Elma Talić
between 12000 and 50000; between 1992 and 1995
2024, Bard College Berlin
Only the historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
— Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”
This artistic work — and the research project behind it — responds to the (re)surfacing of two images of/as past utopias in the present dark times: the image of young Yugoslav Partisan women (partizanke) in war uniforms, and that of young Yugoslav men in the uniform of Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). In post-Yugoslav, post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the broader region of former Yugoslavia, the images of these two uniforms are ‘saved’ by different historians: in recent books and well-kept archives, historians (artists, academics, activists) fan the “spark of hope” in these particular fragments of the past, outlining the political projects and future visions that wearers of two uniforms embodied, but also underlining the threats posed — and realized — by the “enemy.”
The film [which can be understood as a draft for a bigger project] works with found materials — images, parts of (political) speeches, interviews, Facebook posts — and it layers them, without fixing them. Working with the sheets of transparent paper and through repetition, the film escapes the gluing of a collage; the definitive ‘captioning’ of a particular image with a particular text. The materiality of the images that appear on screen and the occasional appearance of my own hand aims to remind of the presence of the body of a historian, which struggles to see the image past the layers — specifically, the “12000 to 50000” layer, which represents the estimated number of women and girls who were subjected to sexual abuse as a weapon of war and ethicizing violence in the 1990s Bosnian war. The ‘process’ of this film thus involves simultaneous uncovering and covering of the image, guided not only by the question of historical truth of the historical event, but also the question of the “enemy.”
