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

GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN
the same time share the common denominator upon which identity is formed - the idea
of the nation or in the case of the region of the former Yugoslavia and in particular of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the idea of the common ethnic identity. 7 In his elaboration of the
proposition about the modes in which ethnic identity is produced Vlaisavljević observes
that ethnic politics rests upon narrative pragmatics - the ethnic identity is always created
by the telling of the “most important stories”, and these are always, in this region,
war stories. War in this sense is not just a means that is used when nothing else avails,
rather it is “the most important experience” and always again appears as a source of
cultural values and ethnic identifications. For that reason then every politics today in
Bosnia-Herzegovina is war politics, and all the collective actors in politics are war subjects
and, if we talk of the inescapability of reconciliation, we are forgetting that those
who are to be reconciled are constituted in their own being precisely as war subjects.
In this sense, Vlaisavljević suggests - for them, reconciliation would be literally self-destruction.
How then radically to do away with the past and destabilise those war subjects
who rest on the telling of the “most important tales”? Can speech occupy the place of the
tale, tale as tale of the past, tale as delusion? It is necessary, however, to expose oneself
to the truth, to confess, to lay bare, to reveal oneself in speech as action, to put an end to
the past via direct statement.
On June 4, 2005 Liu Wei went with camera into Xinhuam University in Beijing asking the
students one simple question: what day is it today? Most of them replied that today is
that day in the week, that date. But when he insisted, the students looked away, covered
their faces, turned and went. What Liu Wei strikingly shows in the piece A Day to Remember
is the moment of withheld speech, speech that does not happen, speech emptied
of the potential of action - but indirectly thus draws attention to what is dangerous in
speech, its power, its political and transformative potential. The reaction of passers-by
here is the pith of the manner in which the unutterable is manifested, as well as of what
has been erased from the collective memory. After an attempt to talk with the students,
Liu Wei went to the scene of the crime itself, to Tiananmen Square, in order to shoot its
calmness, its simple everyday life, in which, for the collective progress to happen, it is
necessary to keep quiet about things that disturb its unstoppable movement. The experience
of repression, experience of crime, experience of traumas, are internalised and
suppressed as something about which one can tell, but not speak. 8
In what manner can one articulate crime and yet surmount the unambiguous role of
perpetrator, victim, accomplice and observer? Who is it that should speak, and with what
means, if he or she wants to avoid just the telling of (the “true”) stories, the establishment
of the “fundamental interpretations”? Speech happens elsewhere, negotiations and
judgements happen elsewhere, in the same “international community”, outside the territories
in which the past is its future and in which it is only possible to wait for speech
and the political to once again step into the sphere of the public?
The speech of victims, however, is what we most often hear - in the media, in documentary
films and works of art. However, how is one to proceed with the role of the perpetrator,
or of someone who by belonging to a certain community or nation is prompted
to identify with the perpetrator? National Park, a video by Dragan Nikolić is an attempt