Renata Poljak - Don't Turn Your Back on Me by Nikola Krizanac

DONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T TURN YOUR BACK ON ME

Beyond their physical and historical existence, islands have been and continue to be metaphors and symbolic resources for understanding one’s ontological place in relation to the rest of the world. Despite being disruptions in the continuous flow of land, islands have a great power to invoke the imagination as ideas are often projected onto them. They have been sites of leisure, escapism, and the exotic, as commonly found in science fiction and adventure genres from the 19 th century to the present; metaphors for independent thinking regarding liberation and slavery, as in the works of Martinican poet, writer and critic Édouard Glissant; or sites of pirating or offshore banking as seen, for example, in the recently leaked trove of documents known as the “Panama Papers”. As Glissant 1 might suggest, islands are in many ways ellipses or incomplete ideas representing something else other than normative realities that compete against our fixed ideas of meaning. To speak of islands is to speak of the land and sea at the same time, spaces of limits and boundaries, spaces of both arrival and departure.

Geological and environmental forces such as tectonic plates and erupting volcanoes first shaped islands. But human history, industry and culture have equally influenced how we define and make sense of these sites. Partenza, a 2016 multi-media project by Croatian artist Renata Poljak, articulates the meaning of islands by engaging with the emotional consequences of living remotely, and thus acts as an Islands of Displacement in Renata Poljak’s Partenza Alaina Claire Feldman

apparatus to gauge and figure, making sense of visual territory. The work is set on the island of Brač in its southernmost tip in the city of Bol. Bol is famous for its popular beach, Zlatni Rat (“the golden cape”) that stretches out into the sea with its edges constantly shifting according to the seasonal tidal movement. Reexamining the sea’s historic and superficial remoteness, Partenza profiles the sea as a space and subject of political and emotional significance. The work is comprised of a single channel film, nine photo collages, two ink and six charcoal drawings. Nearly all the material is fixed in black and white. Their installation mimics the Adriactic archipelago with similar yet distinct individual features tied together by a geopolitical bond. Together, these works describe a longing for another place, another time and an eternal return that may never occur. The establishing shot of the film is a dune on Zlatni Rat. A sharp horizon line divides the frame and sand is suddenly punctured when seven women in modest, dark, traditional Croatian clothing slowly make their way up the dune and approach the camera head-on. They reach the apex of the dune, pause and wait. Further close ups are captured and their identities and emotional and psychological states are defined: women with tears, some pregnant, young and old, standing and facing the sea’s horizon. As these figures descend the dune and pace along the island’s beach, they look past the camera almost religiously as if to blink might lead them to miss something crucial. These women, later joined by a few older male compatriots, are framed by Poljak’s rich use of aesthetic and art historical references:

1 Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant, 1997. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

soviet montage theory, traditional fashion, experimental

as Poljak does not employ a completely fixed narrative but rather

western cinema, an absence of color and dialogue.

the work becomes a shifting story that pays close attention to

Balanced between tight close up and low angle sequences

the articulation of space with room for contemplation. As in the

of these figures and between long shots of Zlatni Rat, every

works of Maya Deren and other avant-garde film makers, this

succeeding moment in the film is fraught with the expectation

physical space can also be understood as a psychological space

that something is about to happen and yet nothing does.

for both the subject and the viewer to project their personal experience and narrative onto the work in order to fill the gaps

Croatia is comprised of over 1,200 islands dotting the Adriatic

and spaces between islands of emotion and thought. Partenza

Sea 2. This is significant when observing Croatia through the

is silent except for diegetic sounds of waves colliding onto the

lens of its history and its proximity to water systems, its navy, its

beach. Here we are able to imagine our own dialogue, locating

fishing and tourist industry and recent economical and socio-

a nascent power in the actualities of our surroundings. If the

political situations. The scenes in Partenza refer to the early

characters are firmly fixed in existential condition, the location

1900s when the Tierra del Fuego gold rush attracted thousands

itself equally becomes Poljak’s subject matter; her camera panning

of Croatians to the Argentinian and Chilean coasts. By 1939,

parallel to the coast, extending and contesting boundaries and

nearly 15,000 men had emigrated, leaving their families behind

our relationship to continents, islands and land-sea divides.

and sighting better economic opportunities abroad particularly

Turning her camera onto the present, in the final shot the camera

in Latin America due to relaxed immigration laws 3. Despite

dives underwater and changes from black and white to color.

the efforts and sacrifices of these migrant miners, there was

Clothing once worn by bodies but now left empty sink to the

little gold for them to be found and nearly no fortunes to be

sea’s floor, perhaps evoking the Italian island of Lampedusa5.

made. Some continued to work for Argentinian president

The film is released from a national perspective of remembrance

Juan Perón’s public works projects in major cities and some

to an international responsibility of the very present and very

in agricultural labor, but a very limited number of workers

urgent movement of peoples across intercontinental waters.

were able to return to their homes and their families4. They continued to work and remit wages back home where there

Partenza is a story of exclusion told through aesthetic employment

was little economic opportunity on the island, particularly

of abstractions and absence. In a series of nine 130 x 90 centimeter

on remote islands such as Brač. As borders shifted and

collages, Poljak assembles what seem to be circular, black voids

fighting prolonged, many Croatians endured displacement

over professional photographs taken by Dinka Radonić during

and sought refuge by leaving the region all together.

filming. Upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves not asvoids but as video stills of the sea. And so Poljak reminds us again of the

The weight of history is evident in every moment of this work.

severe boundaries of the sea, implemented not as a limitless space,

Poljak’s camera focuses on minutiae, on the seemingly mundane

but as an entity with borders that puncture our imagination and

aspects of waiting. Her characters register the aftermath

material world. The collages are accompanied by six 50 x 60 cm

of trauma eliciting empathy for what lies in and out of the

charcoal drawings marked abstract circular hand movements, and

frame. They suffer in a purgatory defined by disconnection,

layered almost obsessively. These circles are history cannibalizing

separation, estrangement, frustration and forever waiting for

itself wherein pattern of migrations seem to endlessly continue.

a return. The politics of waiting are a key aspect of Partenza

With her circles, voids and cinematic narrative, Poljak reveals how

as there is direct gender imbalance between being those with

the contemporary capitalist paradox to follow better economic

opportunity to leave and those whom stayed behind. And so,

pursuits and risk lives is a dangerous challenge to those who

another form of falsified return becomes apparent in this film.

flee and those that are left behind. She connects contemporary

In Partenza, waiting condenses a woman’s existence into a cycle

migrations in Northern Africa to historic accounts in Eastern

of waiting for life to begin while attending to and maintaining

Europe, and empathizes with the conditions of alienation felt

the lives of children and the elderly. In the second to last

from forced departure from one’s home. Here, the sea represents

scene, action is finally taken. The cycle breaks down when

the division of continents and the division of families while

one of the women revolts and walks alone into the sea until

critiquing the global market that demands migration and labor

she is completely submerged in water never to surface again.

in the first place. Partenza interrogates how imagination and

The film engenders space for speculation and interpretation

negotiation of our place in the world is charged with both the

2 Croatia Country Study Guide Volume 1 Strategic Information and Developments, 2013. International Business Publications: Washington DC, p. 32. 3 Croatian Migration History and the Challenges of Migrations Today, Dubravka Mlinarić, Mario Bara, Snježana Gregurović, Drago Župarić-Iljić, Simona Kuti, 2015. http://aemi.eu/croatianmigration-history-and-the-challenges-of-migrations-today.

4 A different kind of multinational: Immigrants to Argentina from Eastern Europe, Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald, 1998. http://www.casahistoria.net/easteurope.htm

complexities of the past and present simultaneously. Looking outwards to the sea, its depths are unknown as our futures. 5 Lampedusa is an Italian island territory in the southern Mediterranean which lies about 70 miles from Tunisia. For about 20 years, the island has become synonymous with the transit point for Northern African migration to Europe. For more information on the politics regarding visual culture and representations of migration in the present, please see The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis by T.J. Demos.

camera

boris poljak

actress

dajana čuljak

women from bol

antonija bager ana hero ane kraljević listeš ana mari tomičić branka karnininčić daniela burić gordana ferić ines eterović ivana jerčić ivona plančić irma soljačić luna jerčić maja živković romana baković zdravka koljatić and miško batarelo

extras

ana mišković đurđa anotolov

Partenza 2016 video installation on loop 10’

kruno lažeta editing

hrvoslava brkušić renata poljak

by renata poljak costume designer

sonja obradović

underwater camera

zoran mikinčić budin

executive producer

barbara jukopila

second camera, photo

dinka radonić

sound recording

siniša krneta

sound designer

iva ivan

colorist

tomislav stojanović

produced by

REA association

Video is supported by Croatian Audiovisual Centre, the Croatian Ministry of Culture, the Town of Split and Bol and Dalan Sow Read with amiable sponsors: diving center Big Blue, Bol and Croatian National Theatre in Split. © renata poljak 2016.

I like to think that this is how my great-grandmother Vinka could look like, as a young woman, in love with her husband, with two newborns. As I have heard: The only thing they had was a great love for each other. Ever since I saw La jetée, I have been imagining Bol’s jetty as “jetée” from the famous Chris Marker’s film. At this location I could visualize, in black and white, my great-grandmother Chris Marker Stills from ‘La jetée’

and great-grandfather searching for each other and running towards each other to embrace. In the “reality” of Marker’s film, the image that haunted the main male character was the image of his own death. In the reality of my great-grandmother, the letter with news arrived by a boat: the great-grandfather died in Chile. Great-grandma had already bought the tickets for her and their children and was waiting on the sea shore, at the jetty, ready to leave, with her suitcase, ready for partenza…

At the beginning of the 20th century, great-grandpa left for South America because of famine and poverty. He left behind his wife and two children with a promise he would soon send them tickets for a better future. Time passed, great-grandpa stayed in touch, everything was going on well. Great-grandma sold everything she had, she fixed the papers and waited for the ferry. Next ship arrived carrying a letter: „great-grandpa died from pleurisy (pneumonia)’. Nona was left standing on the jetty with suitcase and a black umbrella. After some time I will have made I, the Housewife!, incited by the suitcase and the umbrella which we inherited from our great-grandma in our little house in Bol on the island of Brač.

Zbog gladi i neimaštine pranono je otišao, početkom 20. stoljeća u Južnu Ameriku. Ostavio je ženu i dvoje djece s obećanjem da će im karte za bolju budućnost poslati ubrzo. Vrijeme je prolazilo, nono se javljao, sve je išlo dobro. Nona je prodala sve što je imala, napravila papire i čekala vapor. Idućim brodom stiglo je pismo. Nono je umro od plaurita (upale pluća). Nona je ostala na mulu s kuferom i crnom lumbrelom. Nakon nekog vremena ja ću napraviti video Ja, domaćica! potaknut tim kuferom i kišobranom koji nam je nona ostavila u nasljedstvo u maloj kući u Bolu na Braču.

America Drawing with text, charcoal and pencil, 50 x 50 cm, 2016

For how long ? Again ? Once upon a time, there was a woman who was totaly happy in her own world, with a loved one who never left her and will never do so. That’s why this is a fairy tale!

Zar opet? Toliko dugo … U svijetu postoji jedna bajka, u toj bajci je žena sretna i ima svoj svijet i svoju ljubav koja nije i neće nikada otići. Zato je to bajka.

Fairy Tale Drawing with text, charcoal and pencil, 50 x 50 cm, 2016

Sketches of horizon for a film Drawings, Charcoal on paper, 50x60 cm, 2015

Amidst different translations of the sentence by Virginia Wolf –

A single journey is life threatening and A single journey can change

the course of life – there is an in between space of reading of the notion of travel. In that in between space I have located emotion for my work Partenza. Directly translated from Italian, the word partenza literally addresses departure. However, Partenza 2016 photo collages on Hahnemühle baryta satin paper, alubond dimension 130 x 90 cm the lead Dajana Čuljak photography Dinka Radonić

this Italian word that is so embedded in our Dalmatian dialect refers more to the feeling of departure and the fact that someone will be missed. Therefore, I left the title in Italian, without translating it. In its core, Partenza revolves around a love story, as every migrant carries his/ her love story as a travel companion. A journey, departure and arrival are the essence of Partenza as much as the gist of my personal life. The space in between depicted by the collages (which are made of the set photograph and geometric parts of a film still) is the subject that interested me the most.

While starting to work on the concept for Partenza, the history of painting as well as the whole art history that I studied became very important to me. With this project I wanted to change my approach to art making and to deliver the narrative exclusively through the sequence of visual compositions.

Don’t Turn Your Back On Me 2016 photo collages

Prior to Partenza, I made a series of collages titled Don’t Turn Your Back On Me which eventually also became the title of this book. The title encloses the subjects that preoccupy me – collaging of the past and the present moment and intertwining history of art (and Carravaggio’s paintings in particular) with contemporary artistic approach. Both of these ingredients share the notions of traveling, tragedy, unexpected moments and impetuous action.

The correlation between the past and the present, our treatment of history and the facts which are commonly accepted to be true, as well as rewriting of historical narratives which are sometimes used by state apparatuses to exercise their power over people, their memory and value systems, are all recurrent motifs in my practice. On these issues I based many of my previous works, such as Ruta and The Monument (2009) and afterwards Staging Actors/ Staging Beliefs (2011).

* The photographs taken in the studio, during casting for Partenza. Photo: Tamara Dugandžija, Davor Konjikušić

Renata Poljak’s film and photo collages titled Partenza

of Melbourne, who writes: “As was the case with the

(Italian for departure, as used in many of Croatia’s

seventeenth-century Baroque, the current expression

coastal dialects) express the global insecurity of

of the Neo-Baroque has logically emerged as a result

contemporary society and the fragility of human existence.

of systemic and cultural transformations, which are the

Metaphorically, they address a story about departure,

outcome of the rise of conglomeration, multimedia interests,

anticipation and separation, dictated by migrations. In

and new digital technologies. Cultural transformations

the early 20th century, it was usual yet traumatic for

have given birth to Neo-Baroque form. The Neo-Baroque

men to leave Croatian islands due to poverty and hunger.

articulates the spatial, the visual, and the sensorial in

One of these tragic stories is weaved into the artist’s

ways that parallel the dynamism of seventeenth-century

own family history; this series of works is inspired by

Baroque forms, but that dynamism is expressed in guises

the life story of Renata’s great-grandmother who lived

within a completely different technological context…”

on the island of Brač and whose husband went to Chile looking for work in order to secure his family’s future. Like many of the island’s women, she waited for her husband who, like many of those men, never returned.

Angela Ndalianis Neo-Baroque and Contemporary Entertainment MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004 By addressing the issue of migration, Renata also speaks

Don’t Turn Your Back on Me

Partenza is simultaneously the homage to the

about cultural changes and resulting civilizational problems

contemporary tragedies of migrants at sea. The author

by comparing them with the past, when numerous

uses this phenomenon as a connecting thread and a

migrations and ethnic pogroms created the reality and the

reminder that not so long ago, and even nowadays, we

future of humankind. If the artist came close to the Neo-

are in the same boat. Therefore, Poljak links two stories

Baroque sentiment with the aforementioned, then the

about migration – the one of Croatia from the early 20th

next aspect where I find parallels is intertextuality, which

century and today’s plight of African and Asian refugees.

occasionally and subtly appears in Renata’s work. This

The work utilizes migrant and refugee stories that

intertextuality is immanent in the Neo-Baroque and could

constantly repeat throughout history. It powerfully and

be seen as a continuation of postmodernism; it is primarily

suggestively points to the human condition as fragile and

used to blur the relationship between representation

susceptible to political, economic and social changes.

and illusion. This is another important characteristic of Renata’s artistic creation that applies also to Partenza.

