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

at just such an articulation. The artist and his mother go to Petrovo Selo, a place close
to Djerdap National Park in Serbia, in which in 2001 a mass grave was found, with the
bodies of Kosovo Albanians, executed by the Serbian army during the war in Kosovo. The
“National Park”, which for several years concealed the truth of the crime, in an ironical
and symptomatic way, becomes a symbol of a society that is not capable of coming
to terms with its own past. In spite of the fact that in Nikolić’s work the artist remains
hidden, that is, physically not present, the video represents his personal to face up to
the past - as individual and as member of a society that denies it - which he does on an
highly intimate a level - “making use” of his mother as guide who leads both of them
into the story of the family history and to the memories and landscapes of childhood, as
well as the dark recent past by which they are marked today. The mother also plays the
role of researcher and journalist; referring to old acquaintanceships and family links, she
attempts to find out from the people she meets in the village, as well as police officials,
where the remains of the graves are, which is in fact just a question that conceals the
basic intention to get the interlocutors to speak about the unutterable, about what they
would rather know nothing of. The immediate family of the artist, his mother and two
sisters are the only ones to speak in front of the camera without restraint, telling over
the pleasant and unpleasant anecdotes from the family history, evoking the key moment
of the film, the moment of parresia, the open speaking of the truth about one’s own “family”.
Of the past
The prospective framing of the project with the title Where Everything is Yet to Happen,
alongside the position of “radical uncertainty” - was also formulated through the posing
of an “impossible” equation: if the recent past is what creates the perversion of the
political, social and economic present of Bosnia-Herzegovina; if the recent past - marked
by war between its three dominant ethnic “communities” - is the only thing that this
country “has” and that still makes it, to a given extent, an object of interest to and the
patronage of the international community and the interest of European support to the
development of democracy, civil society, tolerance and multiculturalism; if this same past
is a key fact in the external naming and in the mechanisms of “branding” the cultural
and art production of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the “stable” and “well-ordered” neo-liberal
democracies of the west, apt to humanitarian exoticising and of fetishising the “suffering
of others” - it follows that this part, as well as the present paralysed by it, should be done
away with.
Do away with the past, not in the sense of a blind, escapist denial of its “reality”, but in
the sense of an attempt to delegitimize it, to destabilise the field of reference in which
it imposes itself as the only, almost “natural”, source of the narrative about present and
future. Such a destabilisation would be possible only by the creation of new narratives
(certainly also those of the past), new fields of reference, and they are, in the originating
point of the project Where Everything Is to Happen, turned towards the location of handholds
and footholds that enable the thinking of a community as a being-with outside
and against the essentialist and totalitarian construction of the community as immanent
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN