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Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
Th e second text that I want to look at is the essay published in Leap into the City:
Cultural Positions, Political Conditions. Seven Scenes fr om Europe, a publication on
the project initiated by the German Cultural Foundation on the cultural aff airs of
seven cities of Eastern Europe in states of transition. One of the cities is Zagreb with
the subject of “networking” and “cooperation” (whereas in Ljubljana the topic was
“internationalism” and in Pristina “nationalism”). Th e text I am referring to is the essay
“Recognizing networks” by one of the project leaders Boris Bakal, who starts his exposé
by underlining the metaphysical or Emersonian sense of understanding the world, in
which “everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human
power, in transference, not in creation; and therein is human destiny, not in longevity,
but in removal. We dive and reappear in new places” (Bakal, 2006: 413). Th is continuous
existence, according to Bakal, was part of “this region from the mid-nineteenth century
to 1946, when the new state abolished all existing network and civic activities or placed
them under centralized control”. Under this totalitarian centralized control “individuals
were deprived of the possibility of being the generator of small changes, and there is the
reason for the death or disappearance of socialist models of management” (Bakal, 2006:
415). As we can guess, this anti-communist discourse with very clear bourgeois ideology
aims to discard the real historical collective moment (socialist self-management) in
order to support the charity-based non-governmental middle-class humanitarian
organizations (such as Društvo čovječnosti – the Society of Humanity). Th e history of
artistic collectives in Yugoslavia, especially in Croatia according to Bakal, was that
“European artistic context rested precisely in that their work and socialization were not
determined by any material preconditions but were exclusively based on volunteering
and on spiritual strength”. Th e fact that these collectives with “spiritual strength”, such as
Gorgona, Exat, Podroom, Group of Six Artists and New Tendencies, were fi nanced by
the state foundations is just a momentary surprise for Bakal’s world view. According to his
metaphysical approach, real creative collaboration started in the post-Tito period, where
“Yugoslavia was turning into an ineffi cient obstacle to the interest groups of corporate
capital” (Bakal, 2006: 417), and parallel with that, for artistic collectives the awareness
of their participation in this process became more obvious. One of the fi rst of these
initiatives was the project/group Katedrala (Cathedral) initiated by Boris Bakal himself.
Realized in 1987 and 1988 in Zagreb, Belgrade and Berlin this multimedia installation
aimed at playing the role of conscience of a scattered society by creating a broad network
of collaborations and interdisciplinary endeavours. In a very visionary manner, as
Bakal claims, the visual identity of Katedrala’s catalogue from the late 1980s presents
a network of spiritual antagonism by uniting all the Zagreb churches: the demolished
Jewish synagogue, the Catholic cathedral, the Orthodox Church on Preradović square
and the new Zagreb mosque. Th e most important part of this vision is that Bakal and
his colleagues felt that the “[socialist] society was already deeply torn in all its aspects by
great antagonisms and violent economic confl icts that, in the hands of adroit politicians,
were soon to be turned into religious-nationalistic and ethnic wars” (Bakal, 2006: 416).
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