Mladen Lučić

Renata is an artist of a powerful personality and an exceptional visual delicacy who uses up-to-date

The film opens with a wide-angle shot of a sandy incline at

technology to tackle socio-political themes and the

which, in fast rhythm succession, appear women wearing

issues of new visuality. This differentiates the author

garments typical of Croatian islands from the beginning

from the activist works by numerous other artists.

of the last century. That scene can be read as a kind of

Part of the reason may be the iconography, which is an

homage to the western movies of John Ford or Anthony

important part of the author’s visual expression that

Mann, just like the later portraits of these women recall

does not shy away from narration. Quite the opposite,

the close-ups of Sergio Leone, the first Neo-Baroque film

it emphasizes story, most often dressing it in poetic

director. Even if these film sequences echo western movies,

garb, and sometimes in explicit black-humor satire. Such

I am not certain that this was the author’s intent: she could

expression can be seen as a reflection of contemporary

have simply wanted to evoke the atmosphere of that period,

times that embrace representational imagery; according

just like the film directors mentioned, and so similarities

to this, even socially engaged art that strives to be

became unavoidable. The black and white photography of

conceptual and radical has also appropriated narration.

Boris Poljak, one of Croatia’s best directors of photography, emphasizes the film ambience similar to those distinct

Though it may sound sacrilegious to some, I would

Hitchcock-like atmospheres from the 1950s. This is most

classify the major part of Renata’s oeuvre as an

evidently manifested in precise framing and contrasts

interpretation of Neo-Baroque. The Neo-Baroque

between individual frames, which brings a necessary and

isn’t a homogenous style; rather it signifies a state of

carefully dosed dynamic to the story. The very action

spirit and an act of individual artistic expression that

happens in a loop of sorts, using repetitions that silently

investigates and questions new artistic possibilities.

evoke permanence and the tension of anticipation. This is

The gist of what we consider the Neo-Baroque sentiment

highlighted through the coexistence and juxtaposition of

may have been best expressed by Angela Ndalianis, the

frames of Bol’s lunar-like seashore (the film was shot on

professor of new media and history at the University

Zlatni Rat beach) and the distant contours of mountains

that encompass the dark and fearsome surface of the sea.

were indeed not contradictory to his lifestyle. The question

The culmination of the film is the suicide by drowning of

remains whether this turbulent existence was the result of the

a woman who lost all hope, which the artist represented

painter’s egoistic arrogance (as historians like to say) or his

by shifting from black and white to color, a method also

continuous rebellion (indeed present throughout his work).

used by Tarkovsky in his film Andrej Rubljov. The blackness of the sea bottom, which just a couple of scenes earlier

For her two photo collages, Renata purposely removes

was dappled by broken sun rays (like the Holy Spirit lights

Caravaggio’s Madonna with Child from St. Anne; between

up St Theresa in Bernini’s Baroque sculptural group), is

these two characters as well as on the edges of compositions,

now bathed in an endless sea blue. From underneath

the artist inserts the images of our contemporaries. While

the sea, fluttering like Baroque draperies, pieces of

the first collage presents the younger, the second one

contemporary clothing emerge, gradually sinking. And

presents much older characters. The works paraphrase

so symbolically the Bol seashore becomes the undersea

Renata’s preoccupations, this time by not speaking through

of Lesbos or Lampedusa. With this, the author leaves a

metaphors but through direct narration. They embody the

mark of equivalence between the past and the present,

artist’s interest in permanent interference of time and space,

and at the same time relativizes reality and illusion.

estrangement, anticipation and hope. These collages are certainly closest to Neo-Baroque, not only because of the

While utilizing all of these Neo-Baroque attributes, it

direct quotation of Caravaggio, but also because of their

seems logical that Renata Poljak also quoted Caravaggio

composition and iconography and clear distinction between

– one of the greatest masters of Baroque painting. While

the present and history, which creates a balanced and

she was preparing Partenza project, Renata, in her own

conceptually strong unity. They remind me of the seminal

words, rediscovered painting and art history. The two

Neo-Baroque piece - Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio from

photo collages titled Don’t Turn Your Back on Me hold

1986. Certainly, the loose temporality of the film’s story is

clear references to Caravaggio, more precisely, to his work

not Jarman’s invention; however, the director discreetly

Madonna with Child and St. Anna. This is probably the

introduces contemporary motifs (such as a typewriter, a

most important painting by Caravaggio from his religious

digital calculator, cigarettes, a motor bike and a car) into a

body of work. It features Madonna lifting the child up

detailed reconstruction of the Baroque interior, thus revealing

to the air while stepping on a snake; the whole scene is

his own sensibility and innovative approach to filmmaking.

unbiasedly, from distance, observed by St. Anna. Because

Jarman stays true to the original motifs of Caravaggio’s

of this, for Caravaggio’s times, atypical and slightly

compositions, however only through the set and the models.

provocative religious composition (St. Anna is realistically

The paintings, in the film being in the process of making

depicted as an elderly wrinkled woman, Virgin Mary is

by Caravaggio, are very remote from his original style. The

given as a common caring mother while baby Jesus is

painted scene in which the painter portrays a woman features

presented naked and uncircumcised), the painting was

a model situated in the space created in Vermeer style; a

seen as scandalous and removed only two days after its

close-up reveals her head painted in a manner of Botticelli;

hanging to one of the altars of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

while Caravaggio himself is making his painting in the style

Using such typical genre scene, with adding provocative

of Degas – the whole situation typical for Neo- Baroque.

elements, was a highly uncommon way of representing

the life of saints, especially because Caravaggio used

As much as Jarman’s films, Renata’s photo collages go well

“immoral” Roman women as his models. Undoubtedly,

beyond their space and time, even if the artist makes, by

this painting broke with the existing artistic principles

means of new technologies, a clear distinction between

and cleared the way for more liberal reinterpretations

historical and contemporary times. The photographs of

of sacral motifs. Since she studied art history, Renata

contemporaries are digitally manipulated through chiaro

was familiar with the importance of this painting and the

- scuro effect, also typical for Baroque; their background

reaction and changes it caused in the painting history. The

seamlessly melts with the background of the painting. There

artist chose it not only because of its painterly excellence

is still a sharp contrast between the warmth of historical

but also because of its social context – quite in the line

and coolness of today’s figures. The older personas seem

with her own social engagement and continuous quest for

washed away, lonely and deserted, whereas the younger

change. It was definitely a conscious choice to approach

ones, with their eyes absent and harrowed, still look for

Caravaggio while thinking about the work dealing with the

and await some hope, not wanting to have the Orwellian

migrant crisis; Caravaggio was a migrant himself, due to his

future of their fathers. Today’s people depicted by

tumultuous personal life and numerous exiles. If one studies

Renata’s collages, by turning towards the past, hope that

his work in details, it can be noticed how the paintings

humanity and individuality will not desert us for good.

In the spring of 1943, the Princess of Gundulic Street, the house number is no longer important, launched a bit of magic, with the help of which or whose god it’s not known, to become invisible. Such were the times, when princesses could not wish for more than invisibility. And we need not to be reminded of how much arrogance was needed for this kind of wish. The ceilings were four meters high and cloudy from cigarette smoke. Father smoked before they took him on a trip. Mother smoked before they took her on a trip. Even grandfather smoked, but they didn’t take him as he died before the trip. Ruta Tannenbaum was fifteen years old and she was not to blame for the cloudy ceilings. But for six months she lived alone under them, she was very scared and for that she wished to become invisible. Ooh, how arrogant she was! When they came to take her on a trip, all that was left of Ruta Tannenbaum was her right foot. Everything else was already invisible.

Ruta and the Monument 2 channel video instalation with additional text by Miljenko Jergović 2007

But even that was something, something indeed, said the people from the tourist agency and took Ruta Tannenbaum’s right foot all the way to the freight train station. A small bare foot walked along beneath the princess’s white dress. I tell you, that was something to be seen. They loaded her onto the cattle wagon. We’re going to India, thought Ruta Tannenbaum, there where cows are holy animals. She felt a cow’s warm tongue licking the salt oﬀ her right foot. And so she laughed for the last time. She was arrogant and not too bright, that princess, since who would think of traveling to India in the spring of 1943. No, the train was going to Poland. It was dark and smelly, so that the invisibility didn’t help much against the fear. Indeed, what did it mean for a princess to be invisible, in her white dress, if one could still see her small right foot. We could say this is how she lived to her death. And it would not be a mistake. Ruta Tannenbaum never made it to India, nor really to Poland. She disappeared somewhere along the way, imagining the cow’s warm tongue licking her right foot. How arrogant was that princess. Look at that dress, maybe she’s still in it. Where did it hide Ruta’s right foot?

* excerpt from the novel Ruta Tannenbaum by Miljenko Jergović

This film didn’t come first. However, I can imagine Renata as an artist in residence, Berlin, 2007. She sees and hears a hallucinatory, but nevertheless banal and ordinary situation unfolding. A young guide lectures some chuckling visitors at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), on the tourist trail between the Brandeburg gate and Potsdamer Platz. The memorial, which was realised over a period of fifteen years from 1989, (the year the Wall came down) was conceived by the American architect Peter Eisenman1. It is a field of 2,711 rectangular, abstract and anonymous anthracite grey slabs –or ‘stelae’- of different heights, placed on uneven ground, which produces a sensation of motion. Open round the clock and free of charge, the slabs are arranged in a monolithic grid within which people walk and wander. Disorientation and claustrophobia are integral parts of the sense of embodiment linked to this pilgrimage, in which the conventional horizontal and vertical references are recast2.

Relaying Memory

Elisabeth Lebovici

Since its inception in 2005, the memorial has attracted half a million visitors each year. However, how does Renata Poljak see this scene? Is she here by chance? Has she ever heard of this playful form of visit, to the point of coming back and recording it? Has she been reading the announcements of a travel agency? Has she been stationed here? Has she followed a group? Has someone spoken to her in such a way that she has been determined to trail them? Because she ended up filming this guide, to follow his speech at the beginning and end of the visit. Gathering his flock on its way out of a bus, he starts to explain (in English), that the ‘Holocaust Monument’ is his favourite stop in the tour he provides: on the one hand, he says, ‘because it’s a work of art’, and on the other because it’s ‘so controversial’. And if it is controversial, it’s primarily (audience laughter) because ‘no Jew has been killed here!’ What a start! These preliminary remarks naively place the accent on that which underpins the memorial and the difficulties of the work of memory. It is precisely a place and a public marker that articulates the absent bodies (and the peculiarity of genocide consists in eradicating the bodies and making the dead disappear). Furthermore, the notion of controversy is considered equally as: ‘an ongoing process of contestation […] one of the permanent features

1 The project presents a radical reflection on the notion of memorial, notably in the sense where it renounces ‘all symbolism’, explains the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe brochure.

2 A subterranean information centre is added. Imposed on Eisenman and built by Dagmar von Wilken, it includes four rooms: ‘ Ort der Information’ (Place of Information), which exposes the breadth of the crime against humanity, with the aid of notebooks, letters and appalling statistics; ‘Raum der Stille’ (Room of Silence), which traces the destiny of a few Jewish families; ‘Raum der Orte’ (Room of Places), which relates extermination in all of its aspects; ‘Raum der Namen’ (Room of Names), (where a voice gives the name and the biography of each of the six millions victims of the Holocaust).

of remembrance’3. This, it seems, is a leitmotif in the visit, in which the guide enumerates the scandals linked to the memorial’s construction, accumulating anecdotes almost certainly repeated to provoke a reaction from its public4. In the case of a work by Richard Serra - once associated with Eisenman’s project, he then withdrew - the guide probably wouldn’t act very differently. I don’t know when or how she decided it, but Poljak, in choosing to direct a film, and to inscribe in it a piece for one text and two screens (Ruta and The Monument, 2007), one being constituted by this Berlin memorial visit, adopts the position of witness. I purposefully use this term, witness, as it seems to qualify more thoroughly the place undertaken by Renata Poljak, in many of her productions, and I’ll come back to it. But I also use this expression because the notion of witnessing is now ‘filled with the heavy history of the Shoah, and the massacre of mass-populations that characterises C20 history’ as stated by the French historian Annette Wieworka in 1998, in the foreword to her book L’ère du témoin: The Era of the Witness5. In this book, Wieworka analyses the Eichmann trial of 1961, as a pivotal point of the ‘advent of the witness.’ The judicial setting of the Eichmann trial, indeed, is based less on evidentiary documents than on the witnesses appearing in court to tell their stories, since it was the first instance for survivors to give their testimonies. Of a hundred witnesses, ninety were survivors from the camps; Eichmann’s trial can be understood as the beginning of the testimonial narration of Shoah. Victims’ testimonies become here ‘an embodiment of memory’ transforming the Holocaust into a ‘succession of individual experiences with which the public was supposed to identify’6. Eventually in the 1970s comes ‘the era of the witness’, with a systematization of the gathering of survivors’ testimonies, mostly audio-visual, where ‘the person of the survivor is no longer at the centre of the enterprise. The survivor has been replaced by a concept, that of transmission’ 7. From then on, states Wieworka, the written, recorded, filmed, and exhibited testimony of the Holocaust has structured our understanding of the 3 Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, War and remembrance in the XXth Century. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cited in Brigitte Sion, Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires. Memory, Architecture and Tourism, Lanham/London: Lexington Books, 2015, 1. 4 As the young guide relates, a scandal erupts in 2004, while the building site is already well advanced. One discovers that the Degussa firm, which supplied the antigraffiti cladding applied to the stelae, is linked to the company that used to produce the Zyklon B gas, which was used in Nazi extermination camps. The polemic is especially sharp and the works are suspended for one month. The important memory work set about since the end of the war finally has the last word on this controversy. 5 Annette Wieworka, The Era of the Witness [1998], translation Jared Stark. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. 6

Wieworka op cit, p.88.

