To make a fire, we need
a flammable substance,
air, that is, oxygen,
and a source of heat.
Making a fire goes like this.
Heat the flammable substance until the
temperature reaches the level where a certain
chemical reaction takes place.
The mixing of these gasses with oxygen
results in the burning of that substance.
Death, lust is dead,
death is dead, sorrow, dead,
God is dead...
In the dark times,
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
- Bertolt Brecht
Towards the end of the period of totalitarian
control of East and Central Europe,
an art movement appeared in a
country then still called Yugoslavia.
It was named "NSK".
Using the materials of music,
theater, and the visual arts,
the NSK collective took on the role of catalyst,
revisiting the repressed
traumas of European history
and exposing hidden mechanisms
of ideological domination.
Tribes of Europe!
Democracy has destroyed order.
The ground is ready.
Now we can say:
no history has been decided,
no nation has ever won thanks to justice.
It won thanks to pure physical strength.
All civilizations are based on it,
all the powers of law will dance
to the sound of arms.
Historiographers are gradually coming to
the realization that history itself
is in fact a series of consensual myths.
It's not necessarily a nation's past
that shapes its mythology,
but its mythology which shapes its past.
Taken apart, analyzed and then re-assembled,
history's fragments reveal a cyclical structure.
Within this recurring pattern,
the history of an entire people
is actually no more than a collective
projection - an illusion shared by millions.
MariborchanX:
I am sorry for the inconvenience.
As you may have noticed, there
is a gap, an error in this video.
Fortunately I have a transcript of
what is said during this missing period.
If you want it, click on this picture,
that will take you to that video.
But what was the real motivation
behind Laibach's early performances?
Was this a politicized art,
or aestheticised politics?
Or were they simply a warning that if you
repress history, it will eventually boil over?
According to homeopathic theory, you can
only cure through the symptoms of an illness.
The immune system must be provoked.
How better, then, to trigger the defense
mechanisms of the state than to
hold a mirror up to that state?
You step forward as
provocateurs, as, one could say,
the number one enemy of the state.
Do you have many followers?
Art is a noble calling
which requires fanaticism.
Laibach is an organism whose aims, life and
means of activity of the group are higher
in strength and duration
than the aims, life and means of the
individuals which compose it.
Aren't you afraid that someone might
one day spank you because of all this?
Art is a noble calling
which as such requires fanaticism.
The new art is a new era.
It is a movement independent
of other ideologies.
- Kazimir Malevich.
By 1984, Laibach and several other
Slovenian groups took one step further
in the fanaticism required of art.
They linked together in a
larger collective body.
NSK, or Neue Slowenische Kunst,
would encompass music,
theater, design, architecture,
and the visual arts.
They said they were presenting
art "in the image of the state."
But, like Laibach, they didn't seem
to have any specific political agenda.
Manifestos issued by the new art movement
said that their intention was to
"revive the trauma of early 20th
century avant-garde movements
by identifying with them in the stage
of their assimilation into the
systems of totalitarian states."
In 1927, Russian avant-gardist Kazimir
Malevich was traveling from East to West.
He passed through central Europe, arriving
finally in Berlin for a series of lectures.
Unfolding diagrams translated into German,
the founder of the school of
abstract art known as Suprematism
explained some basic principles.
Art, he said, had always functioned merely
as a "toiletry article" within society.
But the new art would have its own,
independent ideology.
Although in the West Malevich is credited
with being a godfather of abstraction,
from an Eastern viewpoint it seems clear
that his main intention was
to be the author of a new mythology.
Two generations after the
Soviet Utopian avant-garde
was destroyed by the revolution
it had helped create,
many of its ideas came to life again
in the Westernmost city
of socialist Yugoslavia.
It appeared, that the collectives,
the members of the NSK movement
welded together into a
simulation of a state bureaucracy,
and created an abstract Suprematist form.
Although for NSK,
history and politics were
as the bricks and cement
of their state structure,
NSK seemed to float free
of any specific doctrine.
If the artists of NSK could be said
to have a political goal,
it would be "the destruction
of historical naivete."
Trbovlje. This town has built us,
and we continue its
revolutionary tradition.
- Laibach
Nineteen seventeen.
Shock-waves of revolution spread
outwards across Europe.
The best-known images
of the upheaval in Russia
are already the
product of a myth-making art
serving the direct interests of
the new Soviet state.
In the beginning, the Utopian rhetoric
of the revolutionaries and
the revolutionary ideas of the
utopian artists marched together.
