interview

• 
  Dunja Blažević

KP: It seems that your life path consists of a series of pioneering endeavours. Let’s focus on the first one, which was your work in SKC – the legendary Belgrade Student Cultural Centre. You were Director of SKC Art Gallery from 1971 to 1980, in its most fruitful and provocative period, when it set the basis for the spirit of youth arts and culture not only in Belgrade but practically all over the country – the former Yugoslavia. Seen from today’s perspective, where did you push the boundaries to the farthest limit?

DB: SKC of that time was truly a micro-territory of freedom. It offered programmes that were pushing the borders of the perception of art as well as the borders of social thought. Our projects and events had that innovative component and, in parallel, they were in line with what was called for in those days in contemporary arts and culture worldwide.(*)

But it was an event that was not directly connected to arts that actually proved to be the one with the deepest and farthest reaching consequences on a wider social level. I am talking about 1978, when the first Feminist Conference in Yugoslavia was held in SKC. Its title was “Comradess Woman” (“Drug-ca žena”) and it was a constitutive event for the entire Feminist movement, idea and practice in Yugoslavia. I accepted immediately the proposal of Žarana Papić from Belgrade and Nada Ler Sofronić from Sarajevo to organise the conference. Žarana and Nada had invited all relevant feminists of the époque, from the USA to Western Europe to India. We have to remember, of course, that this was the time of militant Feminism in the West, where Feminists had actual ground for legal battles for women’s rights. When I say that this was the peak moment, I also take into account that this event caused an uproar in the Yugoslav public. The authorities on the highest level (The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia) dealt with the issue and they had an unfavourable reaction to the conference as they considered that women in Socialist Yugoslavia didn’t have any problems whatsoever – so what was the need for this conference in the first place? The official perception in general – even in the media and press – was that we (the organisers) were “importing” women’s problems from the West and that this was none of our concern. For instance, Slavenka Drakulić had a harsh polemic in the newspapers with Igor Mandić, the famous and back then very influential journalist and publicist who was claiming that all the problems introduced at the conference were invented and imported. The battle was going to extremes, falling even to a very low level and introducing arguments such as, “They are all ugly, hairy and horny”! Luckily, it was enough to bring out mere facts, such as our physical looks and private statuses – we all had partners or boyfriends, husbands, children… So, it was evident that the problem was not in that area but somewhere else, and that it was much deeper. One needed to delve into the firmly embedded patriarchal tradition in these parts in order to detect, identify and analyse those problems. But this was just the beginning, the first step of a long journey that is, to this day, far from finished .

As a consequence of the Comradess Woman conference, I was summoned to the City Committee of Belgrade and was told bluntly that I had been holding the position of Director of SKC Art Programme long enough and that I should ‘withdraw’ or I would be ‘withdrawn’. I should not fear for my existence as another position in a museum or a gallery would be provided for me, but SKC was no longer a place where I was supposed to stay. I told them that this was out of question and that I would remain in the position until the end of my mandate, which was in 1980. I had been elected legally to this position with the full consent of all of my colleagues and that was a very important fact: one has to know that an institution such as the Student Cultural Centre was of great interest to political organisations within Belgrade University and there were attempts to replace the managing team, which consisted of young and qualified people who were there not because of their political correctness but because they were competent for what they were doing. I have foremost in mind the University Committee of the Communist Party led by Mirjana Marković (**) and her young devotees, who were eager to take over SKC. 

In any case, the conference brought about the turmoil because it was the first thing that the political power structures were able to discern as potentially subversive and problematic; when it came to art, whatever radical concepts we were presenting in SKC at the time caused problems with authorities simply because they didn’t understand them. But this event was ‘readable’ to them and it spelled danger.

This event was also important because it was the generator of continuous activist fieldwork, especially in Belgrade and Zagreb. This form of activism gained its new meaning and importance during the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, but I will come back to this subject later. It was also the seed for future Women’s Studies that came about much later. Interestingly enough, in this first generation of Feminists, the only artist who consciously articulated her Feminist stance was Sanja Iveković. It is only with the later generations of young female artists – war and post-war – that the gender issue became their artistic credo. Moreover, one could say that young female artists are now dominating the visual arts scene in these parts. This, too, is a consequence of the Comradess Woman conference.

Recently, I was analysing with some of my colleagues this phenomenon of domination of female artists – especially in certain fields, such as video, for instance. We came to the conclusion that this is so because there is no money or power involved. There where true economic and political power lies, women are either absent or present merely on a symbolical level of gender representation but not as equal participants.

With the outbreak of war in ex-Yu, the already well-organised women’s organisations all over the country consolidated and focused on work with refugees, raped women, etc. They were organising accommodation and all forms of aid for war victims and it was thanks to their mutual communication and the refusal to join nationalistic ranks that the aid activities were so successful. Also, they provided the ground for establishing numerous women activist organisations that are doing immensely important grassroots work, especially here in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We have to bear in mind that the past 20 years have brought regression when it comes to a great many social processes, including the position of women. So this new form of Feminism, with its strong accent on activism, is actually fighting for something that we – the generations of the 60s, 70s and 80s – took for granted. It is hard to believe from today’s point of view that women in the former Yugoslavia had benefits that are absent or questionable nowadays: equal salaries, less patriarchal pressure, right to abortion, etc. So these organisations are truly doing the groundwork in fighting for legislative regulations in that which we thought were elementary things.

KP: After your SKC period, you found yourself for the following 10 years in the position of Editor-in-Chief of the Visual Arts Programme of Belgrade Television, where the programme you authored – the cultural magazine “Fridays at 10pm” (“Petkom u 22”) – has had tremendous influence on generations of young artists and intellectuals all over Yugoslavia. It was the time when you probably had the most power in the public and social sense…

DB: … and also complete freedom! I was given carte blanche to create this programme according to my poetics and beliefs. Thus I had the opportunity to explore continuously that which was my primary and lasting interest: the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. It was precious for me to be able to create a certain climate and provide substantial information on the tendencies in world contemporary art for such a wide audience.

KP: Yet the power of your professional positions (Director of SKC, Editor in TV, Director of SCCA-Sarajevo) also meant that you were – and still are – highly exposed to public scrutiny. Given the fact that you have always opted for generating certain new processes rather than taking the already known paths, you also chose to struggle and fight for those novelties.

DB: It was always starting from scratch. This was the case with SKC since this cultural institution model didn’t exist in Yugoslavia until that time. I left Belgrade already in 1990 and lived in Paris until 1997. When I came to Sarajevo in 1997 for private reasons, I felt guilty. I think my generation didn’t do anything to prevent the terrible things that happened in the 90s. It is true that we (intellectuals, artists, urban thinkers) were a huge minority, but we were simply repelled by the events and passed through them as a knife through melted butter. When Milošević’s so-called “anti-bureaucratic revolution” began in the late 80s and was followed by Tuđman’s nationalistic reply to it, we reacted by saying, “This is not our story and it repulses us.” In fact, we didn’t produce any resistance. As Braco Dimitrijević said back then, “Ustashi and Chetniks are here, but Partisans are nowhere to be seen!” Hence this tremendous feeling of guilt, especially regarding the younger generations. This is what we bequeathed to them. As I was torn between Belgrade and Zagreb even before the war – and in 1997 those were not the places one would go back to – Sarajevo and Bosnia were somehow the nests for all of the lost souls – but also they represented the greatest victims of the war.

Apart from knowing people from my profession and collaborating with them, I didn’t have any particular ties to Sarajevo prior to the war. But seeing the degree of devastation on the one hand and the amount and intensity of artistic production that came out during the war, I decided I had to do something and to at least try to fill in some gap. It was a situation of creating something anew, very similar to that of SKC. I must say that I have been so lucky in life, because I have always had the opportunity to do what I believed in. This is a rare privilege. I didn’t make compromises and I could base my existence on that which I wanted to do.

KP: From the perspective of 2011, almost 15 years after you started with SCCA- Sarajevo, how do you see the goals that you set? Did you manage to attain them and to what extent?

DB: I was invited by my Sarajevo friends to launch the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art – SCCA – as they claimed no one over there could do it. Initially, I never imagined I would live here for a long time, but it has turned out to be 15 years. The Soros Centres for Contemporary Art have had tremendous importance for the artistic scene in all of Eastern and Central Europe in the sense of production, mobility, networking and information flow. Ex-Yu was different from other Eastern and Central European countries in that there was the previously existing institutional infrastructure of museums or galleries of modern art in Belgrade, Zagreb, Skopje, Sarajevo. Naturally, they were impoverished, but they could provide some continuity to the artistic production. Whereas in Eastern and Central Europe there were no such institutions. So they were literally building  the infrastructure for contemporary art from scratch, and in many countries those Soros Centres were the seeds for future Modern Art Museums. On the other hand, we had the horrendous devastation as the heritage of war.

When we began with the work, we tried to tend to the most urgent things. We had in mind the youngest generation of artists, who were the most deprived in their education and production due to the war. So we created our agenda according to their needs: repairing or allocating working spaces; re-taking public space for artistic production; introducing video as an artistic discipline. Unlike Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana, Sarajevo didn’t have any video production before the war. But during the war a lot of videos were created, often simply because of the necessity of young people to record the moment which might be the last in their own or someone else’s life. So we first made a research, collected a huge amount of video materials and made a selection of those that were truly authors’ videos. Then we decided that we wouldn’t fix our activities to a particular space but that we would inhabit various spaces according to the different natures of the projects. In addition to that, we formed a small studio for video production. In the beginning, it looked very much like the flower shop from the famous comic Alan Ford: one computer for digital editing and nothing else. Unfortunately, SCCA- Sarajevo was the last centre to be established due to the war and Soros was already getting out of subsidising arts and culture. So he was our financier for only three years. Our studio “Proba” has meanwhile expanded its activities also to film and commercial production in order to survive.