7 Annette Wieworka, ‘Eichmann, un procès inaugural’, Le Nouvel Observateur, special issue n° 53, « La mémoire de la Shoah », December 2003-January 2004, 30.

problems of the present. This dominant symbol of Evil also constitutes the bedrock of a universal, supra-national ethics. Paradoxically, the historian continues, when the memorialisation of the Holocaust has been affirmed as a necessity, when memorials have multiplied, when survivors’ last accounts have passed to a second then a third generation desirous not to forget, when educational curricula have proliferated (with the Americanisation of Holocaust Studies in the US), when the opening of Eastern archives has generated an abundance of new works, when literary and cinematographic fiction have taken their stories as a core theme, the use of this memory has been increasingly contested. The fear has arisen that the standardisation and the universalisation of the accompanying discourses are shaping a global ideology, emptied from concrete memories and cut off from the realities described by historians: ‘Thus we would be entering, she writes, in a new cycle, a fourth phase of the history of this memory, characterized both by its institutionalisation and by its calling into question’8. Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, makes of the memorial act an unstable spatial object. Not only does it clearly avoid representing or telling the history of the Shoah, but also, by replacing the horizontality of the ground by two separate and undulating surfaces, the one running above the slabs and one passing under the base of the same, the monument suspends an overwhelmed body between these two artificial topographies. As Eisenman explains: ‘it was the idea of the ground in the Nazi ideology of Blut and Boden that made the Jew placeless, alien and other. Thus, it is to architecture, after the demise of modernist abstraction and to ground, as a condition of presence, that this work appeals’9. Poljak’s film isn’t promotional. It neither presents the work nor judges the soundness of its foundations. It is more interested in the way it’s used. The film doesn’t even judge the relevance of the exchanges between the guide and her troop of tourists, nor the quality of their passage between granite parallelepipeds, not even what the people think or feel, or why they laugh. The film depicts the life of the monument: more prosaically, its ‘lived experience’. Furthermore, the film testifies to the ‘thanato-touristic’ condition of the Memorial to Murdered Jews in Europe, and by extension, of Berlin, with its palimpsest landscape of the twentieth century, its attempts at cosmopolitanism and its atrocities. Openly available, physically inscribed in continuity with the city pavement, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe immediately 8 Annette Wieworka, ‘Shoah : les étapes de la mémoire en France’, Les guerres de mémoires, Paris, La Découverte, ‘Cahiers libres’, 2008, pp. 107-116. URL: http://www. cairn.info.inshs.bib.cnrs.fr/les-guerres-de-memoires--9782707154637-page-107.html 9 Peter Eisenman: ‘The Silence of Excess’, Eisenman Architects, Holocaust Memorial, Berlin. Baden: Lars Müller publishers, 2005.

inscribes itself in the field of so-called ‘archi-tourism’ -architectural tourism- and ‘dark tourism’ (or thanatotourism). The Glasgow-based scholars John Lennon and Malcolm Foley coined this expression in the 1990s, to qualify the growing interest of the tourist in visiting sites of recent death and disaster. The euphemistic proposal of an ‘aesthetic tourism’, whether places or works, museums, palaces or architectural monuments, is from now on widely doubled by a trauma tourism of catastrophes and massmurders. It draws the visitors to the very sites where the collective experience of violence is patrimonialised, or to architectural monuments where commemorative rituals are being performed 10.

sensual contact of a cow licking her foot, she is in fact herded into a cattle-wagon moving towards a death camp.

By witnessing this visit, this tourism, this discourse, these silences, these laughs, these paths, this performance situated on this day and at this hour at the Berlin Memorial, Poljak’s film testifies in the memorial chain.

Immediately unravelling the causal connections, chronology and periodisation, this screen (Ruta) and its fictional interlocking steers the other screen (The Monument) to an unbalanced and anachronistic temporality. It assumes from now on a historicity that would takes ghosts into account, as the historian Régine Robin explains: ‘The spectral, the ghostly, the reappearing dead, connote the return of the repressed, but equally all the bifurcations un-derived from history, the defeated, the abandoned solutions, the suffocated utopias; here, the spectral is the third space which will allow the transmission of a part of the inheritance, the past, open in what it still has to say and in what we still have to tell it’ 12.

The witness passage has therefore come to play again what happens on the second screen, which delocalises the temporality and the spatiality of the visit to the monument. It consists of a filmic loop, which situates its object in an aquatic milieu difficult to contextualise, if not by the emitted noise, which has the effect of vigorous breathing. It is neither the roar of waves nor the slap of a swimming pool that we hear, but a kind of watery throat filling up and emptying with the noise of a gargoyle. One can see a pretty foot passing through a white patterned petticoat, which is approached, caressed, licked by an immense red tongue coming from out of the depths of the throat. As in the dream-work according to Freud, the scenario figured here has neither start nor end, and disregards negation. A text indicates hereby the scenario’s dream-like source. The filmic loop is inspired by writer Miljenko Jergovic’s preface to his novel Ruta Tannenbaum (2006), a literary fiction written in parallel to the life and death of Lea Deutsch, the ‘Croatian Shirley Temple’. She was a little Jewish girl from Zagreb who became a child-star of the Croatian National Theatre in the thirties. Banned by the collaborationist Oustachi regime, she was exterminated in Auschwitz aged sixteen, and has remained as a stone stuck in the throat of her fellow citizens. Her death anticipates the beginning of the novel. She appears in the preface under the form of a folk tale. A little ‘Princess’, who made the wish to become invisible and has nearly succeeded in this apart from her right foot, which won’t disappear. This foot will lead to the loss of such a ‘presumptuous’ young woman. While believing she is traveling to India, dreaming of the 66

10 Cf. Auschwitz Museum; Genocide Museum in Kigali (Rwanda; Prison S21 in Phnom Penh (Cambodia); Chernobyl Centre…

The foot, in Balzac’s novel The Unknown Masterpiece, is what allows the recognition of the existence of a figure under an indecipherable wall of painting11. This figure almost entirely covered by paint, is female. ‘There is a woman underneath’ cries out one of those observing the painting from which the foot, alone, emerges from the invisibility of its surroundings. Jergovic’s novel equally pulls a female figure by the foot, to name and tell the Holocaust in Croatia, one of the first independent states to put in place the Final Solution to exterminate the Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies.

I would like to prolong this evocation of Ruta and the Monument with a few filmed elements (units) of another project by Poljak entitled Freedom is not given. It has to be pursued (2013), which she showed us during her intervention at Something You Should Know, on the 13th of November 201313. Projecting her films in Croatian classrooms with the purpose of presenting her work, she has gathered the reactions of numerous students, who were then between fifteen and eighteen years old (now therefore able to vote). Almost unanimously, their extreme rejection of the Split Gay Pride – where hundreds of demonstrators marched under stones, bottles, tomatoes and tear gas thrown by thousands of counter-demonstrators in 2011. Their xenophobic and homophobic words were intertwined with a revived nationalism, and the nostalgia for an Oustachi great grandfather, entangled with a will to leave as its only hope, and an individualism as much frenzied as distraught. Once more, Poljak revives this chain of testimony while locating it in the instability of a constant becoming. 11 Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef d’œuvre inconnu is a short story first published in the newspaper L’Artiste, in 1831, then integrated in his series of books The Human Comedy. 12 Régine Robin, La mémoire saturée [The Saturated Memory] Paris: Stock, 2003, 57. 13 Something You Should Know: artists and curators is the title of the ongoing seminar which Patricia Falguières, Natasa Petresin-Bachelez and myself have been curating at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris since 2006.

The work of Renata Poljak combines the media of photography, video, film and installation. By using strong metaphorical imagery, the artist delves into political, economic and social phenomena, occurring in Croatia and Europe since the early 1990s. The ideas and subjects of the artist’s works stem from her own experiences; often they incorporate autobiographical elements, and first person narration, while combining them with documentary and archival materials. The works contemplate on the concepts of remembering and forgetting, and on construction and dissemination of ideologies, histories and different political agendas. They portray the current state of uncertainty, passivity, helplessness and disorientation of the artist’s generation in both intimate and social context, as well as (un)conscious tolerance of various forms of violence and chauvinism in Croatian contemporary society- resonating on much wider, even global scale.

Uncertain Memories Željka Himbele

Poljak’s work in several parts, Staging Actors / Staging Beliefs (2011/2012), comprises of a photograph, two projections and one video on a monitor—shown separately, but corresponding conceptually. The projection Staging Actors / Staging Beliefs (Boshko Buha) revolves around the persona of Ivan Kojundzic, who as a child took the main role in a popular Yugoslav feature film Boshko Buha (1978). Boshko Buha, the film’s main character, is indeed a fascinating historical figure. At the age of fifteen, he was one of the youngest members of the communistoriented Partisan resistance movement, which during the World War II was supported by the Allies, and fought against the Axis Powers on Yugoslav Front, while building foundations for the post- war Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. With the plot elaborating life, combat actions, bravery and heroic death in an ambush of this youngest of Partisans, who was posthumously awarded with the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia title, the film gained a wide popularity. Through its continuous screenings both in theaters and on the national television, the communist ideology and belief in Yugoslav socialist system were extensively spread. However, the character of Boshko Buha, played by Kojundzic when he was fifteen years old, was his first and last film act. Later in the 1990’s he got actively involved in the Croatian War of Independence which marked the end of Yugoslav Federation and its political agendas—the very ones Boshko Buha was fighting for—and later, during the early days of a newly founded Democratic Republic of Croatia, worked as the news speaker on Croatian National Radio and Television. Poljak’s video combines selected excerpts of the original feature film and fragments of an interview she made with Kojundzic in a private, intimate setting of an apartment. Nevertheless, the interview is scripted and directed as much as the film; Kojundzic, this time playing himself (at age of 48), gives contradictory answers to Poljak’s questions, reflecting in completely opposite ways on his

childhood memories of the Boshko Buha character (first saying that he was ashamed and later that he was proud of starring in this role); his personal views on Yugoslav history and his own participation in the Croatian War; and complex consequences of transition from Socialism to Capitalism. The video re-enacts the current division and clashes of opinions in Croatian society regarding the living conditions before and after the War that brought a radical shift in the system of values and blurring and rewriting of different segments of history. This collage of discordant short narratives structurally but also metaphorically corresponds to the video Staging Actors / Staging Beliefs (Daily News Dnevnik), for which Poljak, with minimal editing, appropriated Croatian TV prime time daily news footage, featuring Kojundzic as the news speaker delivering local and international news. Here, the reports on local politics, economics, urgent social and religious issues, sports and weather are all delivered in a consistent impartial mass media formula, documenting the history of mid 1990s in Croatia and the world in a fragmentized and restrained way. The third part of Poljak’s complex work— the video projection Staging Actors / Staging Beliefs (Homage to Slavko Stimac)— refers to another popular film from Yugoslavia; this time, a widely influential children’s feature film Train in the Snow (1976), inspired by a novel of the popular Yugoslav writer Mato Lovrak. Train in the Snow narrated a story of solidarity and collective responsibility of children acting together, self- organizing themselves in an effort to dig out a train stuck in the blizzard during their school trip. The movie gained a large support within the agendas of Yugoslav youth organizations; similar to Boshko Buha, it influenced generations of people growing up in Yugoslavia as it was widely screened as an educational tool, presenting children with the value of collaborative efforts. The main character was played by Slavko Štimac, undoubtedly one of the biggest stars of the Yugoslav cinema, who was prominently featured in numerous films, growing up along with his audiences. However, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the career of this actor completely fell apart - in Poljak’s words, “One cannot be a famous Yugoslav actor when the country does not exist any more. The country is gone, so the context is gone.”

In this video projection, Poljak focuses solely on the motif of snow; she arranges and shoots the fake snow falling, lit by reflectors on a theater stage. This silent, uninterrupted footage of the snow falling and gradually covering the stage, made by a steady camera, becomes a poignant, poetic metaphor for

forgetting and erasing history. The work can be seen as an homage to all the actors and public personas, once embodying noble ideas, to be gradually forgotten. As a complement to the projection, a photograph entitled Staging Actors / Staging Beliefs (Set photograph) reveals a place where the footage was taken—a historical theater setting, completely devoid of people. Here, as if a silence of the snow falling reverberates through lavishly decorated and entrancingly lit sitting areas, captured by a camera in an aberrant, dreamlike composition. In Staging Actors / Staging Beliefs series, as in many other works by Poljak, personal memory and form of (auto)biography act as starting points to create a complex examination; this time, on the iconic power of cinematic images in representing and circulating ideologies and political agendas, and shaping cultural memory. While in the first two parts the artist investigates storytelling methods, linear narratives and intertwines past and present, collective memories and individual universes, historical facts and generated realities, through the projection of snow and the related photograph shot in the theater, Poljak emphasizes the powerful imagery as a space for contemplation. Autobiographical references are also directly present in much earlier work by Poljak - a single channel video Memories (Tito, tata) (1999). The video initially captures the artist compulsively writing and uttering tito and tata- the words similar in spelling and sound. While the first word was in fact the name of the charismatic Yugoslav President for Life, the second word means daddy in Croatian language. The rhythm of this repetitive action transforms into a pop song to which the artist eventually starts to dance. This activity can be read as a metaphorical escape from the authoritative father figures in both public and personal realms, but also can refer to an erasure of the past that so often happens through the noise of popular culture and mass media. The history of cinema is again both a resource and a motif in the artist’s photograph titled Uncertain Memories: This is not me, 2012. She takes up a frozen frame from Andrei Tarkovsky’s documentary Voyage in Time (1983), made during his research trip through Italy for his feature film Nostalgia. This notable Soviet director captured Italian people, landscape and monuments- their history and present, while also pondering his own life and art making. The image that Poljak chose, blurry and depleted because of shooting it from the TV screen, features a little girl playing with a balloon. Over the screen a post-it is attached, with a note “This is not me.” The work is a continuation of Poljak’s delving on entanglement of real and fictional, which is, as much as in Tarkovsky’s oeuvre, an ongoing investigation of remembrance mechanisms and a quest for (self-)identity.

While giving the title to this

taught me the difference

book - Don’t Turn Your Back on Me –

between right and wrong.

and talking about previous and current migrations, political

Branko Bauer was a film

and economic tragedies and

director with specific focus

history repeating itself, I

on children and the youth. He

came to realize that this

produced his films in Hollywood

title is reminiscent of the Yugoslav cult movie by Branko Bauer Don’t Turn Round, My Son, that was made in 1956. In this film, Don’t Turn Round, My Son! and then Run! are the last words spoken to his son BB

by a father who is dying, being shot by the enemy’s fascist bullets. Accordingly, the son runs through the field towards the forest where his saviors, the partisan fighters, are waiting on him. I grew up with this kind of films and topics. The hero

style, which made them widely popular among the audiences but also film critics. Bauer’s production talked about the World War II, bad fascists and good partisan fighters, children who died heroic deaths for the idealist agendas – the same agendas we in fact experienced, due to their sacrifices, in our Yugoslavia. No wonder that belief systems, values and (non-) belonging to a certain community were in focus of my work for such a long time. As I turned

characters from these films

seventeen, a “new era” had

were in fact my heroes. The

started; the new capitalist

films by Bauer such as Boško

system that demolished the

Buha (1978), The Farm in the

agendas nourished in socialism

Small March (1976) or my

by declaring them wrong,

favorite one, A Train in the

together with all of my

Snow (Mate Relja, 1976), have

childhood memories and values…

For ten years I was bitterly

in the endless Mediterranean

observing architectural

scenery of Zlatni rat - a

violence of overbuilding on

small dot on a small island

Croatian islands and the coast

in a small country. I adored

that started right after the

the contradictions and

war by a new generation of

sensations I was able to find

nouveau riches, politically

there but the violence of the

suitable people. In 2004,

development of new buildings

during my stay in Amsterdam

and the new mentality in

after spending four months in

that landscape irritated me

the town of Bol on the island

more and more every day.

of Brač, I finally articulated my feelings through the project

When I finally left for

entitled Great Expectations.

Amsterdam, only three days later I wrote the script.

Great Expectations

I have always had emotional

Great Expectations will talk about

super 16 mm film and series of color photographs

and geographical connection to

various forms of violence in

2004/2005

the small town of Bol, where I

the male-line of one family.

have been spending my summers

Emotional, architectural

ever since I was a little girl.

and physical violence

That particular year I stayed

respectively interchange

much longer, I just could

from one generation to the

not force myself to leave.

next, due to the different socio-political contexts.

