Reenacting pedagogies of socialism: auto-analysis of a critical practice

Abstract

This essay surveys a pedagogical project that reenacted archival artifacts of the former Yugoslav Civil Defense from the period of the Cold War and a few years before the collapse of socialism in 1991. During the course in Spatial Theory held at the Academy of Arts in Osijek (Croatia), students created a series of performances and art works. The works re-embodied a complex constellation of archival material juxtaposed with reenacted images performed in public space of the city and the space of the Academy. Having in mind the fact that found footage was used in times of socialism to educate and train citizens how to (re)act and perform in a situation of nuclear attacks, the material can be regarded as a potential source to examine signifiers (and ideologies) of socialism. As the performances triggered repressed traces of the fear-provoking scenario of a potential nuclear attack, what resurfaced was the pedagogy of a suppressed ideological model. The intention of the essay is to demonstrate how reviving training material from the past (and originating in a different political system) can be critically reactivated for the purpose of developing experimental formats of artistic education.

Keywords:

• Yugoslav total civil defense
• spatial theory
• archives
• (p)reenactment
• critical pedagogy

Notes

1 I use the phrase “apparatus” in the sense philosopher Giorgio Agamben is referring to the “the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge” (see Agamben 2010, 3).

2 On site-specific practices see: Kwon (2002) and Kaye (2000).

3 Besides the site-specific exhibition at the former Civil Defense office, the project received a good response and was invited to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Arts in Rijeka and to the 16^th Biennale of Arts in Pancevo (Serbia).

4 One of the theses that this course tried to test and articulate is about the dissensual and conflictual feature of public space. In other words, public space, so the argument, can be regarded not as a site of inclusion, but rather comes into being through struggle, tension and exclusion. See Deutsche (1996).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrej Mircev

Andrej Mirčev is an academic and dramaturg from former Yugoslavia. He received his PhD. from FU Berlin where he was also fellow at the International Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures”. His interdisciplinary research engages in trajectories of a dialectical dialogue between theory and practice with an interest in spatial theory, intermediality, archives and critical theory. Mircev is guest professor at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe and associate lecturer at the Department for Stage Design, University of Arts Berlin. Together with Astrid Hackel and Judith Bodor he is the co-author of the book Left Performance Histories (NgbK, Berlin 2018).