In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Theater 31.1 (2001) 27-33



[Access article in PDF]

Beginning to Clean the Air
Two Interviews from Belgrade, June 2000

[Figures]

IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK=

Borka Pavicevic,
Interviewed By Erika Munk

Borka Pavicevic was interviewed at the Center for Cultural Decontamination.

ERIKA MUNK What led to your decision to found the Center in 1994?

BORKA PAVICEVIC The Yugoslav war has lasted for ten years in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. When it began, a lot of people in literature and the arts supported the nationalist movement. At that time I was one of the founders of the Belgrade Circle, a group of intellectuals who hoped to be a parallel institution countering corrupt nationalistic ones like the Writers Union. We regularly had large meetings--300 people in Belgrade, listening to visitors from Sarajevo and elsewhere. Free public discussion with the "enemy" in the middle of the war!

I went to Paris with a Belgrade Circle group, and in the audience were a lot of pumped-up nationalist émigrés. One of us said she thought Milosevic was responsible for the war in Yugoslavia and all hell broke loose. We were actually carried out from the bookstore where we were speaking.

When I came back an article was pinned on the bulletin board of the Yugoslav Drama Theater, saying that Islamic terrorists and Croatian fascists were working through the artistic director of the theater--me. That I was treasonous and the Albanians and Muslims on the theater staff were suspect. So the general manager came to my house and said he couldn't stand the pressure and I should resign. I'd been there too long, I had other things to do, so I said OK.

How did you find this beautiful place?

I went to the municipality and asked for the morgue as a site for my new center, but they said it was already a restaurant--I love this image of creating a consumer culture!--so they offered me the Veljkovic Pavilion. The Pavilion was built in the 1930s, as the first private art museum in the Balkans, a link between us and Western Europe. After World War II it was pillaged and wrecked. It has a lot of meaning, but it was a total disaster, no electricity, like you were in Vukovar. So our sign became a brick made of the mud in Vukovar. You can build something with a brick or throw it at someone. [End Page 27]

How was the Center's work different from that of the Belgrade Circle?

On one level, we were moving from a critique of the ideas of boundaries and territory, and how ethnic cleansing stemmed from these ideas, to thinking about how everything was breaking down. At such a moment we felt we had to do affirmative as well as critical work.

But affirming what? Perhaps the sine qua non of everything, the idea that one culture contains other cultures. Before the war Yugoslavia was, in a modest way of course, what the European Union is now becoming. If someone stole a cow in the seventies, the story wasn't that a Muslim stole a Serb's cow. But now ideologically not only the thief but the cow herself is Serb or Croat or Muslim. The nationalist identification of nation, state, culture, women, history, even what cheese you eat, moved inexorably to destruction.

On another level, the big story then was the separation of intellectual and physical work, a kind of cultural sickness which meant that if I was thinking something, that was enough. We tried to form an institution in which people could do different things at the same time--unlike the bureaucrats before, who were barely capable of doing one thing at a time. We are trying to connect thinking to practice, and it's not easy here. The Belgrade Circle's way of communication through public discussions had its mission, but if we had a cultural center, we could also spread ideas through visual arts and performance, through feelings and catharsis. If you start to speak in pictures, not by educating...

pdf

Share