Zlatni rat (Golden Cape)

132

is kilometer and half

And for the core of the

long beach at which I

film - the arhitectural

read Virginia Wolf; I

violence - I had just

was imagining London during her

the best example if front

time, following the writer’s

of my eyes (literray),the

stream of consciousness

new, big house bulid

and visualizing spaces

by my uncle just in front

that enclosed her characters

of our house, only twenty

while being alone and enveloped

centimeters away!

At the Court of the Transition King Leila Topić

Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they’re thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can’t miss it. Laurie Anderson, Big Science

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Reflecting on people’s inconsiderateness and about the birth of a hybrid pseudourban context, the artist has found connections and interlacing of family relations, the architectural urbicide that is taking place in Split and its surroundings, and the violence at football stadiums which finally led to the incident reported in the “crime section” of the daily newspaper. These reflections are brought to life through a 17-minute film entitled Great Expectations and a series of photographs Croatia, Summer 2004. One of the most compositionally impressive photographs is the one depicting the artist on the terrace of her family home. The body’s gesture and position of the head indicate a person enjoying the view, but instead of a view over an open sea what appears in front of Renata Poljak’s eyes is the roof of her uncle’s newly built house. However, the mainstay of the work is not just the offensive architecture, even though it was the inspiration for the entire project, but above all the research of the causes that resulted in the urbicide of the coast, and which led the author to explore family relations and to analyse the transformation of war brutality into a new form of socially acceptable violence. The author notes ten years of observing architectural arrogance: “I noticed how following the war violence, a new type of mentality was born. Violence, once ‘justified’ during the war, took on a new form in architecture. A mentality saturated with tourism, greed, unscrupulousness and denial of all tradition is the continuation of the violence and reflection of the new taste that has appeared in post-war Croatia, and which is directly mirrored in the houses of the “newly rich.” Through the prism of her own family’s story, Renata Poljak warns of the creation of a new morality that is becoming collectively accepted. Using the private experience through a social context is also a continuation of the author’s artistic work to date, during which time she has analysed the emergence of generally acceptable social norms through her video works, articulating personal experience on a background of a wider social context.

The photographs Croatia, Summer 2004 show the most varied examples of new, “transitional” architecture, a phenomenon affecting not only Split and its surroundings, but one which has spread along the entire Dalmatian and Istrian coast. But this occurrence is not solely the product of the globalisation processes of the 90s. The extensive research that was carried out by two journalists Tomić and Paunović, points to the fact that the roots of the authentic anti-style, e.g. the architecture of Split, in some cases should be searched for in an

earlier time, in the golden era of self-government. In the article Proletarians from Sirobuja, Tomić explains how Sirobuja, a district in Split, sprung up during the 1980s when construction workers, instead of receiving state-subsidized f lats or housing loans, were given worker credits in building materials. Consequently, these unplanned houses suddenly sprang up overnight. The entire settlement, about 1000 houses stretching out on both sides of the main highway from Split to Omiš, was built illegally. Such cases were once accepted as a type of social venting, but thanks to the great expectations of the “Croatian state-building project” of the 90s, “the resourcefulness of the masses” has taken on completely new dimensions, as Renata Poljak has recorded with her camera and lens. In the film Great Expectations, the panning of the camera shows how houses built in the building tradition of the area began to metastasize in the mid-90s. The panoramic panning of the camera captures the new “largest houses in the village”, the protruding armoured fittings, the concrete blocks decorated with rows of turrets and serially produced balustrades defining the new apartment f loors. This is why a photograph entitled Zimmer from the Croatia, Summer 2004 series is paradigmatic: on top of a tall cypress that rises above the apartment unit there hangs a sign offering apartments to let. The housing conglomerates seen in the film, only halfplastered, with untidy house lots which most often lean against the one-time authentic “home hearth” 1 , with the “Apartments” sign have become the trademark of Croatian tourism, or the local variant of the global phenomenon of cementing the Mediterranean 2 . Even in the domestic qualm between profit and preservation of the land, money prevailed. This is why the series of photographs Croatia, Summer 2004 is a projection of local “civilization” that ref lects the present system of values, a view on the post-war mentality of the resourceful kings who rose above all laws. 1 It is compelling that “Great Expectations” doesn’t explicitly feature the image of domestic hearth as a mythical refuge and spiritual center of home. Instead of it, in several scenes of the film (for example, during the footage of the rows of holiday apartment buildings) there is only a subdued sound of fire cracking which gradually, during dramatic scenes of violence, morphs into the sound of flaring flame that corresponds to the film’s narrative.

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2 The fact that this is indeed a global phenomenon with local specifics is proved by the support of the French CNC (Centre National de la Cinematographie), France 2 TV channel, as well as the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia and the Office for Culture of the City of Zagreb.

It seems that guilt is the key concept revealed by the film as the artist points to the root of the problem through the use of numerous female voices that justify violent behaviour and support the distorted system of family values. The blame lies in the newly arisen system of values and in the great expectations of numerous “kings” 3 , (“good, but naive people”, as a female voice says in one of the scenes, justifying both a multi-storey building that obstructs one’s view and violence at the stadium), who have waited long for a Croatian state, and when they finally had one, it brought, among other things, corruption and inequality in the eyes of the law, encouraging their greed and avarice. The kings are to blame because in the transitional euphoria of gaining profit they forgot that the hatred stemmed from the war was bringing up their children who can only direct their anger at fans of the opposing football team. Or more precisely, Great Expectations is a film which, through an intimate family story, narrates a “Croatian state-building project” infected by capitalism and finally swallowed by the f lame of post-war injustices and the avarice of “the giants of our generation”, and on whose ashes the transition kings have built their concrete courts.

3 Renata Poljak calls them “great people of this generation” who don’t respect architecture or the common culture of dwelling, while being arrogant and almost almighty. The artist repeats these words as a chorus: “Always take more, always earn more, one more floor, one more arch. It is never enough, especially for the kings; they are the only relevant ones.”

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142

144

146

150

152

OTOCI IZMJEŠTENOSTI U PARTENZI RENATE POLJAK ALAINA CLAIRE FELDMAN str 2-5

arhipelag kroz slična ali ipak očigledna individualna obilježja sa zajedničkom geopolitičkom poveznicom. Zajedno, radovi opisuju čežnju za drugim mjestom, drugim vremenom i vječnim povratkom koji se možda nikada neće dogoditi.

Izvan njihovog fizičkog i povijesnog bića, otoci i dalje ostaju metafore i simbolički izvor razumijevanja vlastita ontološkog mjesta u odnosu na ostatak svijeta. Unatoč tome što predstavljaju prekid kontinuirane povezanosti teritorija, otoci posjeduju veliku moć pobuđivanja mašte s obzirom da se na njih često projiciraju ideje. U znanstvenofantastičnim i avanturističkim žanrovima od 19.og stoljeća do danas doživljavani su kao mjesta razonode, eskapizma i egzotičnog; kao metafore neovisnog razmišljanja o slobodi i ropstvu u djelima martinikanskog pjesnika, pisca i kritičara Édouarda Glissanta; ili pak kao mjesta piratstva i ‘offshore’ bankarstva zahvaljujući obilju kompromitirajućih dokumenata objavljenih kao Panamski Papiri. Kao što Glissant 1 sugerira, otoci su na mnogo načina elipse ili nepotpune ideje koje predstavljaju nešto drugačije od normativnih stvarnosti kojima se osporavaju naše fiksne ideje o značenju. Govoriti o otocima znači istovremeno govoriti o kopnu i moru, o prostorima ograničenja i granica, o prostorima kako dolaska tako i odlaska. Za prvotno formiranje otoka zaslužne su geološke i prirodne sile poput pomicanja tektonskih ploča i vulkanskih erupcija. Ljudska povijest, industrija i kultura jednako su utjecali na način na koji ćemo ove prostore definirati i dati im smisao. Partenza, višedijelna instalacija hrvatske umjetnice Renate Poljak iz 2016. godine, artikulira značenje otoka uzimajući u obzir emocionalne posljedice života u osami te na taj način djelujući kao medij kojim se ocjenjuje, oblikuje i tumači vizualni teritorij. Rad je smješten u gradu Bolu na najjužnijem rtu otoka Brača. Bol je poznat po popularnoj plaži Zlatni rat koja u more seže svojim rubom nestalnog oblika, podložnog izmjenama oseke i plime. Preispitujući njegovu povijesnu i materijsku ravnodušnost, Partenza more portretira kao prostor i predmet geografske, političke i emocionalne važnosti. Rad se sastoji od jednokanalnog panoramskog videa, devet crno-bijelih fotografskih kolaža, dva crteža u tinti te šest crteža u ugljenu. Gotovo sav materijal je fiksiran u crnom i bijelom. Postav radova imitira jadranski

Prvi kadar videa je šljunčani plato Zlatnog rata. Oštra horizontala dijeli kadar, no liniju šljunka iznenada prekida sedam žena odjevenih u skromnu, tradicionalnu hrvatsku nošnju koje polagano napreduju dinom, približavajući se izravno kameri. U trenutku kada stižu na vrh šljunčane dine, figure se zaustavljaju i čekaju. Krupni planovi koji slijede otkrivaju njihove identitete te emocionalna i psihološka stanja: žene u suzama, neke u drugom stanju, mlade, stare, uzdignutih glava okrenute prema pučini. Spuštajući se i koračajući plažom, likovi gotovo religiozno gledaju preko kamere, kao da ih jedan treptaj dijeli od propuštanja nečeg presudnog. Žene, kojima se kasnije pridružuje i par starijih muških sunarodnjaka, su sve do zadnje scene snimljene u crno-bijeloj tehnici, a kadriranje ukazuje na bogatstvo estetskih referenci koje Poljak koristi: sovjetska teorija montaže, tradicionalne nošnje, eksperimentalna kinematografija te odsutnost boja i dijaloga. Balansiranjem krupnog plana, niskih kutova snimanja figura te dugih kadrova Zlatnog rata, svaki sljedeći trenutak Partenze ispunjen je očekivanjem kako će se nešto dogoditi, no to se nikad ne ostvari.

1 Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant, 1997. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Hrvatska obuhvaća preko 1,200 otoka i otočića koji se rasprostiru diljem Jadranskog mora 2 . Sam podatak je iznimno značajan ako promatramo Hrvatsku kroz prizmu njene recentne povijesti i njene povezanosti s morem, kroz prizmu njene mornarice, ribarske i turističke industrije te trenutne ekonomske situacije. Scene Partenze se referiraju na rane 1900-e kada je zlatna groznica u Ognjenoj zemlji na argentinske i čileanskih obale privukla tisuće Hrvata. Zahvaljujući slabim imigracijskim zakonima 3 , gotovo 15.000 ih je do 1939. godine u potrazi za boljim ekonomskim prilikama emigriralo u inozemstvo, posebice u Latinsku Ameriku. Unatoč naporima i žrtvi rudara migranata, pronađeno je malo ili ništa zlata i gotovo se nitko

nije obogatio. Pojedini migranti su nastavili raditi u većim gradovima na projektima javnih radova argentinskog predsjednika Juan Peróna, ostali kao radna snaga u poljoprivredi dok se vrlo mali broj radnika bio u mogućnosti vratiti svojim obiteljima 4 . Nastavljali su raditi i slati plaću natrag kući gdje nije bilo ekonomskih mogućnosti, posebice na zabačenim otocima poput Brača. Kako su se izmjenjivale granice i prolongirale borbe, mnogi su Hrvati protjerani te su utočište tražili odlazeći iz regije. Težina povijesti očituje se u svakom trenutku filma. Poljak kameru fokusira na detalje i naizgled svakodnevne aspekte čekanja. Likovi ocrtavaju posljedice traume ujedno izazivajući empatiju za ono što leži unutar i izvan okvira, pateći u čistilištu definiranom razdvajanjem, separacijom, otuđivanjem, frustracijom i vječnim iščekivanjem takozvanog “povratka”. Tema iščekivanja Partenze izravni je i ključni pokazatelj rodne neravnoteže među onima koji imaju priliku otići i onih koji moraju biti ostavljeni. Tako dolazimo do još jednog oblika falsificiranog “povratka” koji je u filmu evidentan. U Partenzi čekanje svodi žensko postojanje na začarani krug iščekivanja da život otpočne, uz simultanu brigu za održavanje života djece i staraca. Akcija je konačno poduzeta u pretposljednjoj sceni. Začarani krug se prekida pobunom žene koja sama samcata ulazi u more dok je – bez mogućnosti povratka – voda u potpunosti ne prekrije.

2 Croatia Country Study Guide Volume 1 Strategic Information and Developments, 2013. International Business Publications: Washington DC, p. 32.

Video ostavlja značajan prostor za špekulaciju i interpretaciju zahvaljujući činjenici da Poljak ne koristi čvrstu naraciju već je razvija detaljnom artikulacijom snimljenog materijala uz dovoljno mjesta za kontemplaciju. Kao u filmovima Maye Deren i drugih avangardnih autora, fizički prostor se može doživjeti kao psihološki prostor u kojem subjekt i gledatelj projiciraju svoje osobno iskustvo i priču kako bi popunili praznine i rupe među strujanjima emocija i misli. Partenza je bešumna izuzev dijegetskih zvukova valova koji udaraju o plažu, što nam omogućava stvaranje vlastitog dijaloga i lociranja rastuće moći unutar aktualnosti vlastita okruženja. Budući da likovi predstavljaju određeno egzistencijalno stanje, lokacija za Renatu Poljak postaje jednako važnom temom; kamera se

3 Croatian Migration History and the Challenges of Migrations Today, Dubravka Mlinarić, Mario Bara, Snježana Gregurović, Drago Župarić-Iljić, Simona Kuti, 2015. http://aemi.eu/croatianmigration-history-and-the-challenges-of-migrations-today.

4 A different kind of multinational: Immigrants to Argentina from Eastern Europe, Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald, 1998. http://www.casahistoria.net/easteurope.htm

pomiče paralelno s obalom, šireći se i istražujući njene granice i naš odnos prema kontinentima, otocima i mjestima razdvajanja kopna i mora. Okrećući kameru sadašnjosti, u završnom kadru kamera zaranja pod vodu zamjenjujući crno-bijelu sliku sa slikom u boji. Odjeća koju su nekad nosila tijela sada prazna tone na dno mora eventualno aludirajući na talijanski otok Lampedusu 5. Rad je lišen nacionalne obojenosti prisjećanja te je usmjeren na međunarodnu odgovornost naspram trenutačnih i aktualnih mijena ljudi preko interkontinentalnih voda. Partenza je priča o isključivanju ispričana kroz estetsko korištenje apstrakcije i odsustva.U seriji od devet foto kolaža dimenzija 130 x 90 cm, Poljak kolažira kružne, crne praznine na set fotografije Dinke Radonić. Kada bolje pogledamo to nisu crne praznine već crno more uzeto kao ‘still’ iz samog filma. Time nas Poljak ponovo podsjeća na čvrste granice mora, implementirane ne kao bezgranični morski prostor već kao entitet s granicama koje probijaju našu maštu i materijalni svijet. Kolaže prati šest crteža u ugljenu, izvedenih opsesivnim nagomilavanjem apstraktnih kružnih pokreta rukom. Kruženja su prikaz povijesti koja samu sebe proždire, a obrazac migracija nastavlja se u beskonačnost. Zahvaljujući kružnicama, prazninama i kinematografskoj naraciji, Poljak razotkriva suvremeni kapitalistički paradoks prema kojem traganje za boljim ekonomskim uvjetima i riskiranje života predstavlja pogibeljan izazov kako za one koji bježe, tako i za one koji ostaju. Poljak povezuje suvremene migracije u sjevernoj Africi s inačicama iz povijesti Istočne Europe, suosjećajući sa stanjima otuđenosti koja proizlaze iz prisilnog napuštanja vlastita doma. U ovom slučaju, more predstavlja razdjelnicu među kontinentima kao i razdjelnicu među obiteljima te istovremeno kritizira globalno tržište koje uopće i nameće migraciju radne snage. Partenza ispituje način na koji su mašta i razmatranje našeg mjesta u svijetu istovremeno opterećeni kako složenom prošlosti, tako i složenom sadašnjosti. Pogled prema pučini čije su dubine jednako nepoznate kao i naše budućnosti.

