Zlatko Paković: The Serbian cultural elite is cowardly – Culture

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The connection between the petty bourgeoisie of Belgrade’s burning cultural elite, Đilko nationalism of Bećković’s provenance, and neoliberal speculation was revealed in the play, and several of his culture ministers sat in the audience. Of course, the audience was mostly people of civic integrity, and the most wonderful gesture towards my work was made by colleagues from the Tuzla National Theater, who came to see the premiere. They came from a city where the Army of the Republika Srpska, on May 25, 1995, with an artillery shell fired in the very center of the city, killed 71 people under the age of 27, and that city neither before nor after today, he never elected a national. party. In January this year, I took the Prime Minister of my “Bosnian Church” with these wonderful people, so we, urbi et orbi, show that there is no theological obstacle for two Muslim women to get married in the mosque according with Sharia law, if they are in love. We perform that ritual in the theater, because what is not even probable in real life is possible in the theater. The same goes for the theatrical liturgy “Srebrenica. When they kill us, we get up.” It is a civic rite of constitution of the public, which has been destroyed in Serbia – says director and writer Zlatko Paković in an interview for Danas, speaking about the premiere of his play “Srebrenica”. When we get up murdered ”, held on Thursday night, at the Cultural Decontamination Center, prepared by the Helsinki Human Rights Committee.

As he pointed out, “if your mouth is full of stories about committed art, political theater, and you start all your criticism with Brecht in your mouth, why shut up a play condemning a cultural source that not only produced the genocide in Srebrenica, many other massacres and ethnic cleansing, but will it continue to occur, of course, when that elite, in the culture-religion-politics-business alliance, war in this area again becomes more economically profitable than peace?

– And why, when you are already protesting against the construction of the gigantic scalameria monument to Stefan Nemanja, against the anti-ecological construction plan in Kosutnjak, etc., why should you keep silent about the work “Vox Dei – civil disobedience “, in which the current government, prosecutor and the president of the state, judged by those who were liquidated for their civic part and courage? To be silent means to lie. To be silent is to kill. The Serbian cultural elite is cowardly.

* How do you perceive the audience of your performances? On how many levels do you think about the observers of your art, that is, when and in what way do you imagine it will come to your performances to achieve the full effect of what you want and plan to achieve in public space?

– As I am interested in an actor, a person whose talent is ignited in his civic responsibility on stage and off stage, the most direct example of that is the singing sequence of the play about Srebrenica in which Ivan Jevtović as Aleksandar Vučić asks repentant kneeling before 8,372 shadows of the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica, cursing “the hour, the landscape and the time”, when on July 20, 1995, he called on the Assembly to kill a hundred Muslims by a murdered Serb, for what a free citizen who knows that he will be an accomplice of the uncompromising criticism of what exists and communicator of a vision in which it is possible to glimpse how our society can be reorganized. So an angry and optimistic man who is ready to pour the truth into the faces of liars himself with lies, to murderers, to be murderers, and to thieves, to be thieves.

* After a series of artistically engaged performances and approaches to the most tragic issues of local society, such as genocide and crimes both in the countries of the former Yugoslavia and within society, did you manage to establish a dialogue with deniers and deniers? Of the horrors committed by individuals in yours or ours? Name?

– If in ten, twenty, fifty years a serious history of theater will be written in Serbia and Yugoslavia, what do you think there will be in it? Perhaps it is not positive about the works that have been performed in the repertoires of Belgrade theaters in the last thirty years? Over the last few decades, you only have two or three exceptions. Everything that happened in theatrical art happened here outside its institutions. Why? Because you can’t direct a play and be a coward and a coward. You can not write a play if you narrow the hair of the powerful and the dominant ideology. This has been the case from Aeschylus to the present day. The theater is, perhaps, the only art for which talent alone is not enough.

* How would you explain the circumstances in which the majority of Serbian citizens are about to move from the negative level that currently prevails to the level of support of some political villains who could repeat the atrocities committed during the wars of the 1990s?

– Our educational and information system is at the service of the worst clerical-fascist revisionism. The Serbian Orthodox Church does not want citizens, but flock. SANU does not want citizens, but a nation. The Republic of Serbia does not want citizens, but territory. Schools do not want citizens, but servants of neoliberal capitalism. All in all, young people from all sides are interfering with the future herd, which, if needed by cultural, political and financial elites, can easily become a herd or herd, and killing, stealing, raping and lying seems very exciting and liberating for the one who has to nod his head all day and do what he feels is good and doesn’t make human sense.

* Do you have, based on what has been happening and what is currently happening, a clearer and more certain vision of the future, when it comes to these problems?

– Before our eyes, globally, the great empire of the twentieth century is collapsing, and a new and gigantic empire rises, which will not even propagate human rights, as the old one did. It’s about the United States and China. In the Balkans, we see how nationalism, still latent, serves to clear these spaces from their own social democratic minds and to turn them into the periphery of global capital with cheap labor and clientelistic intelligence. Rosa Luxemburg also said: socialism or barbarism! Our people knew it long before and after her, Svetozar Markovic and Dragisa Lapcevic and Dimitrije Tucovic and Dragoljub Jovanovic and Zagorka Golubovic and many others. So, barbarism or socialism?

The constitution of the public can begin in the theater

* Is it possible to convert such a force to bring satisfaction both to the victims and to all those who sympathize with them, but also to feel the pressure of collective guilt?

– Of course an exchange is possible. I finish the work with the hymn of the Republic of Serbia “God of Justice”, composed by Božidar Obradinović, with the flag of the Republic of Serbia unfurled on which are written the names of all the victims of the Srebrenica genocide and their numbers identification. When we play the last performance of the liturgy “Srebrenica. When we get up,” I will present this flag, a joint work with Nikola Xhaf, to the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, to be in the hallway of his house. Public opinion in the theater was preparing for the wars of the 1990s and the revision of our historical consciousness, from “Golubnjača” and “Hospital Valjevo”, through “The Battle of Kolubara” to “Milan Nedić” and a dozen of other works, so that the theater can begin with the constitution of the public A republic that, as its own enemies, condemns its citizens who committed a crime, and protects the victims of that crime, even if they are not its citizens, and it carries them in memory, it has reached its essence.

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