The success of Marxist ideology in the East
inevitably impacts on the
Slovenian mining town of Trbovlje.
Hunger, dismal working conditions,
and blatant exploitation of labor
are the norm in the industrial
heartlands of Royal Yugoslavia.
But the revolution brings
a message of hope.
Strikes and street battles between fascist
and socialist miners groups soon erupt.
Contemporary Trbovlje's huge coal-fired power
plant has the largest smoke-stack in Europe.
Laibach emerged from this
machinery in 1980,
producing a specifically industrial
form of rock music.
Thirteen years later Irwin,
NSK's collective of five painters,
return to the source of the movement's
original motivating aesthetic.
Like Laibach, members of Irwin came from the
factory and mining towns of socialist Yugoslavia.
The earliest Irwin works consciously
reflect their proletarian origins,
using materials like coal, tar and blood.
Although their role would later
evolve, in the early 80's Irwin
took on a specific mission
within the NSK movement.
They would be the
chroniclers, or mythologizers
artists willfully serving the interests
of the state they themselves had helped design.
It's the cement factory!
Maybe these are old
paintings, from the times
when Laibach started and
they painted from here in Trbovlje.
Or they are connected with
the miner's life here.
I don't like their style. They have a
lot of... I don't like their boots.
What do we think of the paintings? Fuck 'em.
We don't know what this is all about.
The painting as a painting?
It's unusual, because normally
a simple person would expect
a painting to represent something nice,
a landscape or something.
But these are... The painter who painted
this wanted to say something.
He is practically the only one who could
explain it. I can't get to the bottom of it.
Laibach as Laibach?
Laibach as a music group is very
popular abroad, in Europe.
I saw on TV that they had a concert in
Vienna, and in Prague they were sold out.
But here, in our town,
they are not so well known.
We don't know they are only a
music group or are they something more.
We think the paintings are beautiful,
but look what the mine looks like.
Let's go!
Wait, we're having an interview!
Let's go! Good luck!
It's difficult to explain.
I think Laibach have a very special style,
a way of expressing
themselves through music,
it's a kind of protest
against society.
A kind of... reaction against society and
the system, the whole European system.
All art is subject to political manipulation
except that which speaks the language
of the same manipulation.
- NSK Statement
By the middle of the century, the machinery
producing power from coal and steam
and the machinery producing
mythology from images of power
are manufacturing each other.
The mass reproduction of images
on strips of moving celluloid
prefigures the mass media which will follow -
the beginning of new, increasingly
global, cycles of manipulation.
ARCHIVAL FILM TITLE:
Visit of Marshal Tito to Trbovlje.
Cleanse / klenz/ /vt/
(formal or archaic)
make thoroughly clean; make pure:
~/ of/from sin/.
~ /n/ [C,U] substance that ~ses
(eg a synthetic detergent).
STOP THE PARAHUMAN!
Our mission is to make
evil lose its nerves.
- Laibach
Conditions of Burning and
Methods of Extinguishing.
(Films Zora, 1950)
I'm not going to translate this,
it's basically a fire drill.
God's Kindergarten
The brutal civil war that has been
raging across the Yugoslav republics
since the Axis invasion is finally extinguished in
For the next 50 years, European
stability will be enforced by
an unprecedented dismemberment
of Central Europe
and the rest of the continent between
the two great Cold War blocs.
The immense world of violence has fallen!
Ljubljana has proved that it
is the live heart, the live,
beating heart of an alive, proud, heroic
Slovenian national organism!
A one-time Austro-Hungarian soldier from
Belgrade speaks in Congress Square.
Although the Yugoslav state has
risen intact from its own ashes,
its Western borders are disputed by the
leader of the new Communist regime.
Ladies and Gentlemen! Comrades!
We want the entire world to know that
Yugoslavia, which was fighting,
doesn't want anything but that one
nation, of one blood,
shall live within the framework of one state!
Although Tito's demands are
not backed by force,
the old Habsburg port of Trieste and
part of Austria are claimed by Yugoslavia.
Trieste becomes the site of clashes between
military police and Slovenian protesters.
But it soon becomes clear that the substantial
Slovenian populations here and in the
Austrian province of Koroska, will remain west
of what is now known as the Iron Curtain.
Who gave their lives for
the freedom of Koroska?
The Partisans of Koroska gave
their lives for the freedom of Koroska!
Where, then, is our northern frontier?
Our northern border is there
where our victims fell!
Let's sing a partisan song!
Brothers, to the sun of freedom!
Brothers, come up to the light,
the painful night is behind us,
ahead lies a day of freedom!
The painful night is behind us,
ahead lies a day of freedom!
People love parades.
The concept of politics as entertainment was
one of the great inventions of mass propaganda.
Although the fascist
states had been defeated,
the aestheticization of politics lived
on in communist rituals.
As for the parades, they were an assembly
line manufacturing the new history.
Traditions had to be invented
and well documented.
In its own way, the ideology that had
been planted in Europe's Eastern half
believed itself to be at the beginning
of a thousand year Reich.
Europa
Leben / Tot
There's a Balkan quality
to European history.
Long before the
springtime of nations
and the contemporary idea
of the nation-state,
ethnic groups and rival religions
and ideologies of Europa
fought for domination over
populations and scraps of land.
If Slovenia was, as the Quisling
propaganda minister proclaimed,
God's Kindergarten
then all of Europe was his
playground,
dedicated to refining strategies of
domination and manipulation
that was destined
to rule the world.
Every new order pre-supposes
the existence of disorder
and is already infected with an
inherent virus of future disorder.
- Laibach
Although Tito had broken Yugoslavia free
from Stalin's East Bloc in 1948,
creating the world's first
non-aligned Communist state,
in the end his
"soft totalitarianism"
was no more resilient than that of
the other regimes of Eastern Europe.
The crash of a unifying ideology,
initially spilled more blood in the
Balkans than anywhere else.
Less than a year after
the implosion of the USSR,
and the disintegration
of Yugoslavia,
the Irwin group flew to Moscow with
the idea of facilitating communication
between the
post-Communist states.
Group action: Irwin &
Kinetikon Pictures, 7. June 1992
The evaporation of Soviet power had been
characterized by what Robert Hughes called
"A migration of images into oblivion."
Previously, though, Communism had erased
its own large share of history.
So it seemed appropriate to treat the
vast stage of Red Square for what it is:
a symbolic zone, in which various
competing myths are presented -
and sometimes
"re-presented."
This is a Black Square
on the Red Square.
NSK as a system was
established in Slovenia in the 80's,
and this action is the first
in which this system has begun to move,
where this body has
moved to Moscow...
I would like to make a link.
In the 80's, NSK contemplated
ideology in totalitarian states,
and that was a kind of answer to the
position of Eastern Europe within art.
In the 90's, where totalitarian
states are disappearing,
and national states emerging, NSK
starts to think about its own state
in time, and not in space. That's why the
embassy was our ideal space, our ideal form.
There's a new embassy in Moscow.
True, it was not announced in the newspapers,
or mentioned on TV, or anywhere else.
The NSK Embassy is in a normal
domestic apartment on Leninsky Prospect.
Still, it has attracted large crowds
of people, including artists, intellectuals,
and punks. NSK Ambassador Miran
Mohar says that NSK came to Moscow....
After they'd removed all our
famous and majestic monuments,
such as this one of Dzerzinsky,
the chief and organizer of the KGB,
and Kalinin, our first and most
beloved president, who ruled in Stalin's time,
and Yakov Sverdlov, who played an
unimportant role in Russian history,
after they'd removed
all of these monuments,
they spent a long time
contemplating what to do with them.
On the one hand, this was,
of course, a vandalistic act,
it was quite obviously vandalism,
since history may not be forgotten,
no matter what it may have
been like, and on the other hand,
it was almost necessary to
remove them, in this moment,
it meant an enormous
emotional unburdening.
I think that if Irwin had
been in Moscow at the time
it would have been an interesting
and unusual experience for them,
since they experiment
with the same principles:
to break down, to build,
to break down, to build again,
and in such a way
build their own system.
The experience of NSK in relation
to the darkest and most tragic
and for this reason
also the most interesting
moments in history is very important
for us at this particular time,
as the dilemma of what to do with the past is
what intellectuals are currently dealing with.
But NSK was the first to
formulate precisely
what we can do with our experiences,
that we need no fear them,
that we can harmonize them
into an artistic system.
Fascism will not win!
Americans! Listen to the
voice of working Russia!
Take your dirty hands
off Yugoslavia!
Art and totalitarianism do
not exclude each other.
-NSK Statement
According to theory, the past itself is no
more than an archive of collective memory.
By the 90's, the songs of
the Great October Revolution
have become the property
of an aging rear-guard.
But if history is in fact a sum
total of re-writings through time,
what then to do with this
cargo of conflicting myths?
Like the ideologies
which inspired them,
the early 20th century Utopian avant-garde
were largely organized as collectives
experimental social structures.
The Eastern Modernists believed that the
world could be completely transformed
according to principles of
a new and unified aesthetic.
If the state was to wither
away, as Marx predicted,
then the Soviet avant-garde
would take on the job
of replacing it with
a total art-form
something the Germans
call a 'Gesampt-kunstwerk'.
At the close of the Modern era, with
the wreckage of these utopian dreams
strewn across the landscape
like pieces of a crashed airplane,
it made a certain sense to
reassemble the mechanism
to try to determine what
had happened.
Historical avant garde is a style, written
at the beginning of the century
as a response to the mimetic art which
dominated the world for 2000 years.
Retrogardism, of course, is like the
avant garde a style formation in art.
Its method is the retro-method.
German Nazism, Italian Fascism
and Soviet Communism
all first repressed,
then took direct control of,
the ideas and energies of the early 20th
century modernists.
Each in their own way
transformed the Utopian premise
of the state as a work of art into
an art at the direct service of the state.
Adolf Hitler, the art school reject,
and Josef Stalin, engineer of human souls,
transformed their societies
into vast ritualistic 'dystopias'.
If the state was an
art-work, they were its artist;
If the state was a church,
then their role was clear.
They were God.
The works of NSK's Irwin collective
revealed fascism and communism as
two sides of the same totalitarian canvas.
But they went beyond that.
By deploying a variety world
mythologies together within the same work,
the Irwin artists exposed a
broad spectrum of domination codes.
Placing quotations from Western modernist
art and consumer culture side by side
with symbols of both
totalitarian and religious art,
they revealed their essential similarity
within the world ideological constellation.
The works of Irwin, wrote
Russian theorist Boris Groys,
"had already appeared, long before the
end of the Cold War in political life,
as an artistic rendition of its end."
The people around here are either
scientists or ideologists or religious
representatives or artists or philosophers.
They cover the global
experience of the planet Earth.
Each has its own rituals:
religion
has numerical rituals,
ideology fascinating ones,
science magical ones.
Art, of course, has to act through
the ritual of obsessive neurosis.
Obsessive neurosis is the field where
the sacred paradox becomes evident.
At this point, assuming numerical
or fascinating rituals means
assuming the fields that either
ideology or religion express...
Of course, for the artist, it is
essential, that it speaks with its rituals.
The only truly aesthetic vision of
the State is the vision of the
impossible State.
- Scipion Nasice Theater.
Within the cosmology of
NSK's virtual state,
Laibach plays the role of
the politicians or ideologists,
Irwin are the state artists,
and the theater group, now called the
Cosmokinetic Theater Noordung,
functions
as a kind of church -
a place where obsessive neurosis is
transformed into ritual ceremony.
The ballet we are preparing
will first be shown on December 11, 1992.
It is dedicated to Herman
Potocnik Noordung.
two, hop.. three, hop..
Prayer Machine Noordung
Capital of pain.
Capital of pain.
You are free.
No charge.
No sense.
You are totally alone.
One plus one, plus one....
Throughout history,
art has served power -
be it political,
religious, or economic.
Viewed in the light of
Kazimir Malevich's observation,
the entire NSK project
can be interpreted
as an attempt to 'reclaim' an
aesthetic legacy.
If the ideas and artistic methods
of the early avant gardes
were exploited by political forces,
creating a kind of ceremonial
theater in the service of politics,
then NSK was reasserting aesthetic
control over this work -
while accomplishing an
even more subversive reversal.
Politics and religion would
not only remain within the work.
It would now be they
which would serve art.
This is the "hidden transgression" at the core
of the Neue Slowenische Kunst art movement.
Call it politics in the service of theater.
And what is art?
Art is the goal
and the end of progress.
- Irwin
Suspended as they are
between East and West,
NSK seemingly made a
determination:
no one side would
ever be adequate.
A comprehensive world-view required
that neither hemisphere be denied,
just as neither
be wholly accepted.
No matter how intense
the ideological pressure,
the truth of their specific historical condition
could only include both sides of the story.
And suspicion of history must be
matched by a profound ambivalence
about any single mythology,
iconography or state system.
Only in this way could
an artistic project
defined as a "state in time"
chart an autonomous course.
The famous Slovenian
architect Joze Plecnik,
active at the end of the
Habsburg era, once said the following:
"Of course we have our own culture,
its just that we have to look
for it in Germany, France and Italy."
At the end of a century
in which the border
between East and West
crossed Slovenia five times,
that list of influences
has expanded considerably.
Maybe this is why post-modernism,
with its endless appropriations,
came along as something the
Slovenes were already at home with.
More importantly, in a culture marked by
successive periods of denial
of one or another side of history,
Irwin's work represents a voluntary
endorsement of "outside" influences.
In New York, these influences
are once again visible
as building blocks of the
recombinant Slovene identity.
Not surprisingly, NSK's
authorless sublimations
of an East-West
cultural schizophrenia
have not always been well
understood or liked at home.
And the prevailing political climate
has inevitably played a role in this.
Before Slovenia's first
democratic elections,
a perception existed that NSK was
producing a fascistic, or right-wing art.
Later, their use of Eastern modernist
images resulted in their being
directly accused of working for
the discredited Communists.
Fascism under the guise of democracy
is the rule of financial capital itself.
- Laibach
The End of History.
Slovenia entered the age
of the electronic camera
at around the same time Josip Broz Tito
died in a Ljubljana hospital in 1980.
Adopting a Yugocentric view,
the global decline of Communism began
not with the rise of Mikhail
Gorbachev to the East,
but with the fall of the
founder of Socialist Yugoslavia
in the Westernmost
republic of his domain.
Everything else was just details -
including Gorby's visit to Ljubljana in 1988.
Another type of
communist was on the way.
The decline of the
ideology of 1917
paved the way for a
one-time Belgrade banker
preaching nationalist
fundamentalism.
Miloevic: Comrades! There is
no price, and there is no force,
which could shake the leadership
of Serbia, and the citizens of Serbia,
in the struggle
for just aims!
We want weapons!
We want weapons!
I can't hear you!
I can't hear you,
but I want to give you the
answer that what you require
soon all the names
will be published!
And I want to tell you that
those who used people
in order to manipulate them, to
realize the aims against Yugoslavia,
that they will be punished
and they will be arrested!
This I guarentee you!
Elias Canetti has said that
each war starts with pictures.
Ex-Yugoslavia's contemporary
horror was started consciously,
on Serbian
state-controlled TV.
Years before fighting erupted,
a relentless tape-loop
of fifty-year-old war crimes
flickered in millions of
Serbian living rooms every night.
Among them the forced
baptism of Orthodox Serbs
by a Catholic priest in Croatia's
notorious Jesenovac death camp.
It was in Serbia that
Communism made its first
but not last
post-modern transition
to a televisual fascism.
It began as a return of
the repressed.
The century had vanished into the archives,
but the archives came to life again,
releasing stored demons that
started appearing in prime time.
Slovenia reacted to events in the South with
a kind of pragmatic rebirth of national feeling.
Slovenian secessionists were given a massive
boost by the Yugoslav National Army's
clumsy political trial of four
Ljubljana journalists in 1988.
A rally in Congress Square pounded some final
nails into the coffin of Yugoslav unity.
The proceedings bore an eerie
resemblance to those of 70 years before,
in which the first Yugoslav state was
announced, in a shower of hope and goodwill.
Mr. President!
The troop of the Territorial
Defense is lined up in honor
of the Republic of Slovenia
as an independent state,
and it is prepared
for your review.
Our history is honorable and clean.
Until now, history didn't
give us anything for free;
we had to work hard for everything.
That is why we still exist.
Slovenia's secession from the
bankrupt Yugoslav federation
recycled a time-worn dramaturgy,
bringing a familiar cast of characters and
costumes back into the limelight of history.
But there was a difference.
This time, for the first time, the rituals
of the state endorsed autonomy from,
rather than subservience
to, an external capital power.
If art can declare independence,
why not the state itself?
Ideology relies on rhetoric
because it constructs subjects
who subscribe to their own freedom.
- Bill Nichols
In March of 1989,
the year in which Slovenia took
it's first legislative steps
towards full separation,
Laibach made a risky decision:
to play a concert in the
center of Serbian nationalism:
Belgrade,
the Yugoslav capital.
part of the performance
was a speech,
delivered in a politically explosive
mixture of Serbian and German.
Brothers Serbs!
You are here
the alpha and omega!
You rule this land,
and we will not let you be raped.
This I guarentee you!
You believe in
God's penalties and rewards!
Your holy towns
will remain holy.
Saint Sava says that
this land has to be Serbian!
Profaned graves
we've thought
about it as well.
But He believes
in attack and honor!
Reality has a way of
taking its revenge.
The speech, which started by
appropriating two statements by
Serbian President
Slobodan Milosevic,
would end by directly quoting British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain,
the key architect of European
pre-war appeasement of Adolf Hitler.
NSK's "retrogardism" had
reached its closest encounter
with the very phenomenon
it had anticipated.
In both form and content, Laibach's
provocation in Belgrade that day
was as precise as
a chemical formula.
It seemed to crystallize the
exact moment of transition
between Yugoslav socialist speech and
Serbia's emerging ethnic nationalist rhetoric.
The first had always stressed brotherhood
and unity among the Southern Slavs.
The cadences of the second
had not been heard in Europe
since the dark day
of the thirties.
Listen!
The violence, the war, the love,
and eternal holiness...
Upon these premises we
guarantee you your borders,
and that means
peace in our time.
Language is a system of orders,
not a medium of information.
- Gilles Deleuze
Details of the past, transposed
as metaphors to the present,
are sometimes capable
of anticipating the future.
For the remainder of European history,
Chamberlain's voice will be synonymous
with the weakness of democracy
when confronted with fascism.
The carnage in the East came
via the Kum and Krvavec TV towers,
cross the ridges of mountains that
had protected Central Europe
from the Ottoman
Empire for 500 years.
These images of horror were
relayed across the new Slovenian state
to the great
democracies of the West,
where they were surrounded by late-night
pornography and ultra-violent movies.
The autumn of the century had
become the season of the channel changer.
Atrocity was replaced by entertainment,
or simulated atrocity as entertainment.
The Heaven Over Trbovlje
The Heaven Over Ljubljana
When Slovenia became the first
target of the Yugoslav Army in 1991,
its network of TV tower
were a top priority.
If history increasingly
consists of images,
those who control the
images control history.
By the end of the century, the mass
rallies of the 30's were largely unnecessary.
With the precision of a
guillotine, film sliced history
into 24 frames per second,
transporting it into the future.
In 1983, the so-called "interview" of
Laibach by TV Slovenia defined an early landmark
in what critics of mass media
have termed "culture jamming."
Conducted more by the group
than by unwitting journalist Jure Pengov,
Laibach revealed the way
state-controlled media work
by externalizing both its
methods and its codes.
Although interpretable now
as a kind of failed inoculation,
Laibach's action anticipated both the
visual appearance and the televisual method
that would later be used to trigger
dormant nationalism within the Balkans.
Television. Within the industry of
consciousness the television medium is,
besides the school system, the
leading molder of uniform thinking.
Television programs are
basically centralized,
with one transmitter
and many receivers.
No communication
is possible between them.
We use mainly tools with
a manipulative possibility
and repressively use
the power of information.
These tools are used for
collective consumption,
and are the best for deterring
the masses from critical thinking.
for instance film as the most powerful
weapon with the longest strength
and the most powerful
influence on the human spirit.
If I got it right, you use
television to challenge us.
Fine, so do we.
Maybe, maybe now somebody
will act and repress
these horrifying ideas and declarations
here in the middle of Ljubljana.
We are the children of
the spirit, brothers of might,
whose promises are
still nowhere in sight,
we are the black specters
of this world below,
we are singing of this
mad picture of woe,
we are the
first TV generation.
Yugoslavia / Force
There's a European
quality to Balkan history.
When Europe falls out of balance,
it is visible here before anywhere else.
At the end of the
bloodiest century in history,
and with the finest armies
and weapons in the world,
a complacent Europe grows accustomed
to watching its own primitive past
play like a violent film safely on the other
side of the old East-West boundary.
The warning of a group of artist
from one of Central Europe's
forgotten cities still resounds, more
than a decade after its founding.
Look at the past, NSK said,
and you will see the future.
Look at the Balkans, Europe.
You are looking into a mirror.
Epilogue
In the middle of the nineties,
the most successful pop-cultural
export from the old East
performs for the first time
in the cradle of democracy.
As usual in Athens, reminders of
history don't have to announce themselves.
They are visible everywhere
like the signs reflecting
an irrational Greek fury
at the tiny ex-Yugoslav republic of
Macedonia, just to the north.
At the close of the millennium,
Slovenia remains an independent
and democratic nation.
It is visible on the map, within a
Central Europe uneasily balanced
between the East and West.
As for NSK, the art movement organized "as
a state without territory, a state in time"
recently started issuing its own passports.
They have been used successfully to cross
international frontiers - including by a number
of citizens of the besieged Republic of Bosnia
Herzegovina, who otherwise have great
difficulty crossing state borders.
Remember, this movie was made
still hold? Could it be said, that some
parts even are more true than they were then?
I apologise for any problems with
the transcript myself.
- Mariborchan