You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It – the deconstruction of an amnesia

Irena Bekić

Text from the first publication of the project “You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It”

When in the mid-eighties the French historian and publisher Pierre Nora began to publish the three volumes of his work Realms of Memory (Les Lieux de Mémoire),¹ he set off a discussion among scholarly circles regarding memory, history and remembering. Analysing narratives, practices and representations of national memory in France, he viewed them as a discourse that is historically contingent and unstable, and both remembering and memory as cultural constructs that affect one another in a dialectic relationship of singularity and generalised structure. In his book, Cultural Memory, Jan Assmann suggests something similar. Memory to him is a cultural practice, a sphere of “binding obligations that bring order, meaning, and cohesion both to the temporal and the social dimensions of the world”, through whose establishment “it is only possible to reconstruct the past on which memory and history depend”.² Since collective memory is often realised within the domain of ideologies, and modified according to the dispositions of social power, it serves as the consolidating tissue of society and the promise of historical meaning. However, just as every system contains its own negative impression, that is, that which has been omitted from it, collective memory too contains the gaps where places of intentional forgetfulness lie. It so happens that in the construction of national historical narratives, those memories that are incongruous, even if fragile and faded, are excluded from society by means of systematic amnesia or neglect. Official history, Walter Benjamin writes, is the deafening discourse of the victor, but the silenced voices do also exist. We should not accede to the legacy of deafness, he warns us, because the traumas of the oppressed demand redemption.³ This pragmatic request in human unity⁴ and the solidarity we need, are the starting points of Andreja Kulunčić’s work about the plight of women on Goli Otok.

Goli Otok is present in the collective memory as a symbol of Communist repression, of suffering and martyrdom. When Jan Assman highlights the role of space in the culture of memory in the aforementioned book, he states that entire landscapes can serve as the medium for cultural memory.⁵ However, for some place to be marked by a monument, or be semioticised itself, there needs to be a consensus in the community on commemorating this memory. And consensus is exactly what was absent from the discussions about the camps for political prisoners on Goli Otok, an issue explored by the feminist theorist Renata Jambrešić Kirin. Institutional neglect and political manipulation have obstructed the path towards the historisation of Goli Otok, professional appraisals, as well as any possible commemoration in the form of a monument. Besides, „this brief totalitarian episode of repressive destalinisation (…) never got its legal denouement, nor did its victims receive political rehabilitation”.⁶ And this was not all. The complete disregard of the existence of the female camp, which held a total of around 860 women who were often guilty of no more than having been the relatives or wives of accused Cominformists, cast an additional shroud over this obscure segment of Croatian history. Institutional neglect and politicking, uncontrolled tourism by private concession-holders on Goli Otok, and, as if in a grotesque transfiguration or a poor vaudevillian performance, the designation of Sv. Grgur as a deer hunting ground, are merely further devastations of history on the Goli Archipelago, and women’s history in particular.

Awareness of the responsibility which Benjamin appeals to is what set in motion the artistic projects, Goli Otok – New Croatian Tourism by the artist and originator of the idea Damir Čergonja Čarli in 2000, and the Environment of Memory by Darko Bavoljak in 2016. In a three-year period, Bavoljak organised and produced temporary commemorative in situ interventions and artistic gestures by some seventy invited artists. One of them was Andreja Kulunčić, who initiated the complex project, You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It in collaboration with Bavoljak. This project was the only one that sought to focus on the female part of the camp, with the intention of grasping and making visible this complex set of issues, and with the end goal of introducing it into the public space. If Goli Otok, as Renata Jambrešić Kirin writes, “is the cyclopean island of the Croatian political mythology”,⁷ then the women’s prison is the cyclopean problem of this same policy, as it seems that the silence that accompanies the women’s prison is part of the same silence that surrounds women’s history, not only within the framework of the phenomenon of the Goli Otok prison camp, but also of the Socialist Yugoslavian, as well as the subsequent post-socialist, society. Patriarchal divisions of power defined the logistics of the camps, but the few modern interpretations were equally unable to escape this mental framework. For this reason, the work of Renata Jambrešić Kirin as one of the few, if not the sole, author who focussed her research on the plight of women has a precious stake in the process of shedding light on the topic of Goli Otok. Taking feminist theory as the starting point for her research, she has shown that the feminist position would appear to be the only one equipped with the means to grasp and deconstruct the patriarchal concept written into the structure and functioning of the camp. The female camp, she warned, was not affixed to, or a variant of, the male camp, as it is usually represented, but an “original site for the practice of the Foucauldian anatomo-politics of breaking and disciplining the body”⁸ as the crucial concept of re-education. This also included oppression and violence in which women recreated the patterns of patriarchal behaviour such as aggressiveness, verbal abuse and similar, producing in this sick turn their own negation of their selves. The split with their own character for having been “both victims and executioners”⁹ is the reason behind the silence of the former inmates, who furthermore had to face the tacit, yet deafening accusations of a patriarchal society: having been declared bad daughters of the Party, they were labelled as bad mothers, bad wives, bad citizens. Perfidiously imputed, this social burden is inscribed through trans-generational channels, as a levy on daughters.