KP: Talking about survival: how is SCCA-Sarajevo financed?

DB: There is no money for SCCA as an organisation. We are financed on a strictly project-based principle. We receive most of support from abroad since local authorities still have no sensitivity for what we are doing save for some support for the studio “Proba”. We only have 2–3 employees and I am Director on an honorarium basis since 1997.

This is the consequence of the fact that there is no cultural policy whatsoever on the state level. Here is an illustration: each year, the annual award “Zvono” is given to artists who are pushing the boundaries in their field. The award is financed by an American foundation in 10 Eastern and Central European countries. The award process is conducted mainly by ex-Soros centres and it bears a different name in each country: in Slovenia it is “OHO”, in Croatia “Radoslav Putar”, and in Bosnia it is “Zvono”, after an artistic group that was one of the most innovative groups of its time in Bosnia. The award consists of a one-and-a-half-month all-inclusive stay in New York, where the awarded is based, in a centre for curatorial studies and they have a full programme during this time. The experience thus far proves that this stay is incredibly useful for the awarded artists, especially because we lack a valorisation system. Here in Bosnia, we have no valid art critique as we have had no studies for that until recently. But the Ministry of Culture of Bosnia-Herzegovina has no interest in taking part in this endeavour. Moreover, not once have any of the Ministry officials attended any exhibition opening, not in any museum or gallery! This should be of no surprise given the fact that the recent Minister of Culture stated publicly that he hated contemporary art. So this is the level we are dealing with, and this is the cultural policy we have. The good thing is that they are financing two big manifestations of international importance: the Sarajevo Film Festival and MESS. It seems that festivals are the only formulas to obtain money on a regular basis, as there is no money for any other kind of continuous production.

On the other hand, a positive trend is that there are foundations that are financing only projects on a regional basis, which is extremely convenient for us as the region is our natural cultural habitat.

Talking about artists, it was the first post-war generation that produced new values and created the international network for Bosnian art.

KP: As you have substantial experience with the modes of functioning of cultural foundations, what would be your recommendations to them?

DB: My best experience was with the Swiss Pro Helvetia as they were the most transparent and had very clear criteria on what they were financing and supporting. But their programme is now unfortunately coming to a conclusion. Otherwise, I think we are too burdened with trying to conform to certain criteria that boil down to using keywords that fit the application profile. Sometimes one has to conceal an artistic project within the context of social and civil activities and cannot even mention art.

We were also supported in recent years by the Erste Foundation, although, also, their criteria are not quite so transparent. As to EU funds, it is a cumbersome bureaucratic machinery that I gave up on even though my younger colleagues are dealing with it. In the end, more time is invested in reports and budgets than in the programme itself.

ECF is very useful and communicative but has very little funding for bigger projects. This is the trend in general: one should look for several funders and not for just one source.

KP: What are your current activities?

DB: The project I am currently involved with is “Women’s Heritage” in collaboration with the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb. The project is financed by the IPA foundation, as we could not find understanding and support – meaning substantial funding – within local structures. Also, the condition for projects supported by IPA is regional collaboration, which is the only natural habitat for all of us involved. Other partners are Belgrade’s “Women in Black”, Trieste’s “Casa delle donne”, Ljubljana’s “Centre Danilo Kiš” and SCCA- Sarajevo. Through a number of activities and a conference in Zagreb held in October, we want to explore the position and heritage of women in Socialism and revalorise the already existing perceptions of the issue. On the other hand, we are going to launch an edition that will introduce local authors who were writing for decades on various issues concerning women. Recently, Feminism in Socialist Yugoslavia became a hot topic among Western Feminist theoreticians and publicists, but we would like to present, through English translations, the insider views, rather than just being information points for outside interpretations.

Another project that I took part in recently dealt with political practices in post-Yugoslav art. It was a collaborative project of SCCA-Sarajevo, the Zagreb curators’ collective WHW, Novi Sad’s kuda.org and the Belgrade cultural magazine “Prelom”. The core of the project was mapping those crucial points in Yugoslav art of the 60s, 70s and 80s that are actually referential points for today’s contemporary artists and curators alike. We are talking about art that is questioning and criticising reality, live art that is taking its social responsibility both for the present and for the past.

 

Notes:

* SKC back then was hosting, producing and presenting the peak of local and global avant-garde and contemporary thought: from Marina Abramović to Joseph Beuys to Bob Wilson; from Laibach, Iggy Pop, Nico and Nick Cave to the London String Quartet and Berlin Chamber Orchestra; from Jacques Derrida to Slavoj Žižek.

**M.M., Professor of Marxism, politician, and wife of Slobodan Milošević, President of the United Yugoslav Left (JUL), the notorious party that was considered as the nest of the elite of the Milošević regime; widely considered as instrumental in the strategic devising and counselling of her husband on the implementation of his bloody politics in the Balkans in the 90s.

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