Some days ago I had a pleasure to see the famous Dictionary of War - a grandiose 2 days X 8 hours piece of conference, a marathon performance, intellectual 'reality show', and finally the internet database of more than 100 of "concepts". The basic idea of the project initiators - Multitude e.V. Berlin and Unfriendly Takeover Frankfurt am Main - was that a contemporary war may function as an 'analyzer of power relations'. According to their opinion, the war today, the real war, 'serves to regulate rather than destroy existing power relations'. They suggested 'producing ever new wordings' as a form of intellectual resistance to this violent mechanism of regulation.

The participants of the event, performers, lecturers or 'conceptual persons', as they were announced during the event, all have used different theories, techniques, media and languages, producing new twists in the understanding of the notion of war. Therefore, entire event appears to be conceived as a conceptual war of the different approaches itself, or the 'war of concepts', as some of the participants would call it.

This edition of the project (the Dictionary of War is realized through 5 editions so far) was hosted by multimedia centre kuda.org from Novi Sad. Each of the editions is bringing 25 new concepts, each is performed in different city, recorded and as-soon-as-possible uploaded to Internet. The concepts are alphabetically ordered and available/downloadable in the form of short 20 minutes or so video-lectures. Streaming video works as a kind of preview, while the video files are downloadable only trough torrents and selected peer-to-peer services. The absence of the direct download definitely saves resources and funding (although the project seemed well equipped to meet high production standards), but much more serves as the introduction of a different concept of re-distribution and dissemination of the so-called content, thus embedding p2p production-distribution practices in the wider concept of the project, or acting "progressively" in several ways, to say.

The organizers decided to set the fifth edition of the event in the marvelous late modernist building of Novi Sad public radio. I've seen it from the inside for the first time. The circulation through the large open space with its lounges, speaking hall, cafes, staircases and bookstands, produced something of the atmosphere which I felt so strongly about only once - while visiting Ataturk Cultural Centre on Taksim Square, during Istanbul Biennial. This is the atmosphere of circumscribed perfection, in which modernist-aesthetic fetishism is jointed by the strength of our contemporaneity and its belief in the expressive power of knowledge. This is the atmosphere, which one can reject or accept, but it does not allow unexpected participations, or outer penetration of the content.

Geert Lovink describes the event as the ultimately internet-database oriented one, and disconnected with the concrete space of performing. I completely agree with this observation. The event is conceived for the purpose of producing an eternal Internet database and completely detached from the 'meat space' and it's performative here and now. The audience was not invited to pose the questions, and was rather left to self-organized discussions during short coffee breaks. The stage was designed by light and video projections, while the auditorium space was in the dark. Cameras and beamers, but also a lot of live recording and editing studio equipment and technical persons, it was all a part of the performance. We could literary follow the process of editing and preparation of the content for the Web. From the position of viewer it was also the 'reality show' event - a public video recording session. Producing a 'silent auditorium' as the outcome of the concept is the one aspect of the performance I found somehow interesting. Except for acting as the mis-en-scene in the recording session, the auditorium was, in my understanding, invited to think and contemplate. All this looked like a little strike in the midst of the inflation of the debate, which characterizes our contemporary society, and is strongly linked to all the forms of intellectual participation.

I attended the parts of the second day performances by Martha Rosler, Metahaven, Hans Bernhard, IRWIN and so on. Although all the presentations were formally brilliant and performatively exciting, in political sense I didn't always agree with what was said. I mostly had problems with universalism and abstraction of contemporary theory, stemming out of the well known 'cheerful resignation' and submission of critical thinking to the all-pervasive market of ideas. However, I liked some presentations given by the participants from the neighboring countries: visual culture theorist Suzana Milevska, artist Andrea Kuluncic and Vesna Kesic - journalist from Croatia.

Suzana Milevska wanted to show the connections between wars and namings. Her concept 'Renaming Machine' has pointed to the subtle but powerful strategy for erasing identities without causing any direct material damage. She took as the 'case study' an absurd outwitting game between Greece and Macedonia about the right to use the name “Macedonia.” A short remainder: Macedonia was, as one of it's republics, a part of former Yugoslavia – and obviously "protected" in that way from the Greek claim on it's name; after gaining independence, the name of this new national state was a subject of the serious offensive from the side of Greece, and still is; as the result, Macedonia is represented as FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). Greek and Macedonian governments all played their renaming games, Thessalonica changing the name of its airport to Macedonia (thus confusing unwary foreigners), and Skopje renaming theirs to Alexander The Great (considered by Greeks as the ultimate national hero). But Suzana points to the fact that this ancient historical dispute is just the excuse for this fierce battle of names, and she located the actual reason in much more recent history – 60 000 proclaimed communists were expelled from Greece in 1948, to be allegedly saved from the forces of National Liberation Army, which took over the power, and half of those were the children from mixed Macedonian and Greek marriages – later, only pure Greeks were allowed to re-enter Greece. The real fear is that the families of the expelled Macedonians, once within the framework of EU, will claim their right for possessions, which were actually appropriated after 1948. In Suzana's words, 'Renaming machine functions as a conceptual weapon of destruction, as a kind of wage war or a contest between the old and new identity layer'. Her presentation can be seen at http://dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/v2v/Renaming_machine_-_Suzana_Milevska

Vesna Kesic made live analysis of the internet and newspaper articles related to the case of Croatian song Danke Deutschland, sang on Croatian national television after the first recognition of Croatian statehood by Vatican and Germany in 1991. The singer of the song had gained a short-term local popularity through the persistent acclamation of the political and civic values of the new national state, as the titles 'Punish me as a woman' or 'Mommy gimme 100 kunas [*recently established Croatian currency] may witness about. The composer of the song armed his son Boris Novkovic with the equally persuasive weapon to represent the independent Croatia at the Eurovision contest, with the song 'Don't ever cry my Croatian sky'. The information about the Danke Deutschland song was immediately broadcasted on the national television of Milosevic's Serbia in the prime time news report. In the midst of both the real and the media-propagandistic war this popular thanksgiving was edited to include the archival materials from 1941, where Croatian fascist and supporters of NDH are welcoming German Nazi troops to Zagreb. The song was finally removed from the program of HTV on request of German embassy in Croatia. The entire presentation by Vesna Kesic, which shows all goods and bads of contemporary web 2.0 citizen journalism, can be seen at http://dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/v2v/Thanksgiving_-_Vesna_Kesic

Andrea Kuluncic, artist from Zagreb, widely known after her NAMA posters dealing with the position of the women workers under the transitional circumstances of privatization and mass dismissal of the workers, briefly announced her two recently produced documentary videos, and screened them for the public. The videos, recorded in the same place and at the same time, are representing the two different moments of Yugoslav history. The first was called “A Reconstruction of an Unimportant Day in Our History”, while the second was expectedly called “A Reconstruction of an Important Day in Our History” ☺. The first video reconstructs a relaxed day-in-life of Josip Broz Tito during his stay in countryside, in the Tikves castle. The second is showing the reconstruction of the meeting of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, held in the same castle in April 1991, a few weeks before the war between the two countries officially broke. For a period of time, a Castle was used as a headquarters of Arkan's Serbian paramilitary group. Nowdays it is ruined and looted. The videos are following the narration of the host of the castle, who meticulously reconstructs all the happenings of these two apparently disconnected visits. His reconstruction is pushed forward by the flood of Andrea's questions, addressed with the voice of urgency and insistment. Andrea seems to be interested in the description of the minor details. She wants to know the exact timings of coming and leaving of the presidents, what were the routes they used for afternoon walks, what was the duration of the lunch or what was on menu. Her investigation shows how the protocols for the political meetings of high importance are designed and what is the habitual décor of the politicians, deciding upon people's lifes. The minor line of the story that Andrea underlines here suspends the very event of war, but at the same time her usage of the suspense as cinematic narrative technique maintains the tension of its threatening presence. Andrea Kuluncic's presentation can be seen at http://dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/v2v/Reconstruction_-_Andrea_Kuluncic