5 Lampedusa je talijanski otok u južnom Mediteranu udaljen stotinjak kilometara od Tunisa. U zadnjih 20 godina otok je postao sinonim tranzitne točke sjevernoafričkih migracija u Europu. Za više informacija o politici koja se tiče vizualne kulture i predstavljanju migracije u sadašnjosti konzultirajte The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis by T.J. Demos.

RENATA POLJAK str 9

RENATA POLJAK str 45

Uvijek sam zamišljala da je ovako mogla izgledati moja pranona Vinka kao mlada žena, zaljubljena u svog muža, s dvoje tek rođene djece. Jedino što su imali bila je velika ljubav, kažu.

Kada sam počela raditi na konceptu za Partenzu jako su mi postali bitni slikarstvo i povijest umjetnosti koje sam studirala. Ovim projektom željela sam promijeniti umjetnički pristup i napraviti rad u kojem je naracija prisutna kroz samu sliku.

Od kada sam vidjela La jetée zamišljam Bolski mul kao mul (la jetée) iz Markerovog filma i pranonu i pranona kako se traže, trče jedno drugom u zagrljaj, u crno bijeloj boji. U “realnosti” Markerovog filma, slika koja je progonila glavnog junaka bila je slika njegove vlastite smrti. U realnosti moje pranone brodom je stiglo pismo: Nono je umro u Čileu. A nona je već kupila karte za sebe i djecu i sada je stajala na mulu s koferom, uz more, spremna za partenzu…

RENATA POLJAK str 33

Partenzi prethode kolaži naslova Don’t Turn Your Back on Me. Ovaj naziv u sebi sadrži teme koje me zaokupljaju, kao što su kolažiranje prošlosti i sadašnjosti, te spajanje povijesti umjetnosti (naročito slikarstva Carravagia) i suvremenog izričaja. Odnos povijesti i sadašnjosti, način današnjeg pristupa povijesti, njenim činjenicama za koje vjerujemo da su točne, te ispravljanje povijesti koje često primjenjuju države mijenjajući pri tome i memoriju ljudi i uvodeći nove vrijedonosne sisteme, nešto je što me zanima u svemu što radim. Na tim temeljima nastala je Ruta i spomenik, u Berlinu 2009. a zatim i Staging Actors / Staging Beliefs 2011. *

fotografije snimljene za vrijeme castinga za Partenzu u studiju u Zagrebu, u fotografiji Tamare Dugandžije i Davora Konjikušića.

Između varijacija prijevoda rečenice Virginije Wolf: Svako putovanje je opasno po život i Svako putovanje može nam promijeniti život, leži in between prostor tumačenja pojma putovanja. Na tom među prostoru sam gradila emociju u radu Partenza. Riječ Partenza znači odlazak, u doslovnom prevodu s talijanskog ali ta talijanska riječ, prihvaćena u našem dalmatinskom dijalektu, ne obuhvaća samo odlazak već i emociju nedostajanja osobi koja je ostala i koja ide. Zato je naslov ostao na originalnom jeziku i ne prevodi se. Partenza u svojoj osnovi ima ljubavnu priču, kao što i svaki migrant nosi svoju ljubavnu priču s sobom na put. Putovanje, odlazak i ostanak su u srži Partenze i mog osobnog života a in between prostor na kolažima ( koji nastaju od set fotografije i geometrijskih djelova jednog filmskog stilla) je ono što me u njima najviše zanimalo.

NE OKREĆI MI LEĐA MLADEN LUČIĆ str 50-53

Film i foto kolaži vizualne umjetnice Renate Poljak, pod nazivom Partenza (talijanska riječ za odlazak koja se upotrebljava u hrvatskim primorskim dijalektima), progovaraju o globalnoj nesigurnosti današnjeg društva te o fragilnosti ljudske egzistencije, a metaforički obrađuju priču o odlasku, iščekivanju te razdvojenosti što migracije uvjetuju. Početkom 20. stoljeća zbog neimaštine i gladi odlasci muškaraca s hrvatskih otoka bili su uobičajeni i traumatični, a jedna od tih tragičnih priča utkana je i u povijest autoričine obitelji. Ova serija radova inspirirana je životnom pričom Renatine prabake koja je živjela na otoku Braču i čiji je muž, kako bi osigurao egzistenciju svojoj obitelji, u potrazi za poslom otišao u Čile. Kao i mnoge druge

otočanke čekala je povratak svog muža, ali on se, kao i većina ostalih muškaraca, nikada nije vratio. Film je ujedno i Renatina posveta današnjim tragedijama migranata na moru što autorica koristi kao poveznicu i podsjetnik da smo to i sami bili (a i ponovo postajemo) te povezuje dvije iseljeničke priče; hrvatsku s početka prošlog stoljeća i sadašnju afričko-azijsku tragediju. Ovaj rad, služeći se iseljeničkim pričama koje se tijekom povijesti ponavljaju, decentno, ali izuzetno snažno i sugestivno ukazuje koliko je ljudsko postojanje krhko i podložno političko-ekonomskim i društvenim promjenama. Renata je umjetnica snaže osobnosti i izuzetnog vizualnog rafirmana, a služeći se suvremenom tehnologijom u svojim se radovima bavi sociološkopolitičkim temama, te problemima nove vizualnosti, što čini vidljivu distinkciju u odnosu na aktivističke radove brojnih drugih umjetnika. Razlog tomu je i ikonografija, vrlo bitan dio autoričinog likovnog izraza, koja ne bježi od naracije, štoviše potencira priču najčešće je odjevajući u poetsko ruho, ali ponekad i u eksplicitnu crnohumornu satiru. Takav se izraz može očitati kao odraz današnjeg vremena kome je ikoničnost bliska, a sukladno tome i umjetnost (pogotovo ona angažirana) koliko god se trudila biti idejnom i radikalnom, postala je narativnom. Premda će to nekima bogohulno zvučati, svrstao bi veći dio Renatinog opusa pod inačicu pojma neobaroka koji nije stil već označava stanje duha i čin individualnog umjetničkog postupka koji istražuje ili teži preispitivanju novih umjetničkih prosedea. Sukus onog što smatramo neobaroknim osjećajem definirala je profesorica novih medija i povijesti na Sveučilištu u Melbournu, Angela Ndalianis koja piše: ... “Kao što je bio slučaj s barokom u sedamnaestom stoljeću barok i današnji Neobarok plod je sistemskih i kulturalnih promjena, koje su pak posljedica uspona konglomeracija, multimedije i novih digitalnih tehnologija. Upravo su kulturalne transformacije dovele do neobaroka koji artikulira ono prostorno, vizualno i osjetilno na način vrlo sličan dinamizmu baroknih formi sedamnaestog stoljeća, ali se istodobno od njega razlikuje jer se stvara u potpuno drugačijem tehnološkom okružju.“… (Angela Ndalianis: NeoBaroque and Contemporary Entertainment (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004.)

Renata se u ovom radu bavi današnjim migracijama te kulturalnim promjenama i civilizacijskim problemima koje sobom nose, uspoređujući ih s prošlošću kada su brojne seobe i etnički pogromi značajno kreirali stvarnost i budućnost čovječanstva. Bliskost autorice s neobarokom je i citatnost, koja se u Renate povremeno i odmjereno pojavljuje, a neobaroku je imanentna te ga označuje kao izvjesnog sljedbenika postmoderne, a služi mu i kako bi relativizirao odnos reprezentacije i iluzije, što je još jedna od bitnih karakteristika Renatinog stvaralaštva, svojstvena i Partenzi. Sam film počinje širokim kadrom uzvisine na kojoj će se u pravilnom ritmu redom pojavljivati žene u odjeći tipičnoj za naše otoke početkom prošlog stoljeća Taj kadar može se iščitati i kao svojevrsni homage vesternima Johna Forda ili Anthony Manna, kao što i kasniji portreti tih žena podsjećaju na krupno kadriranje Sergia Leonea, prvog neobaroknog režisera. Nisam siguran da li je prizivanje vesterna bila namjera autorice ili je samo željela dočarati atmosferu tog razdoblja kao što su činili i spomenuti redatelji te su se neke podudarnosti pokazale neizbježnima. Crno bijela fotografija, jednog od najboljih hrvatskih snimatelja Borisa Poljaka, apostrofira filmski ugođaj, blizak onim specifičnim Hitchckokovim atmosferama pedesetih godina, što se manifestira vještim impostacijama kadra i kontrakadra što samoj filmskoj priči donosi potrebnu i pažljivo doziranu dinamiku. Radnja se odvija u svojevrsnom loopu, repeticijama koje nijemo dočaravaju trajnost i napetost iščekivanja što je potencirano suodnosima i planskom sučeljavaju mjesečeve strukture morskog žala i udaljenih kontura planina što omeđuju tamnu i prijeteću morsku površinu. Dramski akcent filma je samoutapanje žene koja je izgubila svaku nadu, što je autorica naglasila kolorističkim obratom poput onog kakvog je učinio Tarkovski u filmu Andrej Rubljov. Crnilo morskog dna, koje je još par kadrova prije bilo prošarano lomljenim zrakama sunca, (kao što Sv. Duh obasjava Sv. Tereziju u Berninijevoj baroknoj kiparskoj grupi), sada se kupa u plaventilu a s morske površine, lelulajući poput baroknih draperija, polako silaze dijelovi suvremene odjeće, čime Bolski žal silazi u podmorje Lezbosa ili Lampeduse. Autorica ovdje stavlja znak jednakosti između prošlosti i sadašnjosti istovremeno relativizirajući stvarnost i iluziju.

Poigravajući se neobaroknim svojstvima, logično je da je Renata Poljak posegla i za citiranjem jednog od najvećeg majstora baroknog slikarstva, Caravaggia. Kada se pripremala za realizaciju Partenze, Renati je, kako sama kaže, ponovo postalo bitno slikarstvo i povijest umjetnosti te radi dva foto kolaža naslovljena Don’t Turn Your Back on Me, a koji se jasno referiraju na Caravaggia, odnosno citiraju njegovu sliku Madona s djetetom i Sv. Anom. To se platno smatra jednim od najznačajnijih Caravaggiovih djela religiozne tematike, a predstavlja Madonu koja djete Isusa podiže u zrak istovremeno gazeći zmiju, dok Sv. Ana nezainteresirano promatra prizor s distance. Zbog za ono vrijeme atipičnog i pomalo provokativnog religioznog prikaza (Sv. Ana prikazana je realno, kao naborana stranica, Djevica Marija obična je brižna majka, dok mali goli Isus nije obrezan), slika je bila predmetom skandala, a uklonjena je samo dva dana nakon što je bila postavljena na jednom od oltara bazilike Sv. Petra u Rimu. Takva tipična genre scena s provokativnim elementima u ono je vrijeme bila nepojmljivom za prikaze svetačkih života, tim više što su Caravaggiu modeli bile ne baš ćudoredne Rimljanke. Ta je slika nesumnjivo narušila uvriježene kanone te otvorila put slobodnijim umjetničkim interpretacijama sakralnih tema. Pošto je studirala povijest umjetnosti, Renati je poznata važnost te slike, odnosno reakcije i promjene koje je ona izazavala, te je odabire ne samo zbog njene slikarske izvrsnosti, već i njenog socijalnog konteksta što je u skladu s autoričinim društvenim angažmanom, odnosno njenom permanentnom težnjom za promjenama. Caravaggio nije slučajno izabran u vrijeme kada autorica razmišlja o realizaciji svoje umjetničke posvete migrantskoj krizi, jer je i sam bio migrantom zahvaljujući svom burnom životu koji je rezultirao nizom progona. Ako pažljivo gledamo njegove slike one nisu nimalo oprečne životu kojeg je vodio, a pitanje je da li je njegov burni život bio samo rezultat egoistične arogancije, kako kroničari pišu, ili se radilo o permanentnom buntu kakvog je provodio i u svom slikarstvu. Na svoja dva fotokolaža Renata razdvaja Caravaggiovu Madonu s djetetom od Sv. Ane, a između i s obje strane citiranih majstorovih likova postavlja fotografije naših suvremenika; na prvom kolažu mlađe, a na drugom starije osobe. Ti fotokolaži parafraziraju umjetničku zaokupljenost Renate Poljak, samo što sada ne govore metaforama

već izravnom naracijom apostrofiraju autoričine interese za permanentnu interferenciju vremena i prostora, otuđenost, očekivanje i nadu. Renata je u ovim kolažima dakako najbliža neobaroku, ne samo zbog izravnog citiranja Caravaggia, već i po provedbi kompozicionih i ikonografskih elemenata te jasnom stilističkom razdvanju sadašnjosti i prošlosti što zajedno tvori skladnu i misaono jedinstvenu cjelinu. Ti me fotokolaži podsjećaju na paradigmatsko djelo neobaroka, film Caravaggio, Dereka Jarmana iz 1986. godine. Vremenski izmiješana radnja filma, dakako, nije Jarmanov inovativni postupak, ali uporabni predmeti današnjice (pisaća mašina, digitalni kalkulator, cigarete, motor, automobil…) koje redatelj diskretno uvodi u minuciozno rekonstruirani barokni prostor, govore o novoj osjećajnosti i inovativnom pristupu filmu. Jarman vjerno prenosi prizore s Caravaggiovih slika, ali rekonstrukcija se odnosi samo na modele i scenu, dok će sama platna koje u filmu Caravaggio slika, biti daleko od njegovog izvornog rukopisa. Scena u kojoj slikar portretira ženu prikazuje model impostiran u prostoru kako je to činio Vermeer, krupni kadar otkriti će glavu slikanu na način Boticellija, a sve to filmski Carravaggio slika u Dégasovoj maniri tipično za neobarokne situacije.

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Renatini fotokolaži (kao i Jarmanov film), nadilaze vrijeme i prostor, premda autorica suvremeni tehnološkim sredstvima čini jasnu distinkciju između povijesnog i današnjeg vremena. Fotografije autoričinih suvremenika digitalno su obrađene baroknim chiaro – scuro postupkom, a drugi plan se tonski pretapa s pozadinom Caravaggiove slike. Ipak, jasna je razlika između topline povijesnih i hladnoće današnjih likova. Starije osobe gotovo su isprane, osamljene i napuštene, dok mladež odsutnih i unezvjernih pogleda još traži i očekuje nadu ne želeći doživjeti Orwelovsku budućnost svojih očeva. Suvremenici s Renatinih kolaža, okrečući se prošlosti, zazivaju da nam ljudskost i individualnost zauvijek ne okrenu leđa.

Depuis son inauguration en 2005, le mémorial est devenu un lieu de visite attractif (500 000 personnes chaque année). Le film montre l’une de ses visites. Mais comment Renata Poljak voit-elle cette scène ? Est-elle là par hasard ? A-t-elle déjà entendu cette forme comique de visite, au point de revenir sur ses pas pour l’enregistrer ? A-t-elle lu l’annonce d’une agence de voyages ? S’est-elle postée là ? A-t-elle suivi un groupe ? Lui en a-t-on parlé de sorte qu’elle veuille les suivre ? Car elle en est venue à filmer ce guide, à suivre ses propos à l’entrée et à l’issue de la visite. Réunissant ses ouailles probablement sortis d’un bus, il commence par expliquer en anglais, que le « monument de

Ce n’est pas ce film, qui est venu en premier. Cependant j’imagine Renata, résidente à Berlin en 2007. Elle voit et entend se dérouler une scène hallucinante et pourtant certainement banale et ordinaire : celle où un jeune guide « bonimente » à des auditeurs pouffant de rire, la visite du Mémorial aux Juifs assassinés d’Europe (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) qui se trouve sur l’axe touristique entre porte de Brandebourg et la Potsdamer Platz. Le mémorial, qui a pris quinze ans d’élaboration à partir de 1989 (l’année de la Chute du Mur) pour être finalement conçu par l’architecte américain Peter Eisenman 6 est un champ de 2711 stèles gris anthracites rectangulaires, abstraites et anonymes, de différentes hauteurs, placées sur un sol dont l’inclinaison des dalles produit un effet de mouvance. Accessible gratuitement jour et nuit, le monument compose un quadrillage monolithique au sein duquel on marche et on erre. La désorientation et la claustrophobie font partie des pratiques corporelles liées à ce pèlerinage, où se défont les références horizontales et verticales conventionnelles 7.

6 « Le projet présente une réflexion radicale sur la notion de mémorial, notamment dans le sens où il renonce à toute symbolique », explique la plaquette de présentation du Mémorial aux Juifs Assassinés d’Europe. » 7 Il s’y ajoute un centre d’information souterrain. Imposé à Eisenmann et construit par Dagmar von Wilcken, celui-ci comporte quatre salles : « Ort der Information » (qui expose l’ampleur du crime contre l’humanité à l’aide de propos de déportés, de carnets, de lettres, et de statistiques effroyables), « Raum der Stille » (qui retrace la destinée de quelques familles juives), « Raum der Orte » (qui relate l’extermination sous tous ses aspects), « Raum der Namen » (où une voix donne le nom et la biographie de chacune des six millions de victimes de l’Holocauste)

l’Holocauste » est sa halte favorite dans le tour qu’il prodigue : d’une part (dit-il) parce que « c’est une œuvre d’art » et de l’autre, parce qu’elle est « so controversial ». Et si elle fait controverse, c’est d’abord (rires de l’assistance) parce que « no Jew has been killed here ! ». Ça commence bien ! Ces remarques préliminaires mettent naîvement l’accent sur ce qui fonde le mémorial et sur les difficultés du travail de mémoire. Il est précisément un lieu et un marqueur publics articulant des corps absents (et le propre du génocide consiste à éradiquer tous les corps et faire disparaître les morts) ; par ailleurs, la notion de controverse est également considérée comme « one of the permanent features of remembrance. 8 » C’est, semble-t-il, un leitmotiv dans la visite, lors de laquelle le guide énumère les scandales liés à la construction du mémorial, 9 accumulant les anecdotes certainement bien des fois répétées pour faire réagir son public. Il s’agirait d’une œuvre de Richard Serra – un temps associé au projet d’Eisenman, puis qui s’est retiré –, le guide ne s’y prendrait sans doute pas très différemment. Je ne sais pas quand, ni comment elle l’a décidé, mais Renata Poljak, choisissant de faire un film, et de l’inscrire dans une pièce pour un texte et deux écrans (Ruta and The Monument, 2007) dont l’un est constitué de cette visite du mémorial de Berlin, adopte la position du témoin. J’utilise ce terme, témoin, à dessein parce qu’il me semble qualifier plus largement la place qu’emprunte Renata Poljak dans, ou plutôt avec plusieurs de ses productions, j’y reviendrai. Mais j’utilise aussi ce terme, parce que la notion de témoignage est désormais « chargée de l’histoire lourde de la Shoah et des massacres de population de masse qui caractérisent l’histoire des totalitarismes du xxe siècle », comme l’a énoncé l’historienne française Annette Wieworka en 1998, en préambule de son ouvrage justement appelé L’Ere du témoin10. Dans ce livre, Wieworka fait du procès Eichmann, en 1961, un tournant où le témoignage, c’est-à-dire 8 Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, War and remembrance in the XXth Century. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cité in Brigitte Sion, Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires. Memory, Architecture and Tourism. Lanham/London : Lexington Books, 2015, 1. 9 Comme le raconte le jeune guide, un scandale éclate en 2004, alors que le chantier est désormais bien avancé. On découvre que la société Degussa qui fournit le revêtement anti-graffiti appliqué sur les stèles est liée à l’entreprise qui produisait le gaz Zyklon B, utilisé dans les camps d’extermination nazis. La polémique est particulièrement vive et les travaux sont suspendus pendant un mois. L’important travail de mémoire entrepris depuis la fin de la guerre par l’entreprise a finalement raison de cette polémique. 10

Annette Wieworka, L’Ere du témoin, Paris, Plon, 1998.

un des vecteurs essentiels de la mémoire, se charge d’un sens qui dépasse l’expérience individuelle, et se porte dans l’espace public : la scénographie du procès Eichmann, en effet, se fonde moins sur des documents que sur la déposition des témoins, dont la parole se libère alors. Puis vient le temps, où s’effectue une collecte systématique de témoignages le plus souvent audiovisuels et où le génocide des Juifs occupe l’espace littéraire, médiatique et cinématographique. Depuis, selon Annette Wieviorka, « la mémoire de la Shoah est devenue - pour le meilleur et pour le pire –la matrice mémorielle à laquelle on se réfère plus généralement pour analyser des faits passés et pour poser, au sein des réalités contemporaines, les bases du récit historique futur 11». Cette symbolique dominante du Mal constitue aussi le soubassement d’un universalisme moral supranational. Paradoxalement poursuit l’historienne, à mesure que la mémoire du génocide des Juifs s’est affirmée comme une nécessité, que les mémoriaux se sont multipliés, que les récits de survivant.e.s ont fait place à une deuxième, puis une troisième génération désireuse ou réfractaire au besoin de ne pas oublier, que les programmes d’enseignement (l’exemple des « Holocaust Studies » aux EtatsUnis) leur ont fait une place quasi obligatoire, que l’ouverture des archives à l’Est a suscité une abondance de nouveaux travaux, que des fictions littéraires ou cinématographiques l’ont prise pour thème, son utilité a été de plus en plus contestée. Les enseignants ont témoigné de leurs difficultés à l’enseigner. La peur a surgi, de voir l’uniformisation et l’universalisation des discours l’accompagnant devenir une « autorité sémantique » coupée des réalités décrites par les historiens. « Ainsi serions-nous entré.e.s, écritelle, dans un nouveau cycle, une quatrième phase de l’histoire de cette mémoire, caractérisée tout à la fois par son institutionnalisation et par sa mise en cause.12 » L’ère du témoin semble s’être achevée, aucun récit ne semble sans précédent. Or le Mémorial aux Juifs Assassinés d’Europe d’Eisenman, fait de l’acte de mémorisation un objet spatial instable. Non seulement, il évite clairement

de représenter, de « raconter l’histoire » de la Shoah. Mais aussi, en remplaçant l’horizontalité du sol par deux surfaces séparées et ondulantes, celle qui court en haut des stèles et celle qui passe aux pieds de celles-ci, le monument suspend, entre ces deux topographies artificielles, un corps qui se sent dépassé. Comme l’explique Eisenman, «it was the idea of the ground in the Nazi ideology of Blut and Boden that made the Jew placeless, alien and other. Thus, it is to architecture after the demise of modernist abstraction and to ground as a condition of presence that this work appeals.13» Le film Renata Poljak n’est pas promotionnel. Il ne présente pas l’œuvre, il ne juge pas de son bien fondé. Il s’intéresse plutôt à ses usages. Le film ne juge pas non plus la pertinence des échanges entre le guide et sa troupe de touristes, ni de la qualité de leur passage entre les parallélépipèdes de granit, ni même de ce que pensent ou éprouvent les personnes, ou pourquoi elles rient. Il parle de la vie du monument ou plutôt, plus prosaïquement, de son « vécu ». Sans doute, il témoigne de la condition « thana-touristique » du Mémorial aux Juifs Assassinés d’Europe et par extension, de Berlin, avec son paysage palimpseste du XXè siècle, de ses tentatives de cosmopolitisme et de ses atrocités. Totalement accessible, inscrit physiquement dans la continuité avec le trottoir de la ville, le Mémorial aux Juifs Assassinés d’Europe s’inscrit d’emblée dans les parcours proposés à la fois au titre de l’ « architourisme », le tourisme architectural et du « thana-tourisme» (ou « thanato-tourisme »). John Lennon et Malcolm Foley, universitaires de Glasgow, ont utilisé dans les années 1990 l’expression de dark tourism pour qualifier cette une forme de voyage centrée sur la visite de sites associés à la mort ou à la destruction. La proposition euphémique d’un tourisme du « beau », qu’il s’agisse de lieux ou d’œuvres, de musées, de palais et de monuments architecturaux, s’est désormais largement doublée d’un tourisme du traumatisme, des catastrophes et des massacres, soit sur les lieux-mêmes où l’expérience collective des violences de masse a été patrimonialisée14 , soit dans des rituels commémoratifs et architecturaux.

11 Annette Wieworka, « Eichmann, un procès inaugural », Le Nouvel Observateur, hors-série n° 53, « La mémoire de la Shoah », décembre 2003-janvier 2004, 30 12 Annette Wieworka, « Shoah : les étapes de la mémoire en France », Les guerres de mémoires, Paris, La Découverte, « Cahiers libres », 2008, p. 107-116. URL : http://www.cairn.info.inshs.bib.cnrs. fr/les-guerres-de-memoires--9782707154637-page-107.htm.

13 Peter Eisenman, « The Silence of Excess », Eisenman Architects, Holocaust Memorial Berlin. Baden : Lars Müller publishers, 2005. 14 Cf. Musée d’Auschwitz ; Musée du Génocide à Kigali (Rwanda) ; Prison S21 à Phnom Penh (Cambodge) ; Centrale de Tchernobyl….

Ainsi, Renata Poljak a pris le relais dans la chaîne mémorielle en y reprenant cette place du témoin, relatant cette visite, ce tourisme, ce discours, ces silences, ces rires, ces parcours, cette performance située, ce jour et cette heure-là au Memorial de Berlin. Le passage du témoin est ainsi venu « rejouer » ce qui se passe sur le second écran. Celui-ci délocalise la temporalité et la spatialité de la visite au Monument. Il s’agit d’une boucle filmique, qui situe son objet dans un milieu aquatique difficile à contextualiser, si ce n’est par le bruit émis, qui fait l’effet d’une vigoureuse respiration. Ce n’est ni le bruit des vagues, ni celui la piscine qu’on entend mais plutôt celui d’une gorge d’eau aspirant et se vidant en ronflant. On voit un pied mignon dépassant d’un jupon blanc à motifs, alors qu’est approché, caressé, léché par une immense langue rouge sortant des profondeurs de la gorge. Comme le travail du rêve, le scénario ici figuré ne possède ni début, ni fin, ni capacité de négation. Un texte en indique d’ailleurs la source onirique. La boucle filmique est inspirée de la préface de l’écrivain Miljenko Jergovic à son roman Ruta Tannenbaum (2006), une fiction littéraire écrite en parallèle à la vie et la mort de Lea Deutsch, la « Shirley Temple Croate ». C’était une fillette juive de Zagreb devenue dans les années trente une enfant-star du Théâtre national croate. Elle en fut bannie par le régime collaborationniste Oustachi, exterminée à Auschwitz, à l’âge de seize ans, et est demeurée comme un caillou inénarrable dans la gorge de ses concitoyens. Sa mort anticipe le début du roman. Elle apparaît dans la préface sous forme d’un conte folklorique. Une petite « Princesse », qui a fait vœu d’être invisible, y a presque réussi sauf qu’il reste son pied droit qui ne disparaît pas. Ce pied va conduire à sa perte cette jeune « présomptueuse ». Croyant voyager en Inde, rêvant au contact sensuel d’une vache léchant son pied, elle est en réalité emportée en wagon à bestiaux vers un camp de la mort. Le pied, dans le Chef d’œuvre inconnu de Balzac, c’est ce qui permet de reconnaître l’existence d’une figure sous une muraille de peinture. Cette figure presque entièrement recouverte de peinture est féminine. « Il y a une femme làdessous », s’écrie l’un de ceux qui observent le tableau dont le pied, seul, émerge de son

milieu d’invisibilité. Le roman de Jergovic tire aussi une figure féminine par le pied, pour dire l’Holocauste en Croatie, qui fut le premier Etat indépendant à mettre en place la Solution finale pour exterminer les Juifs, les Serbes, les Tsiganes. Défaisant d’emblée les liens de causalité, de chronologie, de périodisation, cet écran (Ruta) et son emboîtement fictionnel aiguillent l’autre écran (The Monument) sur une temporalité désaccordée et anachronique : celle que prend en compte, désormais une historicité qui tiendrait compte des fantômes, comme l’explique l’historienne Régine Robin : « Le spectre, le fantomal, le revenant, connotent les retours du refoulé mais aussi toutes les bifurcations, les voies non empruntées par l’histoire, les vaincus, les solutions abandonnées, les utopies étouffées ; le spectral, ici, est l’espace tiers qui va permettre de transmettre une part de l’héritage, le passé ouvert dans ce qu’il a encore à nous dire et dans ce que nous avons encore à lui dire.15 » Qu’avons nous à lui dire ? J’ai envie de prolonger cette narration de Ruta and the Monument par quelques éléments filmés d’un autre projet de Renata Poljak, intitulé Freedom is not Given. It has to be pursued (2013) qu’elle nous a montrés lors de son intervention à Something You Should Know16 , le 13 novembre 2013. Projetant ses films dans des salles de classe de lycées en Croatie avec le prétexte de présenter son travail, elle a recueilli les réactions de nombreux élèves qui avaient alors entre quinze et dix-huit ans (et qui donc, sont aujourd’hui en âge de voter). Dans leur presque unanimité, leur rejet extrême de la Gay Pride de Split – où, en 2011, quelques centaines de manifestant.e.s défilèrent sous les jets de pierre, de bouteilles, de tomates et de gaz lacrymogènes de milliers de contre-manifestants– leurs propos xénophobes et homophobes se mêlent à un nationalisme reviviscent et la nostalgie d’un arrière grand-père Oustachi entrecroisés avec une volonté de partir comme seul espoir et un individualisme aussi forcené que désemparé. Une fois encore, Renata Poljak relance cette chaîne du témoignage en la plaçant dans l’instabilité d’un constant devenir. 15

Régine Robin, La mémoire saturée, Paris : Stock, 2003, 57

16 Something You Should Know : artists and curators est le titre du séminaire que nous co-organisons, Patricia Falguières, Natasa Petresin-Bachelez et moi-même, à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) à Paris.

