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Dejan Atanacković’s video speech on the Monument panel at the Mixer Festival.
Photo: Nenad KovačevićThe panelists (Atanackovic, Goran Markovic, Irina Subotic, Milena Dragicevic Sesic, Branislav Dimitrijevic, Marko Ladjusic and Mia David) sent a letter to the media asking representatives of the relevant cultural institutions to publicly announce their position on the Stefan Nemanja monument . The column in Danas “On the monument to Stefan Nemanja – some speak, others are silent”, which was started on that occasion, publishes the opinions of people who were willing to talk about it. Most refused to speak.
The attempt to monumentally represent mythologized heroes from the distant past, as is the case with the current Stefan Nemanja monument, is certainly a strange act at a time when we are so obviously and transparently hiding the very recent past, the past in the one we participated in, that we saw with our own eyes. not see), which we have allowed to regulate our state and our society even today.
Anachronism, kitsch, grotesque monumentality, are fully expected and the only possible aesthetic result of ruling bad taste, ruling crime, and the government’s very specific political needs to simplify and trivialize the past.
Of course, that fake Nemanja would not be possible without the shameful cowardice of the intellectual elites, a kind of collaborationism that, by the circumstances, is only just gaining its terrible proportions through this clumsy statue.
Two months ago, a petition was launched against the so-called Stefan Nemanja monument. Three thousand three hundred citizens of Belgrade and Serbia signed the petition, stating clear reasons for their opposition to the erection of this voluminous and meaningless statue. These reasons include aesthetic, symbolic, political, and even pathological aspects of that crazy project, with many citing their personal experience of humiliation and the feeling that their city was stolen by people of banal aesthetic standards, selfish decorators, and common criminals.
Citizens are seeing the city disappear, not because it is changing, but because it is no longer a city. Devastated by absurd works whose sole function is the looting of public budgets, the city increasingly becomes a shapeless dysfunctional locality, deprived of meaning and memory.
Sometimes it seems to us that these devastations simply cannot be anything other than the result of the disarming stupidity of the entire system of government. In fact, today it is very difficult to draw the line between stupidity and lucid calculation. However, it is quite certain that the stupidity here, as never before, has acquired the qualities of an effective weapon, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Thus, you can move a bridge over the river to the mainland, you can roll the dice in the Republic Square for months, you can cut down trees and destroy nature as an almost inexplicable act of evil, and it seems that the greater it is the stupidity, the more successful the looting of the city and state is. Thieves praise and reward themselves and tell us that we still don’t know what, of everything that belongs to us, they can sell, ruin and destroy before our eyes.
The fact that they don’t care that their crime is obvious, that they mercilessly plant traces of criminal acts behind them, only speaks to their intention to get to the end.
The only question is how far we intend to go.
Citizens who are aware of these circumstances, and I think it is the majority, have no choice but to close ranks, unite truly numerous initiatives that have defended streets, parks and neighborhoods in recent months, to shape and defend their own neighborhood through of the defense of the city. formulate the political objectives they lack. This tightening of ranks is also the main objective of the petition against the construction of the so-called monument to Stefan Nemanja.
Because it’s not Stefan Nemanja. It is a monument that a criminal regime is erected, a monument that celebrates corruption at all levels of society, Krushik, Jovanjica, the overthrow of Savamala, secret deals, false doctorates and diplomas. This monument celebrates the murder of Oliver Ivanović, the firing of the rebel doctors, the hiding of the victims of the covid, the beating of the protesters and, above all, the class of wealthy party policemen gathered around the former radical runner-up.
There is nothing so banal and tragicomic as false sublimity and forced monumentality. The only thing that will be truly monumental in that monument is the defeat of civil society. A truly monumental defeat. As long as he remains there, it will be an involuntary reminder of our resignation, surrender and shame.
And honestly, I think our shame and all our mistakes, which should never be forgotten and neglected, require a really well thought out monument.
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