Finally, I dislike the way that the project is contextualized here in Novi Sad, Serbia, Yugoslavia, South East Europe or Western Balkan - to list all the geopolitical namings in Suzana's style. I'm quoting the paragraph addressed by project initiators through the newsletter, announcing the 5th edition of the event: 'DICTIONARY OF WAR event will take place in Serbia where notion of war has a special meaning as a symbol of unresolved past, which in many ways determines the future of the territory of former Yugoslavia and its neighborhood – “Is genocidal war necessary for the organization of human society?” still reverberates through this region'. I find it a bit pitiful that intellectual-critical elite borrows terminology and political positions from neo-liberal, pacifist, EU-UN discourse. It was my biggest disappointment with the Dictionary of War, but at the same time it was an additional motivation to tell a bit more about the presentations of people who were re-thinking Yugoslav and Balkan conflicts from the less banal perspective. In that sense, it was also a pity that the group Spomenik=Razgovor [Monument=Talk/Conversation/Discussion ... it is difficult to make 100% of a symmetric translation] was not invited to participate in the event, since it contributed a lot to damasking the discourses of war and piece in this region. I'm planning to write more elaborated article on the work of this group in March, but maybe this report is a good reason to tell a few intro words on this topic.

Spomenik=Razgovor was formed on the occasion of competition for artistic proposition for the Monument to the 'Soldiers and victims of wars on Yugoslav territory in 90s', initiated by the City Council of Belgrade. It was analyzing ideological discourses of peace and politics of memory, criticizing the framework of a competition and the invitation text and re-thinking the role of artists in such circumstances. The activity of the group and administrative struggle with the City Council were postponing the building of monument over the four years period, and were the cause for the three unsuccessful competitions. Now the group works on archiving and representing of all this processes.

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P.S.
I visited Novi Sad on January 26th 2008. I had coffee chat with Thomas Campbell – a member of What is to be done platform platform from St Petersburg. We talked about representations of Central European petit-bourgeois identity, about Serbian-Russian friendship and about the weather. Thomas tolerates temperatures between -10 and 10 degrees. Me, between 15 and 25. We visited the exhibition of Kosovo Art in Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina and had short conversation with curators. We discussed about nationalism and state, about critique and contemporary art. Some of the artworks from this show were vulgarly appropriated by Serbian politicians during the presidential election campaign. I'll write about the exhibition and its discontents in the one of my upcoming posts. Thomas said that exhibition of art from Chechnya is not possible in the Moscow today.

We came to the conference at 3:00 pm, with a little delay. I briefly saw part of Zelimir Zilnik's presentation and took a walk around the building together with Vlidi, exploring all the back-stage and off-stage aspects of the event. Parts of our joint conclusions ended up in this report. We stayed at the conference up to the very end, which was almost 11:00 pm. We were a rare and quite faithful public, who came from some other city [not so far away though] to spend 8 hours listening to Dictionary of War and chat in the cafe with numerous 'conceptual persons'. On the way back to Belgrade I was thinking about Boris Groys and his ideas on competition between artist and terrorist in representing reality of war. His central thesis was something like that terrorist and warriors themselves begin to act like artists, like fast and efficient image producers who make the events relevant by portraying them. While in the old times artist had a power to witness 'heroic action' and to inscribe it into the memory of the humankind, today every act of terror or act of war becomes immediately registred, represented, described, depicted, narrated and interpreted by the media. "By pushing a button that makes a bomb explode, a contemporary warrior or terrorist pushes a button that starts the media machine" - reads famous and brilliantly formulated sentence by Groys which I'm re-typing for this occasion from the Critical Reader: 'Concerning War', published by BAK, Utrecht. Maybe one of the problems of taking the position of 'conceptual person' in the 'Dictionary of war' lays in it's parallel of taking the position of artists who participates in the competition described by Boris Groys and who are completely assimilated by the logic of this competition.
As I was traveling to Belgrade with Vlidi, Vladan Jeremic and Rena Raedle (who drove brilliantly, and I learned that back in Germany she even drove real trucks), we talked a lot about self-organized initiatives in Serbia, about the lack of political articulation and collective thinking and acting. We also discussed the problem of 'overproduction of critical content' in the independent NGO/NPO cultural sector, through which the quality of serious thinking considering broader conditions and framework of production disappears. Maybe this can be also seen as one of the problems of the projects like Dictionary of War.