Tyranny cannot set one guardsman for every victim. It takes a cultural system to rise and establish tyranny, to reserve power for a minority. It takes elaborated codes and media-systems to run this business. It is a matter of technology and adequate media savvy, media literacy, adapted from ideology.

Condensed: Tyranny is a big narration, equipped with weapons and tools for torture. If that is true, it should be possible to block up the rising of tyranny with cultural instruments.

Gleisdorf, the 11th of March 2010. I had taken seat beside Christoph Stak, mayor of the City of Gleisdorf, after the opening related to the project "63 Years after". I was invited to join a round table with participants like artist Jochen Gerz and art historian Werner Fenz. My statement was not just on that project, but on the whole context, we got to take care for.

Artist Jochen Gerz (left) and art historian Werner Fenz

There are no instances or authorities in our society to provide ongoing public debates on the aspects I am focused at. It is not only about fascism and it’s consequences. It is not only about history and our responsibility as a nation. Artists, not all of them, but many of them, share a permanent work on what was not invented by the Nazi, what has not vanished with the Nazi-government: Tyranny.

We tend to take part of tyranny, to drift, to become followers, because there is a promise of benefit for followers, based on robbery and assasination of others. So we have to learn how to read and understand the codes of tyranny. Tyranny of theses days does not depend on the Nazi emblematics and it does not need any SA-savages in the streets.

There are different tools. Most of them are media-based, are a modern way of propaganda. It’s not just do deconstruct, but to decipher those codes and to recognize the tasks of tyranny.

It is not my business as an artist to do so, but the practice of fine arts let’s me gain competences to do so as a citizen. Of course there is some influence on my artistic work, being set in a context like that ...

So this is one of my reasons to take part of this "Omarska-Cartel". Without any experience like that I often asked: What happens, when they come for you and what happens, when they got you? There seems to be one clear thing: They start to turn you into "non-human". (Maybe this ist a crucial point!)

The citation means: "There are moments in which human has a certain knowledge. This awareness sleeps in us and when it awakes, it comes in waves. You can feel it by the calmness, interrupted only by the nervous breath. Fearful I felt the evil to come, somtehing never seen before ..."

Jadranka Cigelj wrote this in "Appartment 102 OMARSKA" [sources]. I was really shocked while rading a report on weeks as a victim in Omarska; shocked and moved, how this impressing woman did it in an elegant way, guarded style, partly poetical, describing what happened there.

[the cartel]

core | reset | home
15•10