/ PROJECT DESCRIPTION /
Andreja Kulunčić: “You betrayed the Party just when you should have helped it.”*
research - activist art project, 2019-2021
* Statement of the woman commandant of the Goli otok Camp, Marija Zelić
About the project:
The exhibition You betrayed the Party just when you should have helped it is part of a project about Goli otok that led by artist Andreja Kulunčić in collaboration with anthropologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin and psychoterapist Dubravkom Stijačić, in organisation with Ante Zemljar Association of Goli otok (head of ass. Darko Bavoljak) and MAPA Association (project coordinator Maja Marković). The project
takes up the issue of the women who suffered and perished on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur (1), still exceptionally little discussed.
The violent, destructive and misogynous bio-politics in the camp for women political prisoners that systematically attacked the reproductive health of the female prisoners excluded their sexual specificity and at the same time turned the convicts against each other, resulted in profound traumas and the many years of silence of the women about their Goli otok experience.(2)
In the opinion of several researchers, women are still not equally featured in public discourse about the period of totalitarian violence in Yugoslavia, which gives a picture of the social policy concerning remembering that has a patriarchal attitude towards women’s traumas.
Hence the importance of the project, the goal of which, through research and the establishment of female memory of the traumatic past and through a site-specific artistic interventions and exhibition, is to start up a new form of confronting the space of dehumanisation, to open up narratives that have remained on the margins of historical mainstream. From this point of view, the exhibition and spatial interventions on the site are important segments of the overall project of inscribing female suffering into the political historical narrative.
Spatial interventions at the site:
Spatial intervention at the site of the political prisoners’ camp consists of the installation of information boards about the organisation and history of the camp (finished in September 2020.), and of the visual punctuation of women’s memory/ trauma as a form of permanent (counter)monument (planed for 2021.). The project includes research into the possibility of transfer of experience through the media of dance, voice and sound in performances by dancers and musicians (performed in July 2019.).
http://www.zene-arhipelag-goli.info/en/intervencije-en/
Exhibition:
The exhibition includes visual material shot on the islands of Goli and Sveti Grgur - video projections in large format of the performances by dancer Zrinka Užbinec, instrumentalist Jasna Jovičević and vocalist Annette Giesriegl, according to a concept already worked out by the creator of the exhibition, Andreja Kulunčić, drawing on the available testimonies of the women convicts. The exhibition also incorporates the researches of anthropologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin and psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić from existing scholarly texts, archival records, testimonies and research in the field. Part of the exhibition consists of documentary material of the spatial intervention at the sites and the author’s drawings and objects that thematise an affective map of survival / all the things the convicts endured.
In the interference of documentary and artistic material, through the medium of artistic installation, the exhibition links symbolic and real experiences of the perception of female trauma. Combining the researches into a syncretistic medium, it includes and heightens the sensory dimension in the processes of cognition, instructing us about the inconstancy, particularity and canonical nature of knowledge and builds a sensory historical narrative.
http://www.zene-arhipelag-goli.info/en/exhibitions/
The discursive segment of the exhibition is embodied in workshops and talks on the theme of the heritage of violence and the gender-specific forms of political violence, the memorialisation of political loss in the contemporary context. The workshop of Renata Jambrešić Kirin takes up from a feminist perspective the issue of the need for heeding female traumatic memory that changes our understanding of the past and of history and asks why a gender recapitulation of history is the last to arrive – after the national, class and cultural. The workshop for women of psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić leads attendees in the direction of understanding themselves, and how they can help themselves and others in difficult life situations. The workshop of the creator of the project, Andreja Kulunčić, expands the project, introducing into the discourse discussion of the concept of anti/counter monument, as a form of contemporary memorialisation practices of the violent heritage. In the case of the Goli Archipelago, this is a historical violence about which contemporary society has not achieved a consensus, which leads to denial of it and to neglect of the victims.
http://www.zene-arhipelag-goli.info/en/diskurzivni-en/
(1) Goli otok and Sveti Grgur in the collective memory are places for repressive de-Stalinisation. They were set up in 1949 as response of the Party to the Tito-Stalin split, to be used for the re-education of those out of favour and members of the party who were apt to be critical. Tito’s idea that the Cominform supporters had to be broken and not killed, opened up, apart from the regular concentration camp methods, the introduction of a number of specific features in Goli otok, particularly with respect to women.
(2) On Sveti Grgur and Goli otok (Labour Site V) alternately from 1950 to 1956 was a political prisoner camp through which more than 850 women accused of being connected with the Cominform passed. The women themselves had to build the paths and the structures that are partially visible today. With a particularly cruel system of punishment, in which the inmates had to be each other’s torturers, the camp was a place of suffering and humiliation. The harassment of the women and police surveillance were continued even after they were released.
BIOGRAPHIES OF ASSOCIATES
Dubravka Stijačić
She has a degree in speech therapy and social education and is a psychotherapist using the approach of reality therapy. For years she worked n the Vrapče Psychiatry Clinic as head of the department for psycho-social methods of treatment and occupational therapy that is charged with conducting psychiatric rehabilitation –psycho-social treatment for all the patients of the Clinic. Currently she is in charge of group and individual psychotherapy and training in social skills, working as an educator and supervisor of reality therapy.
Renata Jambrešić Kirin
She is employed in the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Studies and is an associate of the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb. She has published papers on the themes of female war literature, testimony discourse, socialist culture of memory and gender history in Croatia in Croatian and international academic journals. She has also published reviews, essays and short prose in the journals Quorum, Riječi, Treća, Forum and Književna republika, as well as on Croatian Radio 3rd Programme. She is the author of the book Home and World: Female Culture of Memory (2008) and is the co-editor of many miscellanies and proceedings. In Camphor Covers (2015) she criticises current society, mingling genres and functional styles.
