Text:
names, only names…
Anca Verona Mihuleț
Text from the second publication of the project “You betrayed the Party just when you should have helped it”
In view of the recent developments in the history of mentalities and the constant paradigm shifts, the exploration of humanity’s recent past is a matter not only for academic research or philosophic endeavour, but a socio-political responsibility that should be exercised with diligence and updated instruments. The restoration of our past delivers new modes of reading and translating suspended events, personal histories or contingent realities.
Each process of restoration begins with the identification of the object to be restored, followed by the analysis of its current state, and the acknowledgement of its representativity within a specific context. It is a somatic procedure as much as it is a psychological, involving as it does certain skills that have to be combined with vision and gentleness. Rebounding between visibility and invisibility, a restorer prepares the past for its future representation. The creation of meaning through restoration requires an astute sense of time, space and context, but also the capacity to deliver a form able to communicate outside a constructed frame.
In 2019, when Andreja Kulunčić started to research the internal mechanisms and the apparatus of constraint behind the oppression of women on the islands of Goli and Sveti Grgur, she initiated a complex process of historical restoration, involving several levels of artistic and social practices – site visits, collaborations with the feminist anthropologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin and the psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić, interviews with the female descendants of a few of the women imprisoned on the two islands, and the production of a series of art works, interventions and workshops that were translations of actions and states of mind specific to life in the internment camp. On the other hand, Kulunčić worked closely with local newspapers having the intention of expanding the narrative around the project and transferring attention to the women’s prisons on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, usually ignored by the traditional accounts which focus on the men’s penitentiaries.
You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It is a rhizomatic project that aims to ponder upon the transformation of the body subjected to self-colonization in order to survive in a traumatic environment, and, furthermore, to present methods of activating a symbolic location deprived of modern forms of public acknowledgement.
One could debate the approach to be used to talk about trauma and physical oppression. How can we depict trauma and pain? More than that, are we entitled to depict and discuss the trauma and pain of other people? When the Serbian writer Danilo Kiš met Eva Nahir Panić and Ženi Lebl at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in 1986, he was deeply touched by the confessions of the two women who had survived detention on Sveti Grgur and Goli Otok, Ženi Lebl having also been an inmate of the Gestapo prison in Berlin. Although armed with the right critical tools and the capacity to understand that would have enabled him to write about their stories, Kiš did not wish to take this mission further. Therefore, he suggested to film maker Aleksandar Mandić that he should produce a documentary around their witness statements. In 1989, just before the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the two of them travelled to Israel, where Danilo Kiš mediated the testimonies of Eva Nahir Panić and Ženi Lebl with empathy and care – his imposing body, humble and thoughtful in front of the camera, was always close to the interlocutor, while the settings chosen for the filming were pleasant and full of vegetation, conferring power on the presences of Mrs Panić and Mrs Lebl and counterbalancing their disturbing accounts.
Survival on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur was partly possible because the women had to conquer the space with their own bodies – the body took over the soul denying any trace of sensitivity, warmness and not lastly, femininity. The interned women had to objectify their own existence for the purpose of facing torture and humiliation. At the same time, they were subjected to a double form of exclusion – one by the state that was supposed to protect them, and one by the fellow-prisoners who should have provided support and solidarity – and a double form of confinement – one coming from the camp, and another one coming from their own bodies.
The body of the oppressed is a carcass, limited and emptied of fluids due to the hard labour, left bare of dreams or hopes – it revolves around impossibility and rejection. Unable to distinguish between outside and inside, the body of the oppressed faces abjection. In the study Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva analyses “the abjection of the self”, which occurs “when the subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that is none other than the abject.”1 Deprived from the day-body, the night-body, the body of the mother, and the body of the caregiver, the body of the oppressed finds balance in becoming the body of the oppressor, as an effect of the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other, as Kristeva explains. Abjection is generated by “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite,”2 and in this constellation we can include the system of the camp (Kristeva mentions in this category the crimes of Auschwitz).
At the outset of the project You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It, Andreja Kulunčić visited the sites where the barracks housing the female inmates on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur were located. With the support of Renata Jambrešić Kirin and Dubravka Stijačić, the artist mapped the territory, trying to understand what the everyday life of the interned women looked like; the remains didn’t communicate about the architecture of the place or the rhythm of the compound, so the reconstitution of life in the camp would have been impossible. Consequently, the act of restoring and retracing life in the camp became a cultural construction that was enveloped in the form of six videos sublimating the conditions in which the women were working. Together with Kulunčić, vocalist Annette Giesrieg, saxophonist Jasna Jovićević and dancer Zrinka Užbinec conceived a series of movements and sounds, catalysts of the tensed bodies bearing the weight of the stones they were forced to transport or of the screaming which was part of the intimidating punishment rituals.
