My colleagues from Prelom and I have recently organized the documentary exhibition related to our research about "the case" of SKC in the 1970s. The exhibition investigated cultural and political circumstances in Yugoslavia after the protests of 1968 - from the popularization of the system of socialist self-management and the notion of 'progessive cultural institution' to the ideological trajectories of Yugoslav conceptual art and its radical critical gestures. It took place in Škuc gallery in Ljubljana, the famous center of gravity of alternative culture in Slovenia during the 1980s. We gave it the title "SKC in ŠKUC". The title should sound like fun if you speak any of the languages of former Yugoslavia, with all its tongtwisting absurdization of the acronym fever during Socialism [both SKC and ŠKUC are short for Student Cultural Centre in Serbian or Slovenian], but this little game is barely translatable to any other language, and rarely somebody from "outside" can pronnounce it. Try for yourself - with a little practice, it should sound like "sh-kh-ts in sh-kh-oo-ts"...
The “case” of Students’ Cultural Centre (SKC) in Belgrade reveals important traits of a general constellation of the art and politics in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is the characteristic of strategies after 1968 to contain, pacify and institutionalize student or youth culture as an “organized alternative”. Like many other students’ cultural centres throughout SFRY, the SKC was an official state-constituted cultural institution offering young artists and cultural workers “roof over their heads”. At the same time, it was a place of avant-garde experimentation – the introduction of new technologies, new expressions, new forms of political activism and self-organization.
In the present cultural-political situation, the SKC is being both fetishized and marginalized. On the one hand, it is seen as a space of unlimited freedom and individual creative expression in the midst of oppressive, totalitarian state. This romantic and nostalgic view is usually followed by reactionary fascination with the formalist re-turn of language and symbolism of the (neo-)avant-garde, the characteristic of our post-socialist condition. On the other hand, inside the new conservative trend of re-constitution of national cultures, its historical contributions remain excluded from the contemporary system of evaluation. The symptomatic non-existence of the experience of the SKC’s artist, activist and organizational practices shows the erasure of potentially still viable strategies for contemporary regional cultural institutions. The aim of our research was precisely to extricate the concrete relationships and transactions between the artists and the institution in order to reveal the political genealogy of contemporary art practices.
Therefore, our goal was not to “discover” and historicize what is nowadays seen as the underground art practices of some “brave” individuals in the face of a totalitarian system. It was rather a call for re-examination, that could point to the possibilities of reviving progressive and critical experiences as they existed on the cultural, artistic and intellectual scene in former Yugoslavia, observed from the contemporary standpoint of post-Yugoslav situation in artistic and cultural production within the neo-liberal constellation.
The exhibition "SKC in ŠKUC" was thought out to be in the form of 'a notebook in the space' which contains various research materials - documents, images, texts, films, testimonies, researchers' notes - placed in a certain order. It actually had five untitled-as-yet chapters which dealt with the institutional 'inside' of artistic practices and with the 'outside' of related social surroundings. The main task for us as the curators of the show was to produce the documents, overcoming the simple contextualization of the 'found objects'. A few months ago we started to interview the main actors of the SKC, from the official institutional protagonists - the persons in charge for its program and policy direction, to the persons who worked in its institutional 'orbit', either as initiators and participants of different collectives and groups or as individual artists, critics, theorists and so on. These Rashomon-accounts of various witnesses became really challenging and Prelom Kolektiv started to think about making the movie, which would reflect those different positions by following the 'trajectories of truth' and political background of the story. However, all this may be a good plan for some future steps of the research, while now in Ljubljana we presented only the two most confronted testimonies - one from Dunja Blažević, the head of visual arts program and later the directress of SKC, and the other by Miško Šuvaković, the member of theoretical-artistic group 143, who published several comprehensieve books on Yugoslav neo-avantgarde. Both videos, as well as the other exhibition materials, will be available soon on Prelom's website.
Inside the exhibition "SKC in ŠKUC" we also presented for many years lost and recently found experimental film "Cinema Notes" [Kino Beleške], produced in 1975 by famous British-German director Lutz Becker in collaboration with Belgrade filmmaker Dragomir Zupanc and the group of artists, curators and critics gathered around SKC. The film includes verbal statements and performative gestures of the numerous protagonists of the 'New artistic practice' in former Yugoslavia, discussing the role of art in society and re-thinking concepts of 'form', 'autonomy', 'economy', 'politicality' and 'institutionalization' of contemporary art.
The other two film references were "June Movements" [Lipanjska gibanja], the early work of famous Yugoslav director Želimir Žilnik, produced in 1968 and for 1968, ending with the parole 'The Revolution Shall Not Be a Profession', and the documentary "Art in Revolution" by Lutz Becker, which I briefly described in the post on TV Gallery
For the end , a note about 'cultural translation':
While working on the project for Ljubljana we persistently discussed the language which will be used for the presentation of the original text. Most of them were written on either Serbo-Croat - the official language of former Yugoslavia, or some mish-mash Yugoslav which could hardly pass without a heavy proofreading in any of the national states [and former YU republics] which still share the same or simillar language. Slovenia is not one of them; together with Macedonia it had to introduce Serbo-Croat in the schools [as a form of linguistic self-colonization in the name of the State solidarity] and all the older generations speak this language perfectly. This is not the case with our generation and particularly with younger people, for whom this Serbo-Croat-Yugoslav officially represents a foreign language. They might know how to speak it very good [from either pragmatic or ideological reasons] or might not know of it at all. For example, for me Slovenian is [non]understandable in the same way as any of the other Slavic languages, being it Chech, Polish or Russian... We decided, therefore, to translate all the documents to English, [self-]ironicaly performing a neo-liberal mantra on overcoming the conflicts and establishing new mutual understanding through the common language of the European Union [where the newly associated Slovenia had a presidential role earlier this year]. In other words, after overcoming the totalitarian ideological unification through the formation of new national states [through violent conflicts though, which was not really European, but it was somehow inevitable, right?] we should normalize/or culturalize and to finally replace the language of ideology with the language of culture, as the most polite way of maintaining the good neighbouring relations.
During the process of translation from Yugoslav/Serbo-Croat into EU/English something strange has happened: some of the acts issued by the Yugoslav Communist Party started to show uncanny simillarity to the neo-liberal acts of the representative institutions of the New Europe.
Con etiqueta:
1968 in yugoslavia, ppyuart, prelom, self-management, skc
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