»No way! That is a trauma, a case of a traumatised person, it has nothing to do with art! We are not interested in that!« cried curators of an international contemporary arts show when they, while looking for artists for their exhibition, saw documentation of an artist from Sarajevo.

Although our position is diametrically opposed to the cited exclamation »No trauma please, we are artists!,«¹ we are interested here not in this particular case, but in the fact that belief in the fundamental incompatibility between trauma and art still lingers precisely at a time when trauma – from the most intimate prime-time Oprah-style TV-testimonies to radical practices of self-mutilation in body art – is omnipresent as never before. By focusing on examples taken from the work of two artists from Sarajevo, Alma Suljevic and Jasmila Zbanic, I will try to offer the key to our introductory anecdote.

Since 1997, Alma Suljevic has been developing an art project, 4 Entity, provoked by the traumatic fact that Bosnia and Herzegovina is carpeted with landmines. In the landmine, Suljevic sees a lethal remnant of wartime that even today, in times of peace, takes the lives of people (mainly children, who often carelessly, while playing, find themselves on minefields, and are killed or severely injured). 4 Entity is thus the result of Suljevic’s ‘geopolit-art’ move: connecting all the minefields, she creates a new territory and proclaims a new territorial unit which she sardonically calls 4 Entity. And the very naming of her work suddenly takes us from the issue of landmines in a completely new direction.

The name of the work reflects Suljevic\'s reaction to the fact that Bosnia and Herzegovina today is, on the one hand, de jure, a political chimera without precedent in world history: a state consisting of three entities, one being the federation of cantons (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina), the second a republic with an exclusive ethnic mark (Republika Srpska), and the third a city district (Brcko District). On the other, Bosnia and Herzegovina is, de facto, torn into three ethnically homogenous regions: Republika Srpska is merely the result and embodiment of a strategy carried out by the Bosnian Serbs’ political leadership – ethnic segregation realised through a series of crimes, mass executions, rapes and expulsions; the Federation itself is marked by a deep fissure between regions where Bosnians and Croats dominate, and the nationalistic political leadership of Croats claiming ‘Croat entity,’ which already exists practically in many ways: through the separate systems of the military, police, education, finance, etc.

Thus, one possible, but surely shallow, understanding of Suljevic’s work would tend towards commentary: »We have three entities which are the absurd result of a preposterous geopolitical operation, and by adding one more entity, Suljevic demonstrates that we can make up entities and pile them up ad infinitum, with each new entity just stressing all the more the absurdity of the whole operation, of the whole system.« There is a fault in this interpretation, however, which can be summed up in the proverbial witticism that the one who guessed it all is the one who missed everything else. ‘All’ that is guessed is, of course, the senselessness, absurdity, ‘irrationality’ of the present division of BiH, of its inner, inter-entity borderline;² but let us now pay attention to the surplus as well, to the ‘everything else’ mentioned by the witticism, because the main paths traversed by Alma Suljevic are, in fact, to be found in that area.

With minor corrections, that absurd, »contingent at its radical« inter-entity borderline was, until recently, only a frontline. It is no coincidence at all that this still open war wound, the area near the former frontline, is the region where the most minefields were sown during the war. If one looks at a map of minefields in Bosnia nowadays, one sees that it is a kind of bulging frontline, e.g. inter-entity borderline, bloated. Thus, the borderline between entities becomes an entity in itself: a unit that, although deprived of territory and rules, although virtual, is far more substantial than the entities it separates. And it is the shift from the landmines to the issue of the borderline, to the issue of the land, that one should notice here: the existing inter-entity borderline – not the landmines – is the most perilous remnant of war the people of Bosnia are facing today. After all, this borderline was the precondition for having the landmines, and not vice versa!

Jasmila Zbanic is another Sarajevo artist providing us with a brilliant example of this strategy in her documentary video, Red rubber boots. Where Alma Suljevic, on a manifest level, deals with mines, Jasmila deals with another example of a traumatic object – one might say the traumatic object par excellence: the corpse, or namely the corpses of persons murdered and buried in mass graves. Instead of focusing on the corpses and remnants of killed people themselves, Zbanic focuses on a woman in constant quest for the remains of her children, who were killed by the Serbian army and buried in a mass grave. But, behind this manifest level of the excavation of bones, the actual object of Zbanic’s work is the very emptiness, the void caused by the absence of the woman\'s children, and best described through the woman’s recollection of her dreams: »It is very rare that I see them in my dreams.(…) I would like to see my children, to talk to them, but they don’t come into my dreams. Many mothers dream that they talk to their children, and they feel good in those dreams, but for me the dreams are horrible, since I’m looking for my children and I can never find them.« In this regard, it is not the corpse that necessarily has to appear and fill the void: the red rubber boots her son wore when he was taken away will do.³