Through engagement and the propensity for nurturing, Andreja Kulunčić attempted to reverse the ritual of punishment and oppression – in the summer of 2021, the artist travelled to Goli Otok where she used stones as plinths for modelling a series of clay figurines, each dedicated to one of the women confined on the island. This temporary action was the first step for the creation of 850 figurines, encompassing the official number of female prisoners committed to the islands of Goli and Sveti Grgur, which Kulunčić intends to commence in 2022 through a series of collaborative workshops, dedicated solely to women, taking place in various locations and thereafter continuing at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka. The figurines placed on the burning hot stones in reclining or sitting positions, sometimes identifying themselves with the rocks, act as reminders of the hidden and untold narratives of the islands. Never displayed in groups, always solitary, the figurines are simulacra of the division between “the inner and outer worlds of the subject” as a consequence of “a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control.”3
The constricted clay shapes introduce the meditation around the soul of the punished; in the opinion of Judith Butler, who also quotes Michel Foucault, “the effect of a structuring inner space is produced through the signification of a body as a vital and sacred enclosure. The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, the body presents itself as a signifying lack. The lack which is the body signifies the soul as that which cannot show.”4 The figurines are the representations of the prisoners’ souls, born as part of a creative and restorative ritual outside the social or artistic norms, unconditionally present while they invoke an accumulation of absences, together with the acknowledgement of solidarity, another condition of survival. In her book The Silent Escape, Lena Constante, a Romanian political detainee who spent twelve years incarcerated in several Romanian communist prisons (1950−1962), recalls the soothing effect of solidarity: “When they were pushed, almost despite themselves, by the strong, affective, and completely feminine sentiment of solidarity. The women, all those admirable, miserable women of the penitentiary, demonstrated solidarity. For seven years I had time to come to know them. To study them. Young and old, peasant women, workers, and members of the petite-bourgeoisie, ill and well, they all stood up for those who maintained the ties.”5
For Andreja Kulunčić, the process of producing the 850 figurines together with different women in the various institutions where the project will unfold over the course of a prolonged period of time, goes beyond the ritualistic force of such a self-regulatory approach. In its essence, it is a critical and cogent gesture motivated by the contradictory existential threads typical for internment camps – solidarity is counterpoised by aggression against each other, just as trust is neutralized by deceit combined with fear. The figurines inform of the apparition of the meta-body or the body of the survivor congruent with the function of the anti-monument, evoking a perpetual system of inquiry over the self and the limitations of the self. The anti-monument is as well an object of contradiction that involves the disembodiment of a perceivable, historically identifiable reality and its transgression to a state of vulnerability, whereas the agency of the subject is never surrendered.
On Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, time was measured through the repetitive, Sisyphean action of carrying stones up the slope and then carrying them back or releasing them downhill. As Eva Nahir Panić mentioned, most of the women isolated on the two pieces of land didn’t have the strength to perform physical work as they had never used their hands in such a manner. Therefore, the forced labour the inmates were executing was a way of transforming the working body into a political body, exhausted of any form of agency and unable to exercise the habitual conduct of their daily lives. The vulnerable women were pushed into an activity directed to delineating the boundaries of their bodies, as limitations, social symbols and structural or marginal human experiences are the ones that progress toward pollution, as described back in the 1960s by the social anthropologist Mary Douglas. The pollution powers “inhere in the structure of ideas itself and punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined.”6
Drawn by the epistemic force of the two islands, Andreja Kulunčić shifted her attention to the rock formations characteristic of the area and recently to the plants that live on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur. Departing from the image of the silent bodies that were once engaged in moving the stones on the slippery slopes, with hands too tender to handle such rough surfaces, the artist worked closely with the daughters, granddaughters and nieces of some of the women prisoners in order to mark the presence of their ancestors on the islands. The marking was realized by way of artistic interventions that happened in 2020, or in 2021, when two separate statements were carved into stone, one belonging to Vera Winter, and one to Ženi Lebl.