This is why Andreja Kulunčić brought together a team of female professionals, theorist Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Dubravka Stijačić, a social therapist, dance artist Zrinka Užbinec, saxophonist Jasna Jovićević and vocalist Annette Giesrieg, and strategically developed a project to take in the complexity of the phenomenon through several lines and stages of work. At times they flow in parallel, leaning on various diachronies and semantic layers, addressing different target audiences, sometimes meeting and interweaving, building new memories. Carefully thought-through artistic segments define the multiplicity of the field, while subtly conceived tactics define the process through which they are to crystallise into three demands: as a commemorative configuration on the island, as a resolution of the inherited traumatic burden in humanism and the building of a better world, and the repositioning of women’s narratives within historical constructions. If we were to look at these resolutions in terms of space, we might speak of a work in situ and its deterritorialisation.

In situ

… and ahead lay nothing but destruction (W. G. Sebald The Rings of Saturn)

Deterritorialisation implies new configurations that emerge when lines of work are connected to other, external lines. This way, it does not extend only as far as the defined limits of the artistic field, but reaches in front and behind, and beside, before and after and now, creating an unsteady construction which the author has strategically taken into her calculations in advance.

The central section of the piece is the marking of the location, the women’s side of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, where, decades after the dismantling of the camps, there is nothing to signal the specific history of the place and the institutionalised suffering of more than eight hundred women. The remains of the stone buildings visible to travelers on board vessels passing by, which the women convicts themselves built with their hands and with the aid of rudimentary tools, are the hollowed-out signs of an undefined erstwhile use. However, just as art has always been able to intervene in sites of institutional ruptures thanks to its flexible strategies, disciplinary mimicries, appropriations of methods, tools and techniques, generating of new situations and uses, and above all, its ethical demand, here too it found the channels for commemorating an excommunicated memory. The commemorative key is twofold. First, Andreja Kulunčić installs a memorial plaque at the site, with the basic information about the women’s camp and its organisation, as an identification of the places. In addition to the plaque, she also adds a QR code which directs visitors to the website¹⁰ where they can find additional information on the Goli Archipelago political camp, as well as on the project itself. The website is the home base for research, an archive of scholarly and scientific writing and, most importantly, contains an archive of former inmates’ testimonies. It ought to be stressed that the plaque is not an artistic installation, but part of an artistic strategy. As a meta-functional object, it is the material mediator of information and the medium through which the repressed historical narrative becomes part of the collective narrative. Likewise, it is a medium of the inmates’ subjectivation, the site of their re-inscription into the public space. It is only with the installation of this plaque, which follows the codes of the conventional commemorative format, that they acquire their public faces, and the society gains a place of catharsis. It is at once an element of the author’s artistic agenda, representing her open activism. It bears highlighting that this is the first and sole marking of this site, sixty years on.

In parallel, together with Renata Jambrešić Kirin and Dubravka Stijačić, Andreja Kulunčić begins to create an Affective Map of Survival, which will discreetly and directly mark the space of the camp. It consists of female convicts’ testimonies as traces of Goli Otok life that help us reconstruct that everyday. The authors will create a network of memories by defining around ten points in space that will be materially and permanently marked. For instance, some will be carved in stone in the handwriting of a female heir – a daughter, granddaughter or neice, informants in this project – as has already been done with Vera Winter’s testimony.

