Abstract
The essay takes three examples of the recent Slovene politicized post- or retro-avant-garde big stage events in order to discuss their rhetorics and politics of space. It examines closely to which extent they can be interpreted as a contemporary version of rituals referring to the performative spatial signs as representations of the Slovene cultural space’s ever changing late- and post-socialist identity. Performed in some symbolic places within the territory of the capital of Ljubljana (The Republic Square, the biggest cultural and congress centre Cankarjev dom) these big scale events confirm and subvert the cultural identity of the community. They traverse the borderlines within the semiosphere of a cultural capital in which peripheries begin to synthesize new texts and introduce innovative ideas that are foreign and unknown to the centre and that might possibly act as catalysts for change. Using signs from peripheries these artistic events generate new meanings, structures and texts that invade the centre. We can interpret this procedure as an animated, dynamic process of the performance: a spatial machine characterized by parallel passages from real to formalized space, from frontal to circular and multi-centred space. Borders of the semiosphere that are originally used in order to separate and create identities, thus also connect and construct these identities by juxtaposing the own and the alien. By appropriating relations between spatial signs in different historical periods of Ljubljana they culturally present and deconstruct the past and present while using postmodern performative reading of objects of the past and present, intermixing and compounding art/theatre/film/music/literature/ballet/sports models. Thus they radically blur the borderline between real and fictive experience.
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Notes
I am using a terminology of the Italian scholar Valentina Valentini, elaborated in her lecture Aesthetics and politics in East European theatre. Valentini proposes a thesis about two types of the Eastern European theatre: (1) The theatre of consensus with the text and the actor as its dominant tools: the first being socialistic-realistic or classical, the second a perfect incarnation of the political activist faithful to powers from which he emanated.
(2) The theatre of the opposition, dissidence: its protagonists being the author and the director, the space and the body its tools.
I am alluding to a famous conflict between Ristić/Jovanović/Vidmar culminating in polemics at the Sterijino pozorje festival of Yugoslav drama: to Josip Vidmar’s accusation of both of them with the syntagm of “cultural terrorists”. Vidmar, who declined Missa in A minor, along with practically all contemporary Slovene theatre, did not consider it appropriate to see the performance. In an interview for the daily newspaper Delo, he stated: “Well, it is only true that I have not seen Ristić’s Missa in A minor. The information on the text was sufficient for me to conclude that I would not go and see the performance. Apart from that, I was also told what Ristić demanded from his spectators—to sit on footstools, that is. No, the fact that the director would be directing me is something I did not want to treat myself to.”
The German name Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) is a name for the Slovene artists' collective that consists of more well-known sub-collectives. The collectives were self-organized as a crone-collective NSK 1980s, in post-Tito Yugoslavia where the culture was dominated by the ideology of so called Self-Managing Socialism. In the 1980s, NSK pretended to act affirmatively towards the political structures in the former Yugoslavia; their programmatic articulations were irritating for the ruling regimes in general because of the artists thematizing the system itself.
Translated by David Brooks, http://www.saltpublishing.com/saltmagazine/issues/01/text/Brooks_David_02.htm. Accessed 26 July 2010.
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Toporišič, T. (Re)staging the rhetorics of space. Neohelicon 41, 77–86 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0229-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0229-2