engleski

The refugee/humanitarian crisis: performing documents-fragments – the real metaphor of the razor-wire

This article will demonstrate the way in which Croatian artists, engaged in visual and performing arts, reacted to the recent refugee/humanitarian crisis. The opening part of the article focuses on the works of the Croatian feminist artist Sanja Iveković and the multimedia artist Franc Purg, a Slovenian artist based in London. In their artistic practices they establish a parallelism between the refugee / humanitarian crisis and speciesism. In her video installation titled Resnik (1994), named after the refugee camp near Zagreb, Sanja Iveković deals with the crisis set off by about 2000 refugees mostly of Islamic religion in the early 1990s, simultaneously introducing and questioning the relationship between human beings and other species, that being plant life. Franc Purg, in his interactive online project, Aesteticized Information (2016), collects data from the Internet, including images and text on refugees and endangered species. The processing of data can be stopped by touching the leaves of an indoor plant, but only for a couple of seconds. Both works have been exhibited at the 51st Zagreb Salon exhibition in Zagreb, on the topic Challenges to Humanism, in 2016. The final part of the article interprets some additional performative and art/activistic works (I use the term ar/activism coined by Marion Hamm and Aldo Milohnić) with respect to the topic of migration – eg. Josip Pino Ivančić: Matilda! Open the Door ..., video (2016) ; ...Slovenski hulja hOP… (triptych – two photographs and a video 2016), the Call on Agitation, performed as a joint-performance by the Slovenian soft terrorist, songwriter, artist performer, and social activist Marko Brecelj and the Croatian multimedia artist Damir Čargonja (Rijeka, Istria, Croatia) in 2016, and the Schachtophone-performance Every revolution is a throw of dice, except that (2016) by the House of Extreme Music Theatre (Damir Bartol Indoš and Tanja Vrvilo). Call on Agitation was enacted as a multimedia concert, artivistic (art + activism) piece of performance art, during which Marko Brecelj also held an audience workshop on how to cut razor-wires on both the Croatian and Slovenian borders. In the second part of the paper I will interpret some activist practises in Croatia. Several months following the instalment of the razor-wire fence along the Croatian-Slovenian border, Slovenian police began to remove the concentration camp wire, announcing its replacement with a panel board fence, which is supposed to “appear more decent” and would not endanger the so-called “game animals” (a linguistic speciesistic term for forest and field animals). Among the locals on the Croatian side of the border the Animal Friends activists were among the first ones to protest by staging an action on Zagreb’s main square, on December the 12th, 2015, the International Animal Rights Day. Its purpose was to draw attention to the forest and field animals injured by the razor wire (e.g. deer, does, wolves, lynxes, bears). By crossing the human state borders, those animals are normally (naturally) disregarding the cultural nonsense embedded in those borders, as reflected in the hegemonic flag-totems, following the aphoristic ideas of Erich Fromm on contemporary political totems.

humanitarian crisis, performance art, artivism

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