This subtle intervention covers and develops a number of layers of meaning and established relations. It is a series of traces that, by transmitting intimate feeling and thought, inscribe affect into space. The matter at hand is not therefore a monumental representation of a heroic gesture or tragic yet glorious downfall of a people, but a process in which a space acquired its definition, and a natural landscape became a mental configuration. At the same time, this alignment with memory destabilises it, showing its fragility, the ruptures in the steadfast geography. By traversing between the points, each visitor recreates the camp, turning the deCerteauist place into space.¹¹ For instance, if they were to come across the words of Vera Winter, “We carried the stone from the sea to the top of the hill. When the heap on the top was large enough, we’d carry the rocks back to the sea”, they can cast a single glance to grasp the distance, feel the sharp rock underneath their feet, feel the gusts of the Bura wind on their ribs, or the sun burning their pates. Such identification does not calculate with catharsis, but is an intimate dialogue, a one-on-one meeting, a direct call to remembering. The verbal remains of the contested stories find their spatialisation in an anti-monument, as they were not meant to form a representative image, and do not make up a whole, but show up a lack.

There is a certain reciprocity between the landscape and the convicts. With their everyday labour, the carrying and moving of stones, they re-produced the landscape, while in return, being weakened by the labour, diminished, depersonalised. Reduced to silence, to voicelessness,¹² to a non-subject, they hypertrophied into bodies that had to be disciplined. It is a paradox, as these hyperbolised bodies were physically weakened, raddled by the scarcity of food and water, unsheltered from the elements, physically and psychologically harassed, exposed to torture, disfigured – hair cropped to the scalp omitting the odd tuft, in clothes that were too large or too small, and mismatched shoes. As in a sort of reverse carnivalisation, where those who are exposed to mockery are not those in power, but where the mocking of the weak is redoubled, they became a sign, an emblem and a locus of a one-sidedly proclaimed betrayal.¹³ Through the medium of movement, voice and sound, the performances by the three artists, the modern dancer, the instrumentalist and the vocalist, transfigure the simultaneous condensation and hyperbolisation of the body in the Goli Otok camp. In both solo and collective performances in situ, they recreate the gruelling daily life of the convicts, not in an effort to imitate or illustrate, to recreate suffering in full. On the contrary, this is a rite of passage, a translation of suffering into other codes and another time, an attempt of the body to remember. It is a structural intervention. Using the syntax based on improvisation, each within their own artistic idiom, it transforms, de-locates and reterritorialises the spatial surroundings, since space itself is unfinished, but emerges in the bending of the movements, in the relation between sounds and voices, the previous and current existences.

Reterritorialisation

Memory needs places and tends toward spatialisation.¹⁴

The author displays the video recordings of the performances in an exhibition space, where they denote the space of the island as parts of the exhibition installation. This is not a mere transposal or presentation of the performances from the sites, but the creation of a heterogeneous place that creates multiple refractions of the concrete spaces and time segments. The space and time of the Goli Otok prison, the space and time of the performances, and the here and now of the audience draw into one another, and through one another, reflecting each other in their own dissipation. The author constructs the exhibition as a site of a new imagination, establishing it upon various forms of media and the communicative processing of materials: video, drawing, documentation, sound… These are forms of relations and different materialities, the sharpening and blurring of focus, moving between the recounting of stories, the fragility of memories, the body as a medium or the real body of the tormented women and so on. She displays her large format drawings of female figures in motion in the space as a deliberate distraction whose different spatiality – its two-dimensionality in relation to three-dimensionality, the simultaneity of the depicted movements in relation to the diachrony of motion – interrupts the spatial and temporal continuity. In addition, the drawings are the materialisation of her personal relation towards the material, drawing by hand, transferring movement, the memory of the body.

If we were to view all these segments, as Brandon LaBelle instructs us,¹⁵ as an expansion in the sense defined by Jacques Derrida in Grammatology, then we can see them as a critical addition. It complements the “original” object, the “original” activity or phenomenon, with a sort of interruption, with which it “empties the seemingly stable presence of what we imagine to be complete, whole, or unchangeable”. In LaBelle’s words, the addition “makes the original available to sampling, appropriating, commenting”.¹⁶ In this context, the exhibition, as well as the work itself, represent a dissolved structure that participates in new/individual/collective constructions of memory and thus constructs itself in turn. This is the deterritorialisation of Deleuze and Guattari.