NEPRECIZNA SJEĆANJA ŽELJKA HIMBELE str 74-77

Renata Poljak stvara svoje umjetničke radove u medijima fotografije, filma, videa i instalacije. Upotrebljavajući slike snažnih metaforičkih potencijala, umjetnica istražuje političke, ekonomske i socijalne fenomene od ranih 1990tih pa sve do danas - kako na području Hrvatske, tako i u široj europskoj regiji. Za koncept i sadržaje svojih radova Poljak se oslanja na vlastita iskustva koristeći elemente autobiografije i naraciju u prvom licu, te arhivske i dokumentarne materijale. Radovi kontempliraju o pojmovima sjećanja i zaborava, te progovaraju o tome kako različite ideologije, povijesti i političke agende bivaju konstruirane i diseminirane. Također, oni portretiraju umjetničinu generaciju u konstantnom stanju nesigurnosti, pasivnosti, bespomoćnosti i dizorijentacije (kako u privatnom tako i u javnom kontekstu), kao i (ne)toleranciju različitih oblika nasilja i šovinizma u suvremenom hrvatskom društvu, koji se danas mogu primijetiti i na puno široj, čak i globalnoj razini. Umjetničin rad u nekoliko zasebnih ali korespondirajućih dijelova, Režiranje glumaca / režiranje uvjerenja (2011/2012) sastoji se od fotografije, dvije video projekcije i jednog videa na monitoru. Projekcija Režiranje glumaca/ režiranje uvjerenja (Boško Buha) fokusirana je na ličnost Ivana Kojundžića, koji je kao dijete igrao glavnu ulogu u popularnom jugoslavenskom dugometražnom filmu Boško Buha (1978). Boško Buha, glavni lik filma, fascinantna je povijesna figura. U dobi od samo petnaest godina bio je jedan od najmlađih članova komunistički orijentiranog partizanskog pokreta otpora, koji se za vrijeme Drugog svjetskog rata zajedno sa Savezničkim Silama borio protiv Sila Osovine na jugoslavenskom frontu, istovremeno gradeći temelje za poslijeratnu Socijalističku Federativnu Republiku Jugoslaviju. Radnja ovog popularnog filma opisuje život, sudjelovanje u borbama, hrabrost i herojsku smrt iz zasjede tog mladog partizana, kojemu je posthumno dodijeljen orden Narodnog Heroja Jugoslavije. Film Boško Buha bio je kontinuirano prikazivan i u kinima i na nacionalnoj televiziji, učinkovito šireći komunističku ideologiju i vjeru

u jugoslavenski socijalistički sistem. Uloga Boška Buhe bila je prva no ujedno i zadnja filmska uloga Ivana Kojundžića, koji je tada imao petnaest godina. Kasnije, u 1990-tim godinama, Kojundžić se aktivno priključio hrvatskom domovinskom ratu koji je označio kraj jugoslavenske države i pripadajuće političke ideologije - one ideologije za koju se Boško Buha borio. Nakon rata za neovisnost, u ranim danima demokratske Republike Hrvatske, Kojundžić postaje spiker vijesti na hrvatskom nacionalnom radiju i televiziji. Renatin video kombinira odabrane isječke iz originalnog dugometražnog filma s fragmentima intervjua s Kojundžićem koji je umjetnica snimila u privatnom, intimnom ambijentu stana. Ovaj intervju skriptiran je i izrežiran kao i sam film Boško Buha. No ovom prilikom Kojundžić glumi samoga sebe, kao osobu od 48 godina, te daje kontradiktorne odgovore umjetničinim pitanjima, izgovarajući oprečne impresije svojega djetinjstva i uloge Boška Buhe (npr. tvrdeći isprva da se srami ove uloge a kasnije da je ponosan na nju), dajući osobne poglede na povijest Jugoslavije i vlastitog učešća u ratu za samostalnu Hrvatsku, te završavajući oprečnim osvrtima na komplicirane posljedice društvenog prelaska iz socijalizma u kapitalizam. Koristeći konfrontacije Kojundžićevih dijametralno suprotnih izjava o pojedinim temama, video Renate Poljak strukturalno rekonstruira sadašnju podjelu i sukobe mišljenja u hrvatskom društvu koji se odnose na životne uvjete prije i nakon rata za neovisnost, koji su također donijeli i radikalni preokret u sistemima vrijednosti, te nejasnoće i krivotvorenja dijelova povijesti. Režiranje glumaca / režiranje uvjerenja (Boško Buha) u stvari je koncipiran kao kolaž kratkih narativa, što kako u strukturi tako i metaforički korespondira sa videom Režiranje glumaca / režiranje uvjerenja (TV Dnevnik). Poljak u ovom radu, uz minimalne montažne zahvate, prisvaja arhivske snimke hrvatske radiotelevizije iz 1990tih godina, i to snimke vijesti u kojima Kojundžić kao spiker iznosi pregršt kako domaćih, tako i međunarodnih vijesti. Lokalni politički i ekonomski izvještaji, prilozi socijalnih i religijskih tematika, vijesti iz sporta te vremenska prognoza monotono se nadovezuju jedni na druge u predvidljivoj TV formi, dokumentirajući tadašnju povijest Hrvatske na fragmentiran i ograničen način.

Treći dio ove kompleksne umjetničke serije je video projekcija Režiranje glumaca / režiranje uvjerenja (Homage to Slavko Štimac), koja se referira na jedan drugi, podjednako uspješan jugoslavenski film. Ovaj put riječ je o dječjem dugometražnom filmu Vlak u snijegu (1976), snimljenom prema istoimenom romanu popularnog jugoslavenskog pisca Mate Lovraka. Vlak u snijegu govori o solidarnosti, kolektivnoj odgovornosti i akciji, kroz priču o vlaku potpuno zatrpanom u snijegu za vrijeme školskog izleta te djeci koja sama organiziraju njegovo čišćenje. Za vrijeme Jugoslavije film je bio naširoko korišten od strane socijalističkih organizacija mladih. Kao i Boško Buha, utjecao je na generacije ljudi koji su odrastali budući da je kao sredstvo edukacije masovno prikazivan, promovirajući vrline zajedništva. U ovom filmu, glavnu ulogu dječaka odigrao je Slavko Štimac, jedan od najvećih zvijezda jugoslavenskog filma koji je kroz svoje mnogobrojne uloge odrastao zajedno sa svojom publikom. Međutim, nakon raspada Jugoslavije, karijera ovog glumca potpuno je iščezla. Riječima Renate Poljak, “Ne može se biti poznati jugoslavenski glumac kada ta zemlja više ne postoji. Budući da je zemlja nestala, nestao je i njezin kontekst.” U ovoj video projekciji Poljak se fokusira samo na motiv snijega, snimajući aranžiranu situaciju padanja umjetnog snijega obasjanog svjetlom, na pozornici kazališta. Ovaj bezvučni neprekinuti snimak, napravljen statičnom kamerom, bilježi snijeg koji postepeno padajući prekriva pod pozornice, te postaje snažna poetična metafora za zaborav i brisanje povijesti. Rad se može shvatiti i kao homage svim glumcima i javnim osobama koje su nekoć predstavljale velike ideje, a danas padaju u zaborav. Video projekciji dodana je fotografija Režiranje glumaca/ režiranje uvjerenja (set fotografija) koja otkriva lokaciju na kojoj je video sniman- povijesno kazalište, potpuno prazno. U fotografiji, kao da tišina padajućeg snijega prodire kroz raskošno dekoriran interijer i bajkovitu rasvjetu auditorijuma ove perspektivno lagano iskrivljene, te posljedično nadrealne kompozicije. U seriji Režiranje glumaca / režiranje uvjerenja, kao i u mnogim drugim radovima Renate Poljak, osobna sjećanja i forma (auto)biografije uzeti su kao polazišne točke kompleksnih ispitivanja; u ovom slučaju, ispitivanja simboličke snage filmskih

slika pri prezentiranju i diseminiranju ideologija i političkih agendi, te oblikovanju kulturne memorije. Dok u prva dva rada iz ove serije umjetnica istražuje pripovijedačke metode, linearne narative te isprepliće prošlost i sadašnjost, kolektivna sjećanja i individualne svjetove, povijesne činjenice i generirane realnosti, u projekciji sa snijegom i pripadajućoj fotografiji kazališta Poljak izdvaja snažne slike kao prostor kontemplacije. Autobiografske reference umjetnica također direktno koristi u jednom od svojih ranijih radova, jednokanalnom videu Sjećanja (Tito, tata) (1999). Video započinje snimkom umjetnice koja kompulzivno ispisuje i izgovara riječi slične strukture i zvuka: Tito i tata. Ritam ove repetitivne akcije transformira se u jednostavnu pop pjesmu na koju umjetnica počinje plesati. Performans plesanja ovdje se može iščitati kao metaforički bijeg od autoritativnih muških figura u javnoj i privatnoj sferi života, ali također i kao pokušaj preinake povijesti koji se vrlo često manifestira kroz popularnu kulturu i masmedije. Povijest kinematografije ponovno je i polazište i motiv u umjetničinoj fotografiji nazvanoj Neprecizna sjećanja (This is not me) 2012. Poljak ovdje izolira jedan specifičan kadar iz dokumentarnog filma Andreija Tarkovskog Tiempo di Viaggio (1983), kojeg je režiser snimio za vrijeme putovanja po Italiji radi istraživanja za njegov dugometražni film Nostalgija. Ovaj poznati ruski autor dokumentirao je Nostalgijom ljude, pejzaž i spomenike Italije, njihovu povijest i sadašnjost, istovremeno razmišljajući o vlastitom životu i umjetničkom djelovanju. Fotografija koju je Poljak snimila u stvari je snimka kadra iz Tiempo di Viaggio s TV ekrana, čime je umjetnica dobila pomalo zamućenu fotografiju trošna izgleda. Neprecizna sjećanja (This is not me) prikazuje malenu djevojčicu koja se igra s balonom, a cijela kompozicija dopunjena je post-it naljepnicom koju je umjetnica prilijepila na TV ekran, sa porukom: “Ovo nisam ja.” Ovaj poetičan rad nastavak je Renatinog promišljanja o isprepletenosti realnog i fiktivnog, koje je u stvari, kao i u djelima Tarkovskog, konstantno istraživanje mehanizama sjećanja te potraga za (vlastitim) identitetom.

RENATA POLJAK str 133 Nakon što sam deset godina bijesno promatrala arhitektonsko nasilje, po otocima i kopnu u ‘novoj Hrvatskoj’, s novim bogatašima i novom generacijom “pravih” ljudi proizašlih iz rata, ideju za ‘Velika očekivanja’ uspjela sam na poslijetku artikulirati krajem 2004. u Amsterdamu nakon četiri mjeseca provedena u Bolu na Braču. U Bolu, za kojeg sam emotivno i geografski oduvijek vezana, uglavnom sam provodila ljeta a te godine jednostavno nisam mogla otići s otoka. Zlatni Rat - kilometar i pol duga plaža na kojoj sam čitala Virginiu Wolf vizualizirajući London, prateći tok svijesti i prostore koji okružuje njene likove, dok sam ja bila u malom mjestu, na malom otoku, u maloj zemlji, sama u beskrajnom pejzažu. Obožavala sam te senzacije kroz koje sam prolazila, a na povratku svakodnevno sve više me boljela nova izgradnja i agresivnost u tom pejzažu. Nakon što sam napokon, gotovo pod ultimatumom, otišla u Amsterdam nakon 3 dana sam napisala scenariji za Velika Očekivanja. Najkraći sinopsis u jednoj rečenici bi mogao izgledati ovako: Velika očekivanja će se baviti temom različitih vrsta nasilja koja iz jedne generacije u drugu, u istoj muškoj lozi, mijenja svoju formu pod utjecajem socijalno-političkog konteksta. A ja sam imala najbolji primjer arhitektonskog nasilja koji je postao core projekta, kuću koja je izgrađena ispred naše i od koje više ništa ne vidimo.

NA DVORU TRANZICIJSKOGA KRALJA LEILA TOPIĆ str 134 Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway, take a left at what's going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they're thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it. Laurie Anderson, Big Science

Razmišljajući o ljudskoj bezobzirnosti i rađanju hibridnog pseudourbanog konteksta, umjetnica je uočila veze i prepletanje obiteljskih odnosa, arhitektonskoga urbicida, koji se događa u Splitu i njegovoj široj okolici, te nasilja na stadionima, koje je naposljetku dovelo do incidenta zabilježenog u crnoj kronici dnevnih novina. Promišljanja su realizirana kroz sedamnaestominutni film naslovljen Velika očekivanja, odnosno u seriji fotografija objedinjenih zajedničkim nazivom Croatia, Summer 2004. Jedna od kompozicijski najdojmiljivijih fotografija svakako je ona koja prikazuje umjetnicu na terasi obiteljske kuće. Gesta tijela i pozicija glave upućuje na osobu koja uživa u pogledu, no umjesto pogleda na otvorenu pučinu pred Renatom Poljak uzdiže se krov novosagrađene kuće njenog ujaka. No, u filmskoj priči i seriji fotografija okosnica radnje nije samo zazorna arhitektura, iako je ona bila nadahnuće za čitav projekt, već je prije svega riječ o istraživanju uzroka koji su rezultirali urbicidom obale, a koji su autoricu odveli do istraživanja obiteljskih odnosa i analiziranja preobrazbe ratnoga nasilništva u novu vrstu društveno prihvaćenog nasilja. Autorica je zabilježila deset godina promatranja arhitektonske bahatosti: «Uočila sam kako se nakon ratnog nasilja rađa potpuno novi mentalitet. Nasilje, nekoć «opravdano» ratom, poprimilo je novi oblik u graditeljstvu. Mentalitet zasićen turizmom, pohlepom, bezobzirnošću, negacijom svake tradicije nastavak je nasilja i odraz novog ukusa koji se pojavio u poslijeratnoj Hrvatskoj, a odražava se upravo u kućama novonastalih bogataša.» Kroz prizmu osobne obiteljske pripovijesti, Renata Poljak upozorava na rađanje novoga morala koji postaje kolektivno prihvaćen. Tematiziranje privatnoga kroz društveni kontekst ujedno je nastavak autoričine dosadašnje umjetničke prakse tijekom koje je video radovima analizirala nastanak općeprihvatljivih društvenih normi, odnosno artikulirala osobno iskustvo na pozadini širega društvenog konteksta. Fotografije Croatia, Summer 2004 prikazuju najvrsnije primjerke nove, «tranzicijske» arhitekture, fenomena koji je zahvatio ne samo Split i okolicu, već se proteže duž čitave dalmatinske i istarske obale. No, spomenuta pojava nije isključivo plod globalizacijskih procesa devedesetih. Opsežno istraživanje koje su svojedobno proveli reporteri Tomić i Paunović, ukazuje na činjenicu da korijene autentičnoga

