Elevate Festival Magazine – Issue 2

TOXIC STORIES
Socialism, especially Yugoslavian socialism, handled its own promises
and its own truths, built for a post-war society still in the making.
Pluralism in the democratic sense was not alien to the Tito regime
since it was necessary to rebuild and rethink not only a state but a
multi-ethnic state (conceptually similar to the European Union). That
such a system, which is patriarchally and repressively organised on
its own initiative, would come to a jarring end with the death of the
autocrat, is not surprising from today’s point of view – the narratives
had slipped away from the rulers who adhered the dominant father figure:
Those truths that were used for decades as putty and mortar for
an artificial, heterogeneous structure simultaneously produced those
figures who had diametrically opposing truths at hand for the various
ethnic groups living together. Figures whose fantasies of purification
were not to cause the greatest bloodbath on European soil since the
Second World War a decade later.
ON REPETITION
A decaying socialist system generates poverty, exclusion, and inflation.
People no longer cling to promises of solidarity and pluralistic
salvation, they cling to their own reality of life, which is marred by
hunger and existential fear. In this vacuum, nationalism appears – as
the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš called it – as a line of lesser resistance,
as conformism: a narrative that captures the facts and twists them,
simplifies them and regurgitates them as easily digestible.
And yet, the rulers themselves may not necessarily be nationalists
– nationalism is a means to an end, it is there to keep the masses
in check, to dissuade them from thinking, to deprive them of their
own culture – through the tabloid press, propaganda and the eternal
repetition of the fantasy of a homogeneous society. In this endeavor,
nationalists are like rotten eggs: from Serbia to Hungary, from the
FPÖ to the AfD, from the Identitarians to the Front National.
The same old schtick, which many still seem to think hasn’t become
too bland to play, again threatens a state based on the understanding
of peoples. And the painful truth about nationalism is that once it
spreads, every child in Europe should know, after 1945 and six million
murdered Jews, the camps follow.
ROBBED OF THE ART
Nationalism is suspicious of any and all art. It, too, degenerates into a
pure medium within its sphere of influence, which is why nationalism
always seeks an ally in the religious institution that has historically
viewed art as an exclusive tool of instrumentalisation. And just as
nationalism takes up historical and cultural narratives for itself and
its own agenda, perverts them and deprives them of any scholarly
treatment and approach, it also stands at a skeptical distance from
contemporary art production. Especially in ailing states that operate
under the guise of representative democracy, contemporary art production
depends heavily on the will and favour of those in power – it
is tolerated, but nothing more.
Tendencies of a nationalistically tinged cultural policy can be seen, for
example, in the AfD’s attempts to attack Germany’s theatrical landscape,
in which an approach is called for that is prefaced by the attribute
‚pure’, which, at its core, intends to convey a homogeneous, approving
view of the world that serves to wean theatregoers from distanced, critical
thinking. What may be an attempt with an uncertain outcome in
Germany is a harsh reality in other parts of Europe. The question that
this (essentially) Nazi party repeatedly poses to the institutions should
not be negotiable in a democratically organised society: after all, there
are hardly any institutions that have dealt with and continue to deal
with the responsibility of a society, and the individual, for the reality
of concentration and extermination camps after the Second World
War, the way German theatres have. I repeat: Non-negotiable!
A demonstration of a contrary example, i.e. a nationalist cultural
policy, can be seen in the work of artists in the former Yugoslavian
countries, where a devastating funding landscape places obstacles
in the way of artists who, for example, want to show responsibility
towards the genocide in Srebrenica (an irrevocable truth!), in order to
tread a completely different path, namely that of the ingratiating art
that is acceptable for those in power. In reverse, the artists withdraw
into their shelters, into their improvised workshops, studios, into their
boiler rooms, operate underground according to the DIY principle,
and seek new forms of protest – or emigrate to places where artistic
freedom is still upheld and protected by the rule of law.
THE BOILER ROOM AS SAFE SPACE
Industrija – in Serbia, this name does not only stand for a 90s techno
club, when the whole country and its population were threatened to
be devoured by the abyss of war and its sanctions. Industrija is the
expression of a unique attitude to life – the carnal rebellion against
the horror of nationalism. Literally a boiler room, this club served
not only as a shelter for those who wanted to practice escapism from
their toxic environment, but also for those who had recognized the
urgency and had come through despite the adverse circumstances to
show a traumatized generation that the utopia of the dance floor was
not just a Berlin rumor: Dejan Milievi and Marko Nasti, the Belgrade
techno veterans were born here, as they say themselves, as teenage
techno punks; Mark Williams, Moby, Trevor Rockcliffe and DJ Hell
spun their records here, and Laurent Garnier devoted a whole chapter
in his autobiography Elektrochoc to the Belgrade scene around Club
Industrija. For a brief moment, a handful of young people had managed
to free themselves from the vacuum and approximated Europe’s
clubbing culture – without the internet, cut off from the rest of the
world by war and dictatorship.
Club Industrija has long since become history, a myth that we, who
were still attending primary school at the time, only know from
hearsay – the truth of those four walls painted black, buried in the
memory of those who were there and still hear the bass of the Industrija
system rumbling in their ears. But the attitude to life that this club
conveyed, the rebellion and resistance against rigidity, exclusion, and
simplicity – continues on with each record that is played.
1 https://www.lupiga.com/vijesti/danilo-kis-o-nacionalizmu-3;
2 https://www.vice.com/rs/article/wndgyw/klub-industrija
3 https://www.vice.com/rs/article/mgvex8/teenage-technopunks-dvadeset-godina-kasnije
4 http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/20626/1/
klub-industrija-in-the-1990s-belgrades-beating-heart
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