Exhibiting the work, You Betrayed the Party Just When You Should Have Helped It, also has a clear agenda in disseminating a topic, which is part of the author’s artistic strategy. She has deliberately chosen the History Museum as the site of its first display, in order to symbolically, as well as effectively, introduce the missing women’s voice into an institution of dominant history. Using the cultural capital of the institutions whose primary function is to exhibit, publishing in public media, discussions, a round-table and publications are part of a carefully conceived public campaign, for which the author first laid the groundwork in the public space by announcing the installation of the memorial plaque on public websites. This is an important component of the entire project, as it works to introduce a topic that used to be entirely suppressed into the public space and open a discussion about it. Equally, the public lectures and workshops by Andreja Kulunčić, Renata Jambrešić Kirin i Dubravka Stijačić – each of which is focussed on a specific audience, and which all discuss the social engagement in the arts and the commemorative form of an anti-monument, the position of women’s narratives in repressive policies and dominant historical narratives, and dealing with the legacy of trauma – champion the humanism, solidarity, and care found in the testimonies of the Goli Otok convicts as the essential values in overcoming evil and maintaining a better world.

Contemporary social theories have taught us that repressed memories and their lacunae play a distinct role in establishing collective historical imaginaries. “Working on memory”, writes Bojana Pejić, “depends on class, sex/gender and relations of power, which determine what is remembered (or forgotten), who remembers and to what end”. “In other words”, she says, “the work on constructing a collective memory/amnesia always involves a certain politics of memory”.¹⁷ Therefore, Andreja Kulunčić embarks on a deconstruction of an amnesia in order to open a passage for remembrance. In so doing, she makes use of a subversive form of commemoration – the anti-monument, which does not impose a memory, but seeks it in a constantly renewing interference of contested memories and the audience visiting a place. An anti-monument thus opens the process of a decentralised collective memory as one of the filters for the acceptance of the past. In this sense, it actively encourages discussions about how we remember, what we remember and what is the role of the past in the future.¹⁸ Memory seeks to salvage the past, in order for the past to serve the present and the future, according to Jacques Le Goff. “We must work”, he urges, “so that collective memory may be in the service of liberation and not the servitude of men”.¹⁹ For this reason, Andreja Kulunčić’s, Renata Jambrešić Kirin’s and Dubravka Stijačić’s work is not merely a correction to collective memory or a contribution to anti-monument practice, but an active effort on the transgression of the good. With it they show that the solidarity, resilience and compassion we inherit from women’s culture of memory are the values that allow it.

Zagreb, December 2020

Les Lieux de memorie (1984 – 1993 ↩
Jan Assman, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 233 ↩
According to: Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Massachussets, 2002. ↩
Ibid. ↩
J. Assman, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, p. 44 ↩
Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Traitors are Always of the Feminine Gender [Izdajice su uvijek ženskog roda], in: Up&Underground, 17 – 18 (2010) p. 232. [Translator’s note: the Croatian language has gendered nouns; „traitor“ is coded as feminine] ↩
Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Dom i svijet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja [The Home and the World: of the Female Culture of Remembrance], Zagreb, 2008. p. 81 ↩
Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Traitors are Always of the Feminine Gender, 231 – 242, in: Up&Underground, 17 – 18 (2010), p. 237 ↩
Rosa Dragović-Gašpar’s recollection ↩
http://www.zene-arhipelag-goli.info/ ↩
In his The Practice of Everyday Life, the French theorist Michel de Certeau distinguishes place from space. A place is a “an instantaneous configuration of positions” and implies stability, while “space is the effect produced by the operations that orient it”, that is, a practiced place. Space is related to place much like speech is to language. See: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 183 – 185 ↩
One of the witnesses says: “Someone on the sidelines might say that nobody lived here, or that the residents are mute, or tongueless”. ↩
The betrayal itself is too thus magnified, as it happened just when the party – the mother, the protector, the sister – most needed help. ↩
J. Assman. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 25 ↩
Brandon LaBelle, Lecture on our shared space, in: Evelina Turković, Slika od zvuka: zvuk u vizualnoj umjetnosti [Image of Sound: Sound in Visual Art], Zagreb, 2018, p. 55 ↩
Ibid. ↩
Bojana Pejić, Spomenik Zoranu Đinđiću: Kultura sećanja i politika zaborava [Monument to Zoran Đinđić: the Culture of Memory and the Policy of Forgetfulness], VREME 866, 9 August 2007 ↩
Todor Kuljić, Antispomenik, pp. 333 – 365, in: Tanatopolitika, Belgrade, 2014 ↩
Jacques Le Goff Pamćenje, u: Kolektivno sećanje i politike pamćenja (ur. Michal Sladeček et al.), Beograd: 2015. Str. 125 ↩

Goli otok, women