Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

demand. Called upon to speak, we, representatives of the closer and more distant “international
community” found ourselves caught at the same time in a forest of speech as
well as in front of a wall of silence, which resounded with the question: what, in the first
place, can one speak about and what must one speak about today in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
in Republika Srpska, in Banja Luka, and with what means?
The conviction that art has the power to articulate speech and the political, that it can
“describe without describing” even what cannot be talked of, that it can offer not only
a “critique” of the existing situation, but also actively advocate new models of thought
and action, has been a precondition for the realisation of this project which - as it is most
often the case in the region - “[d]espite circumstances in which we are faced with a lack
of financial means, a lack of developed institutional infrastructure and professional staff
[...] represents also an experiment which proves that - with enthusiasm, committed and
tireless effort, self-organisation and a flexible “infrastructure of friendship” - one can
nonetheless not only (re)present, but also speak and act in ways that transform existing
institutional and cultural models and create a possibility of active participation of artistic
and intellectual practices in the public sphere.” 2
What follows is an elaboration of some of the subjects of this “speech”, the themes and
moments that make a kind of blueprint of the project, which came into being gradually,
obtaining constantly new contours during the past months, through the development of
our initial assumptions across multiple viewpoints, that reinforced its “diagnostic” and
analytic capacity; through meetings of the curatorial team, in an exchange and communication
with their individual focuses and contributions to the exhibition. The exhibition
“Can you speak of this? - Yes, I can” is thus the first chapter of the project, a kind of thesaurus
that opens a series of topics and questions, pointing at the same time to possible
future articulations of the project.
The artworks included in our own selection for the exhibition “Can you speak of this? - Yes,
I Can” have been selected in a process of multidirectional communication between the
initial themes of the project, their development through the initial discursive module
of the project and through discussions with the co-curators of the exhibition, as well as
their individual proposals of artistic and critical positions.
The works that we have included in the exhibition are thus, in many ways, propositions
intersecting and reflecting the whole process of the development and articulation of the
project and despite many other possible links are here united precisely by the common
denominator of questioning the very possibility of speech, describing the indescribable
without using description, and the emancipatory potential of the audacity of articulation,
even when it implies refusal to speak. In this sense, all notes and themes presented
in the text relate on many levels to all the artworks presented in the exhibition.
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN