The Statistics of Defiance (The Transition of Oblivion)

Nikola Šuica

The social and the psychological flows of human presence are joined together in the statistical data pertaining to the votes cast in political elections and divisions. Such direction includes marks of mentality in the veritable anthropological catastrophe that has been going on in Serbia for a long time. In one of the open phases of their joint artistic undertakings, Milica Milićević and Milan Bosnić review the blending of photoregistration in the capturing of double identities in various phases of escape and abandonment. The challenge of split personal destinies permeates the records of physical emigration. According to unofficial statistics, in the course of a decade and a half of terrible biological upheavals in the regional territories, approximately 700,000 young educated people managed to leave their state of origin, setting off for various parts of the globe. A successful escape from the concentration camp of their homeland? The negative echo of the public image of their country of origin contributes to undefined difficulties. And while, in the second half of the first decade of the new century, renewed self-examination in the entranced search for the causes of historical mistakes persists as an irresolvable daily topic in Serbia, the facts of a new era visibly indicate that a liberated individual power, which is important to both external and internal migrants, remains blocked.

The interim space of the undefined waves of emotions of others is contained in a unique construct of individual documented destinies and statistics on the movements and fluctuations of those belonging to “the lost generation of Milošević’s Serbia”. The authorial interpretation of such a phenomenon through individual portraits and shots of individual figures in their migratory environments gives visibility not only to the vast emptiness of wasted human energy but also to all the details consumed in these, and such, one and only lifetimes.

* Nikola Suica, Art Historian, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Culture – Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts Belgrade.