The two assertions – We carried the stone from the sea to the top of the hill. When the pile at the top was big enough, we would take the stone back to the sea and It was on your shoulder, Sveti Grgur, that the classical question to Be(at) or not to Be(at) started. If you beat, you will be. If you don’t beat, you’ll be beaten. – were initially handwritten by their heirs, Nina Winter and Ana Lebl, and afterwards, their handwriting was transferred to stone through carving. The statements have the intention of creating significance around the identity of a group of women historically meant to signify nothing. Kulunčić uses a complex methodology enveloping archival research, content analysis and artistic investigation in an attempt to generate the leap from the political to the cultural body. The inscribed stones are not specifically signalled; they are left as witnesses of the inner worlds of the prisoners, compressed between layers of remembrance and bodily impermanence. For the passers-by, the engraved rocks might seem direct expressions of the women once inhabiting the islands, not linked to a specific chronology, but accurately localized in what is becoming a site of memory.
When in 2020 Andreja Kulunčić installed the simulacrum of a commemorative metal plate on one of the outer walls of a barrack belonging to the women prison on Goli Otok, another fold of the project was revealed. The plate as object, alongside the inscribed text, signifies the identification of the locus with a site of historical and cultural importance, bringing up the possibility of opening it for another type of audience and for a conditional interpretation of the symbolism behind the objectification of the island, while introducing the perspective of “the other”. The bilingual text on the plate reads:
U ovoj uvali i na obližnjem otoku Sveti Grgur naizmjenično se od 1950. do 1956. godine nalazio politički logor kroz koji je prošlo više od 850 žena optuženih za povezanost s informbiroom. Žene su same morale izgraditi staze i većinu objekata koji su danas vidljivi samo u tragovima. S iznimno okrutnim sistemom kažnjavanja, u kojemu su logorašice bile prisiljene biti i vršiteljice torture, logor je bio mjesto patnje i poniženja. Šikaniranje optuženih žena i policijski nadzor nastavljani su i nakon izlaska iz logora.
Alternating between this bay and the neighbouring island of Sveti Grgur from 1950 to 1956 there was a camp for political prisoners through which passed more than 850 women accused of having Cominform connections. With an exceptionally cruel punishment system, in which the women inmates were forced to assume the role of torturer, the camp was a place of suffering and humiliation. The harassment and police surveillance of the accused women continued even after they had been let out of the camp.
By appropriating the role of a decision maker in front of an indifferent political regime, Kulunčić reinstates a necessary order of things, one that was missing after the closure of the prisons, almost as if the installation of the plate, a gesture of normality and responsibility in any democracy, generates an alternative identity for the empty islands.
In the case of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, the abandonment of the women’s detention camps after the fall of communism without any exercise of social, political and cultural responsibility, begot the image of the camp as a structure of power that can be perpetuated and reproduced. “The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the home sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen,”7 asserted Agamben. The prisoners on the islands of Goli and Sveti Grgur had to exert their political bodies in order to survive – they had to punish and beat one another, repress others to escape repression. Again, the invisible, yet sovereign state, allowed such horrendous phenomena to happen. Having this in mind, the presence of the plate shouldn’t be interpreted as commemorative or even as a warning; it is a signifier of the consequences of a prolonged state of exception. In Giorgio Agamben’s perspective, “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporal suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law.”8 The existence of the plate represents the ending of the state of exception and the beginning of a new regimen of meaning outside the new politics.
You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It inherently creates a bridge between a disturbing event from the past and the internalized way of re-writing our recent history. Over the past three years, Andreja Kulunčić has revealed a normative social reality in which the state, the camp, and the bearers of history have been playing a game of hide-and-seek that exceeds the boundaries of a certain territory or theoretical path and can be attributed to the very condition of an oblivious humanity.
*An expression repeated by Eva Nahir Panić in the documentary Goli život (Bare Existence) in regard to the interrogations pursed by the police on Goli Otok. The documentary was broadcast in Yugoslavia in March 1990, from a studio in Sarajevo.
Zagreb, December 2021
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press: New York, 1982, p. 5. ↩
Ibid., p. 4. ↩
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics: New York and London, p. 184. ↩
Ibid., p. 184. ↩
Lena Constante, The Silent Escape. Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons, University of California Press: Berkley, Los Angeles, London, 1995, p. 159. ↩
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An analysis of concept of pollution and taboo, Routledge Classics: London and New York, 2002, p. 169. ↩
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End. Notes on Politics, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 41. ↩
Ibid., p. 39. ↩