Prethodno priopćenje
https://doi.org/10.31664/zu.2021.108.02
Prolonging Trauma. The Homeland War and Contemporary Croatian Photography – Prethodno priopćenje / Preliminary Paper
Sandra Križić-Roban
; Institut za povijest umjetnosti, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
Photographs related to the Homeland War in Croatia were partly taken during the conflict (1991–1995), and partly in the aftermath of the destruction and suffering, when artists recorded their consequences and used visual content to discuss the complex processes of memory and remembrance. While photographs taken during the war are often considered to be evidence, but also propaganda, and most of them are characterized by documentary and reportage approach, this paper singles out several artistic series that interpret traumatic events and reflect on their meaning through creative processes of conceptualization, as well as those that are reminiscent of archival structures and specific ways of storing visual and other types of knowledge. In addition, attention is paid to the topic of landscape, which recent photographic practice, but also theoretical writing often associate with trauma. In writing on photography in Croatia, image of the Homeland War are mainly reduced to a reportage approach that is made available through print and electronic media. Still, the introduction of the theme of trauma into artistic discourse has revealed a need for using (and, consequently, creating) a kind of structure that would make it possible to record the suffering of others by more or less methodical visual means. The freely understood notion of archives, as well as landscape that is primarily understood as a contemplative and only secondly a geological formation, have been used in the context of intimate, non-institutional “storages of objects” and layers of memory and history, whereby their introduction into the common context counts on individual artistic approaches and unpredictable meanings that arise from them. Three series were created during the war: Darko Bavoljak came across the ruined remains of the company Budućnost that operated in Eastern Slavonia, and focused on a specific typography that unequivocally points to the time of the company's founding and the political context that is recognized and inscribed through it. The series by Pavo Urban, created on the 6th December 1991, owes its iconic status primarily to the fact that the young artist died while filming it, while capturing the threatening, melancholic atmosphere of the environment he came from. Almost at the same time, Antun Maračić created his series Ne-grad i njegov subrealizam [Non-City and its Subrealism]. We interpret it along the lines of documentarism, while the very title of the series and the specific atmosphere of nothingness emphasize the conceptualized fragmentariness and the feeling of nausea, prompted by the endangerment of life and the nullification of urban characteristics of the place where the photographs were taken. Younger generations who did not directly witness war-time devastations approach this topic with a different motivation, such as Bojan Mrđenović who also photographed the remains of the Budućnost company in Eastern Slavonia. He sees them primarily as metaphors of conflict and a general attitude toward the legacy of socialism and the ways in which, thanks to architectural modernism, this ideological system marked almost all urban and rural places, a sign that the transition period of the 1990s completely ignored. The thesis on the posteriority of photography is concluded by reflecting on artworks by Sandra Vitaljić from the Neplodna tla [Infertile Grounds] series, which was created not only at the sites of conflicts from the Homeland War, but also at the sites of mass crimes from the Second World War. This series is characterised by practices that are similar to archiving, as well as by a personal experience of walking in nature whereby traumatic memories are reactivated through the visualisation of the landscape, while its complex research structure includes considerations on the correspondence of history and memory and other topics. By widening the discussion to include photographs of the Homeland War, whether they were taken during the War (Bavoljak, Urban, Maračić) or were the result of research and interpretation of traumatic events in a broader historical—and thus also political and other contexts (Mrđenović, Vitaljić) - we encounter different levels and sources of trauma. Selected photographs convey the inexplicable—a source of personal and collective pain that cannot be unambiguously understood and interpreted.
Ključne riječi
art photography, Homeland War, trauma, landscape, memory, archive
Hrčak ID:
270733
URI
Datum izdavanja:
1.7.2021.
Posjeta: 794 *