If the world of corpses and caves is a cover for the void as an object, the landmine is a cover for a yet more traumatic object: the land itself. For this reason, Alma Suljevic, as a part of her project, doesn\'t sell the mines, but the land itself – jars filled with earth dug out from the minefields discovered by the artist herself. Here it is crucial to see Suljevic’s activity in the way described by Lacan in a famous joke about Jews on a train, and ask her, »Why are you selling us the land, when you are really selling us the land?« Or, in other words, why are you making a spectacle of the (selling of the) land, so that I start thinking about the landmines, when it is really the land that it is all about! It is not the mine that makes the land traumatic: the land is always already traumatic in itself!⁴ So, when you buy Alma Suljevic’s land, you are not buying merely a reminder of the trauma (landmines), but the very stuff trauma is made of, the very core of the Trauma.⁵

It is precisely in the light of this shift from a trauma to the Trauma that one should elucidate the paradoxical exclamation at the beginning of this text. Because, in the light of that shift, of that distinction, the apparent contradiction disappears: what supersaturates today’s society with spectacle is the myriad of traumas, while these curators sensed the presence of Trauma. And let us not forget that today it is permitted to exhibit your traumas, to talk about them at great length, to make a spectacle out of them – only in order not to touch, to keep away from, Trauma.

In order to explain the difference between a trauma and the Trauma, we can refer to the Lacanian notion of the symptom. Instead of the standard reading of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which considers the movie as an example of dismantling the symptom (by recreating Madeleine, Scottie is getting rid of his symptom [vertigo], succeeding in the last scene in making it up to the top of the mission tower), let us risk another thesis: Scottie is a killer who doesn\'t want to admit it to himself, but instead starts to knit a hallucinatory story about a woman haunted by ghosts of the past that he is asked to follow, etc.. Thus, his vertigo is ultimately a symptomatic protective formation guaranteeing him that he could not have killed Madeleine: »I couldn\'t kill her since I have vertigo, and I couldn\'t possibly climb to the top of the tower and push her down.« Thus, vertigo is to be read as the Lacanian description of the symptom: an element that causes a nuisance (»I am a normal person, just one with vertigo«), whilst its absence causes an even greater nuisance – a total disaster (»I am completely mad!«). The apocalyptic, annihilating and revealing nature of this beyond-the-symptom insight (»I am not a normal person with vertigo, but a serial killer!«) is the reason why Scottie looks so devastated at the end of Vertigo. Connected with the field of the symptom as protective formation, trauma thus lies in the symbolic, while Trauma is embedded in the real.

One of the features inherent in art is a specific blind staggering, fingering or even watching through a delusive veil of traumas in quest of the nodal points of Trauma, of the Real. That quest is blind not in the sense of forked branching, but rather in the sense of climbing up the cliff, or – let us cheer up Hitchcock aficionados once more – up Mount Rushmore. The movie heroes climb and descend over the rocks, using every available crevice or protuberance, but if they did not know they were on Mount Rushmore, they would not be able to discover that they are in fact climbing over the colossal faces. Another cinematic example would be David Lynch’s use of extremely tight close-ups, where the filmed object becomes unrecognisable to the viewer. Or, let our ultimate example be from the sphere of contemporary art: the installation Close by Atom Egoyan and Julião Sarmento, presented at this year’s Venice Biennale.⁶ Placed in a narrow corridor, the spectator is unable to see and grasp the video image projected on a screen that forms one of the walls of the corridor. The distance between the viewer and the image is simply too short. Paradoxically, the shorter the distance between the spectator and the image, the bigger the gap between them, which underscores the fact that distance is practically non-transgressable ad infinutum, like in some sort of Zeno\'s paradox.⁷

Therefore, instead of outlining some kind of new strategy, I would simply ask us to remember that it is not the distance between an artist and her/his environment, objects or history surrounding her/him, that give rise to artistic activity; quite on the contrary, it is precisely the closeness, the gap or distance the subject/artist has toward her or himself that makes the very existence of art possible. And it is this distance that is strictly equivalent to the distance the subject has to keep on trying to overcome in her/his quest to approach the Real, to face it and grasp it. That is the reason why this fundamental feature of art will remain the precondition for all art strategies. And, for the very same reason, in the future art will be created exclusively by artists who doubt that they really are artists. And surely not by curators who are, on the contrary, totally convinced that they are curators.

And that could be a really good piece of Trauma for them.

 

 

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