injustice remains an injustice until it is rectified; the repair has to start by first recognizing it as such.
Literature
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. New York and London: Verso Books, 2019.
Dussel, Enrique. “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures).” In “The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America,” ed. J. Beverley, J. Oviedo, and M. Aronn. Special issue, boundary 2 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 65–77.
El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936.” Social Text, no. 11 (Winter, 1984/1985): 20–64.
Jureša, Jelena, and Branka Benčić. Aphasia. argos centre for audiovisual arts, KASK & Conservatorium, MER, 2019.
Sladojević, Ana. “Review of Cultural Heritage and the Future, edited by Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg”, Unesco Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnæus University, September 19, 2021, https://blogg.lnu.se/unesco/?p=2005 (accessed August 27, 2023).
Stoler, Ann Laura. “Colonial Aphasia: Disabled Histories of Race in France.” In Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times, 122–70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
Recordings/Webography
Conversation on the film Aphasia by Jelena Jureša, with the filmmaker, Barbara Matejčić, and Ana Sladojević, moderated by curators of the exhibition Working Woman Dejan Vasić and Ana Miljanić, Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade, May 2023.
Madlingozi, Tshepo. “Decolonization is always a disruptive phenomenon: On Social Movements and the ‘Decolonial Turn’ in Constitutional Theory.” Lecture, “Ukutshintshwa kwendlela/[Re] Directions,” seminar series organized by the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET), Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha), South Africa, March 2019. https://youtu.be/u_2m1dyrKuE?si=s5C3fC4tN_FUzGjP (accessed August 27, 2023).
Vesić, Jelena. “The Artistic Life of the Pioneer Plaque: The Exposure of Universal Humans, Spacecraft as Gallery, Cordially Meeting the Others . . .” Presented at the IZK Theory Lecture Series, Grazer Kunstverein, March 2018. https://izk.tugraz.at/semesters/the-artistic-life-of-the-pioneer-plaque/ (accessed August 27, 2023).
Zuma, Jacob. “Reburial of Mr. Klaas and Mrs. Trooi Pienaar: Speech on the Occasion of the Reburial of Mr. Klaas and Mrs. Trooi Pienaar at Kuruman, Northern Cape Province, August 12, 2012.” Province of the Northern Cape, Republic of South Africa. http://www.northern-cape.gov.za/index.php/news-room/news-and-speeches/152-media-room/office-of-the-premier/news-and-speeches/769-reburial-of-mr-and-mrs-klaas-and-trooi-pienaar (accessed August 27, 2023).