anti-stila, primjerice splitske arhitekture, u nekim slučajevima valja tražiti ranije, u zlatnome samoupravljačkom razdoblju. U napisu Proleteri sa Sirobuje, Tomić objašnjava kako je splitsko naselje Sirobuja niknula 80-ih, kada su radnici građevinskih tvrtki umjesto stambena kredita ili socijalnih stanova dobili radničke kredite u materijalu. Potom su, doslovce preko noći, nicale neplanski građene kuće. Čitavo naselje, oko 1000 nastambi, koje se proteže s obje strane jadranske magistrale - od Splita prema Omišu - sagrađeno je bespravno. Takvi su primjeri nekoć bili prihvaćani kao svojevrsni društveni ispušni ventil no zahvaljujući velikim očekivanjima od «hrvatskoga državotvornog projekta» 90-ih, «pučka snalažljivost», kako je kamerom i objektivom zabilježila Renata Poljak, poprimila je posve druge dimenzije. Vožnja kamere u filmu Velika očekivanja prikazuje kako su kuće sagrađene u skladu s duhom vremena sredinom devedesetih počele metastazirati. Kamera panoramskom vožnjom obuhvaća nove «najveće kuće u selu»; stršeće armirane armature, betonske blokove ukrašene nizom tornjića i serijski izvedenih balustrada koje zacrtavaju nove katove apartmana. Stoga je upravo paradigmatska fotografija Zimmer iz ciklusa «Croatia, Summer 2004»: na vrhu visokog čempresa, koji se uzdiže iznad apartmanskog bloka, obješena je ploča kojom se nude apartmani. Stambeni konglomerati viđeni u filmu, poluožbukani, s neuređenom okućnicom koja se najčešće naslanja na nekadašnje autentično «domaće ognjište» 17, s natpisom «Apartmani», postali su zaštitni znak hrvatskoga turizma, odnosno mjesna varijanta globalne pojave betonizacije Mediterana18 . I u domaćoj dvojbi između profita i očuvanja zemlje, prevagnuo je novac. Zato je serija fotografija Croatia, Summer 2004 projekcija lokalne «uljudbe» koja odražava vladajući sustav vrijednosti, pogled na poslijeratni mentalni sklop snalažljivih kraljeva koji su se izdigli iznad svih zakona.

Čini se kako je upravo krivnja ključni pojam koji otkriva film jer umjetnica, kroz brojne ženske glasove kojima se opravdava nasilničko ponašanje i podržava poremećeni sustav obiteljskih vrijednosti, ukazuje na srž problema. Krivica leži i u novonastalome sustavu vrijednosti te u velikim očekivanjima brojnih «krojeva»19, koji su dugo čekali hrvatsku državu, a kada su je dobili, donijela je, između ostalog, korumpiranost i nejednakost pred zakonom, potičući njihovu pohlepu i gramzivosti. Kraljevi su krivi zbog toga što su u tranzicijskom zanosu stjecanja profita zaboravili da im mržnja proizašla iz rata odgaja djecu, koja svoj bijes mogu usmjeriti jedino na navijače protivničkog nogometnog tima. Preciznije, Velika očekivanja je film koji, kroz intimnu obiteljsku priču, pripovijeda o «hrvatskome državotvornom projektu» inficiranome kapitalizmom, kojega je progutao plamen poslijeratnih nepravdi, gramzivosti «velikana našeg naraštaja» i navijačkoga nasilja, a na čijemu su pepelu tranzicijski kraljevi podigli betonske dvore.

17 Zanimljivo je kako «Velika očekivanja» ne prikazuju izravno prizor domaćeg ognjišta, mitsko utočište i duhovno središte kuće, već je u nekoliko scena, primjerice kada kamera snima apartmanska naselja, prisutan zvuk tihog pucketanja vatre koji se potom, u prizorima nasilja, pretvara u zvuk buktećeg plamena koji odgovara i narativnoj potki pripovijesti. 18 Da je riječ o globalnome fenomenu s lokalnim inačicama svjedoči i potpora francuskoga CNC-a (Centre National de la Cinematographie) i podrška televizijskog kanala France 2 te Ministarstva kulture i Hrvatskog Filmskog Saveza.

19 Renata Poljak ih naziva «velikim ljudima ove generacije» koji nemaju puno obzira prema arhitekturi ili kulturi stanovanja, ali zato su arogantni i gotovo svemogući. Poput refrena autorica ponavlja riječi «Uvijek još uzmi, uvijek još zaradi, još jedan kat, još jedan luk. Nikada nije dosta, pogotovo za kraljeve, oni su bitni.»

List of WORKS PARTENZA 2016 Film, video installation on loop, drawings and photo collages page 2 - 43

page 2 - 5 text by Alaina Claire Feldman page 6 installation in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria, 2016 page 7 crew list page 8 - 9 stills from Chris Marker’s ‘La jetée’ & text by Renata Poljak page 10 - 15 drawings page 16 - 21 video stills from ‘Partenza’ page 22 - 23 photo collage page 24 - 31 video stills from ‘Partenza’ page 32 - 33 photo collage & text by Renata Poljak page 34 - 43 photo collages

DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON ME 2015 Photo collages page 44 - 53 page 44 - 45 fragment from photo collage & text by Renata Poljak page 46 - 49 photo collages page 50 - 53 text by Mladen Lučić

RUTA & MONUMENT 2006/7 Two-channel video installation with additional text printed on the wall or on A4 print outs page 54 - 73

page 54 installation in Palais de Tokyo, 2012 page 55 text by Miljenko Jergović excerpt from the novel ‘Ruta Tannenbaum’ page 56 - 61 video stills from ‘Ruta & Monument’ page 62 - 67 text by Elisabeth Lebovici page 68 installation in Gallery Center Varaždin, 2012 page 70 - 73 video stills from ‘Ruta & Monument’

STAGING ACTORS/STAGING BELIEFS 2011/2012 Multimedia installation comprises of a set photograph, two projections entitled ‘Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs (Boško Buha)’ and ‘Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs (Homage to Slavko Štimac)’ and one video on a monitor showing prime time daily news footage – the archive material from Croatian national TV from 1994-1996. page 74 - 121

page 74 - 77 text by Željka Himbele page 78 - 95 video stills from ‘Staging Actors/ Staging Beliefs (Boško Buha)’ page 96 Slavko Štimac image and still from ‘Boško Buha’ movie page 97 text by Renata Poljak page 98 - 101 Slavko Štimac images page 102 - 107 color photograph ‘This is Not Me’, 60 x 85 cm page 108 - 111 set photograph ‘Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs’, 200 x 76 cm page 112 - 121 video stills from ‘Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs (Homage to Slavko Štimac)’ Images from ‘Boško Buha’ movie with kind approval from Centar Film Ltd. Belgrade

MEMORIES (TITO, TATA (daddy)) 1999 single channel video and drawings page 122 - 131

page 150 exhibition view ‘Partenza’ at the Gallery Dešković, Bol, 2016 Photo by: Sanja Šantak

page 122-129 drawings ‘Tito, tata’ page 130 - 131 video stills from ‘Memories (Tito, daddy)’

page 150 production photo ‘Partenza’ on Golden Cape in Bol, Brač, 2015 Photo by Dinka Radonić

GREAT EXPECTATIONS 2005 Film, super 16mm, final HD, 17 min. with photo series ‘Croatia Summer 2004’ page 132 - 146 page 133 text by Renata Poljak page 134 - 137 text by Leila Topić page 138 - 139 film stills from ‘Great Expectations’ page 140 - 141 color photographs ‘Zimmer’ and ‘No Title’, 130 x 90 cm page 142 - 145 film stills from ‘Great Expectations’ page 146 - 147 color photograph ‘The View’, 130 x 90 cm

page 148 exhibition view ‘Partenza’ at the DANUBIANA Meulensteen Art Museum, Bratislava 2016 Photo by: Danubiana page 149 exhibition view opening exhibition for the 11th performance days, We Shall Never Surrender, Varaždin, 2012 Photo by: Vedran Hunjek Curated by: Branko Franceschi Organised by: Gallery Center Varaždin page 150 exhibition view ‘An Ordinary Life’ at the Museum of the Fine Arts, Split, 2016 Curated by: Branko Franceschi Assistant curator: Božo Kesić Photo by: Robert Matić

page 151 exhibition view opening exhibition for the 11th performance days, ‘We Shall Never Surrender’, Varaždin, 2012 Photo by: Vedran Hunjek Curated by: Branko Franceschi Organised by: Gallery Center Varaždin page 151 production photo ‘Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs’ (Homage to Slavko Štimac), 2011 Photo by: Renata Poljak page 152 exhibition view ‘Partenza’ at the Gallery Dešković, Bol, 2016 Photo by: Sanja Šantak page 152 exhibition view ‘An Ordinary Life’ at the Museum of the Fine Arts, Split, 2016 Curated by: Branko Franceschi Assistant curator: Božo Kesić Photo by: Robert Matić page 152 exhibition view ‘Partenza’ at the MSUI / MACI, Pula, 2016 Curated by: Mladen Lučić Photo by: Manuel Angelini page 153 exhibition view ‘Partenza’ at the Gallery Dešković, Bol, 2016 Photo by: Sanja Šantak page 153 exhibition view ‘Partenza’ at the Gallery Kranjčar, Zagreb, 2016 Curated by: Mladen Lučić Photo by: Vanja Šolin Page 154-163 translations of the essays

BIOGRAPHY

IMPRESSUM

Renata Poljak graduated at the School of Fine Arts in Split

nakladnik / publisher

and afterwards attended the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France. Her works have been shown at numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions, biennials and film festivals. She received many awards, like Golden Black Box for the best short film at Berlin Black Box Festival held in Babylon Cinema in 2006, or the T-HT award - one of the most important contemporary art awards in Croatia, in 2012.

In 2002 she was a visiting artist at San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2008 she has been selected for Art In General residency

VfmK Verlag für moderne Kunst GmbH

prijevod i lektura teksta Renate Poljak

ISBN 978-3-903153-24-0

Translation and proofreading of Renata Poljak’s essays

Publisher’s Edition

Željka Himbele

Salmgasse 4a

ISBN 978-953-6901-98-2

1030 Vienna Austria

prijevod i lektura teksta Mladena Lučića

hello@vfmk.org

Translation and proofreading of Mladen Lučić’s essay

www.vfmk.org

sunakladnici / co-publishers

program in New York. She was also a resident in Cité des Arts

Galerija Kranjčar / Gallery Kranjčar

and in Recollets in Paris. In 2010 Poljak had a retrospective of

Zagreb Kaptol 26, 10000 Zagreb

her films in the program of Prospective Cinema (Prospectif

kranjcar@kranjcar.hr

Cinéma) at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and in October 2012

www.kranjcar.hr

at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris. In 2013 her solo show Uncertain

Željka Himbele

Village Voice. A retrospective of her work was featured in 2014

Galerija umjetnina / Museum of Fine Arts

in Montreal, Canada, shaped as the two parallel solo exhibitions

Ulica kralja Tomislava 15, Split

in the art centers Occurence and Optica. Recent group shows

galerija-umjetnina@galum.hr

include exhibitions such as Prophetia at the Fundazio Joan Miro

www.galum.hr

CIP zapis je dostupan u računalnome katalogu Sveučilišne knjižnice u Splitu pod brojem 160929033

Idiomatiques Cataloging in publication data available in online

Translation and proofreading of Željka Himbele’s essay Željka Himbele

prijevod teksta Leile Topić

In 2016 she had two major museum shows in Croatia, in galleries

Translation of Leila Topić’s essay Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Istre /

featuring her newest project Partenza.

Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria

Zrinka Pongrac & Željka Himbele

msui@msu-istre.hr www.msu-istre.hr

a postdiplomski studij završava na Likovnoj akademiji École

catalogue of the University Library in Split under the number 160929033

distribucija / distribution Europe: LKG, www.lkg-va.de CH: AVA, www.ava.ch

Sv. Ivana 1, 52 100 Pula Renata Poljak diplomirala je na Umjetničkoj akademiji u Splitu

Translation of Elisabeth Lebovici’s essay

in Barcelona and Stories from the Edge at the Kunsthaus Graz. in Paris and Zagreb and in Danubiana Art Museum in Bratislava,

Galerija umjetnina / Museum of Fine Arts, Split

prijevod teksta Elisabeth Lebovici

prijevod i lektura teksta Željke Himbele

Memories in NYC was selected as the show of the month by

co-publisher’s edition

lektura teksta / proofreading by

UK: Cornerhouse Publications, www.cornerhousepublications.org

Barbara Matejčić

USA: D.A.P., www.artbook.com

tisak / print

Bibliographic information published by

Régionale des Beaux-Arts u Nantesu, Francuska. Njeni su radovi izlagani u sklopu mnogobrojnih samostalnih i međunarodnih izložbi, te filmskih festivala i bienala. Poljak je dobitnica brojnih nagrada, uključujući 2006. godine nagradu za najbolji kratki

za nakladnika / for the publisher Silvia Jaklitsch

KerschOffset, Lučko, Croatia

film na berlinskom festivalu Balkan Black Box Festival, te 2012. godine nagradu T-HT natječaja, koja je jedna od najbitnijih nagrada za suvremene umjetnike u Hrvatskoj.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic

za sunakladnike / for the co-publishers Elvira Kranjčar, Galerija Kranjčar / Gallery Kranjčar, Zagreb

naknada / print run 550

U 2002. Poljak je bila gostujuća umjetnica u San Francisco Art

Branko Franceschi, Galerija umjetnina / Museum of Fine Arts, Split

Institute, te 2008. residency umjetnik u Art In General, New York. Umjetnica je također bila residency umjetnik u Cité des

Ketrin Milićević Mijošek, Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Istre /

Arts i Recollets u Parizu. U 2010. retrospektiva njenih filmskih radova prikazana je u programu Prospectif Cinéma u Centre

Museum of Contemporary Art of Istria, Pula

Georges Pompidou u Parizu, te 2012. godine u Palais de Tokyo

jednu od najboljih izložbi tog mjeseca. Selekcija njenih radova prikazuje se paraleno u dva Art Centra (Optica i Occurence)

oblikovanje / design

Stories from the Edge u Kunsthaus Graz. U 2016. svoj novonastali projekt Partenza samostalnoizlaže u dva muzeja u Hrvatskoj, u galerijama u Parizu i Zagrebu te u muzeju Danubiana u Bratislavi.

Elvira Kranjčar

Pula Film Festival

Damir Gamulin Zavičajni Muzej Grada Rovinja

u Montrealu 2014. Od recentnih grupnih izložbi, Poljak je sudjelovala u Prophetia u Fundazio Joan Miro u Barceloni, te

zahvaljujemo / thanks to

Mercy Bona Pavelić FACE Croatia

u Parizu. Njenu samostalnu izložbu 2013. godine u New Yorku, Uncertain Memories, časopis The Village Voice izdvaja kao

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

prijevod i lektura teksta Alaine Claire Feldman Translation and proofreading of Alaina Claire Feldman’s essay Adriana Perojević

Gradska galerija Labin

data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de.