TENSE PRESENT: REPURPUSING WAR INFRASTRUCTURE
Uroš Čvoro
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In Danis Tanović’s Oscar-winning film No Man’s Land (2001) there is a scene set in 1994 in the middle of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) war, featuring two Bosnian soldiers in a trench. Stuck on the frontline in close proximity to Bosnian Serbs, the two soldiers are quietly passing the time; one keeping a lookout, and the other reading a newspaper. All of a sudden, the soldier reading the paper exasperatedly exclaims: ‘Oh dear’, to which the other asks ‘what is it?’. Not lifting his head from the paper, the first soldier says, ‘You should see the shit that is going down in Rwanda!’ Laced with dark humor, the scene captures one of many ethical paradoxes from the war: the capacity to empathize with the suffering of others while dealing with your own. The soldiers’ sincere concern for Rwandans caught in a genocidal war in 1994 is paradoxical because he is reacting in disconnect with his own circumstances of (literally) living on the frontline of a genocidal war in BiH.
control people.1 Tense Present includes works that create an educational material based on lived experience and designed to protect life against military destruction. Collaborative project Un-war2 documents war destruction by demilitarizing it: archiving how civilians caught in the Sarajevo siege by Bosnian Serb forces (1992—1996) collectively repurposed urban spaces ruined by military destruction into functioning spaces of survival. Un-War Space functions as ‘a didactic tool for anti-militarist urbanism’, creating the means to reconceptualise the passivity of civilians caught in conflict.3 Mladen Miljanović’s Didactic Wall is a ‘subversive educational installation’ that repurposes draconian EU migration laws to produce a manual for displaced people with information on how to navigate, avoid detection and seek shelter while travelling to EU via BiH.4 For thousands of people stuck in BiH camps, the manual becomes an educational tool of shared military knowledge.
This scene resonated with events in October 2019 as the Vučjak migrant camp near Bihać came into the spotlight. Operating at over maximum capacity under appalling conditions, the camp was under threat of getting shot down. BiH once again found itself at the centre of a humanitarian crisis, only this time not as subject to a genocidal war, but as a country unable to accommodate large numbers of migrants moving across its borders on-route to the EU. Images of detention camps, violent pushbacks by the Croatian border police, and forced displacement of people raised the ugly specter of the war from two-and-a-half decades earlier. People of BiH were again challenged to empathize with the plight of ’others’ while dealing with their own dire circumstances, including being subjected to war-like conditions. Only this time, it was not a war for ethnically cleansed territories, but for maintaining the militarised borders of Europe.
Tense Present also includes works that intervene into the militarised border by creating a short-circuit in the infrastructures designed to control life. Zoran Todorović’s video work Integration documents the artist collecting urine from a refugee centre in Belgrade, Serbia and distilling it to make beer based on a Belgian recipe intended for export to ‘first-world’ countries. The video features footage of Todorović consuming the beer with the audience as part of a lecture performance in London. The work is a scathing critique of European border management by juxtaposing the mobility of the ‘processed’ migrant body (body waste literally processed into craft beer) against the limited mobility of the lived body. Brewing the guilty conscience of Europe, Todorović processes and rebrands the bodily waste of refugees to create craft beer that can move across borders to be consumed by western art loving liberals.
The events in BiH present a powerful context within which to consider the way in which artists featured in the exhibition Tense Present repurpose military knowledge about space, bodies and border control, enabling displaced civilians to breach militarized state sovereignty and circumvent unjust and inhumane migration policies. In the age of endless ‘planetary civil war’, mass migration and forced indefinite detention, borders have become instruments of war: militarized infrastructure used to delay, detain and
By drawing attention to the way in which civilian infrastructure is being used for military purposes, Tense Present alerts us to the way in which the very understanding of the notion of ‘civilian’ is changing. Recent decades have been marked by the pervasive use of military technology and ideology to control and manage movement across borders. This includes a shift in public discourse which criminalizes refugees and migrants – forcing distinctions between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ – under the auspice of threats to state security.
