Socio-political context in after-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, full of rough existential confrontations and dilemmas, has imposed to artists constant questioning of possibilities for acting, ways to “conceal” art with reality of life, restoring relationship with environment, space and burdened recent past, whose reflection can’t be avoided, and making art a rational and critical act. Beside, there are other, more intimate questions like, can personal history be a motive, theme, content or a sense of artistic acting, and how personal experiences can be encrypted in public space?

    Precisely, this question has served as subtext for chosen artistic strategy of Mladen Miljanovic who is questioning “technologies” of functioning of a subject in society, process of subjectification where an individual determines his/her own identity modeling it by external power centers, and subtext for political and social strategies of influence on an individual and its life. Therefore, artist analyzes his own identity, the ways he changes and constructs, and he turns to the question of his own position in society where he acts and to the models of positioning in public sphere. Artist, thereby, repeating the personal experience of serving the army as a artistic performance present in media and public, contextualizes his intimate narration in wider social sphere and creates for himself new kind of public identity.

   On the other hand there’s a question whether this decision of repeating the act of serving, this time not to the “people” but to the art, turns into a form of repetitive matrix of trauma? According to Freud experience is registered as traumatic only through some later one witch retroactively recodes it by “repeating the experience” or so called Nachträglichkeit. Subject is not, therefore, forever determined but structured as a relay of prediction and reconstruction of traumatic experience and fulfilled through “repeated action”.

   Artist’s motives and psychological impulses, which make him act the way he does, are conditional and in mutual conjunction with a context of transitional society, which, therefore, is in a constant state of flux and agitation influencing every individual and making artist react. Gradual entry of this society into a bigger global network of social processes, in a period of disorganization and disjunctive capitalism, is dominated by supranational integration networks and post-national flow of information and money. This state is on the limits of Fuk’s and later Agamben’s theory of bio-politics where “bare life” and body of individual are ultimate goal for achieving power through control and manipulation. Globally, society is threatened with terrorism as a new paradigm of World (“cold”) War and state of emergency, become more and more close within their “safety belts” under the constant threat of attack. Copying global models to local situation gives the right to the artist to state “…life becomes a pray of new and different relations of power witch, this time, are not limited with territory, population, country nor anything that conventional term of sovereignty appointed”.

   Artist’s response to this global constellation, to local environment burdened with history and to the process of subjectification and (im) possibility to form unshakeable identity, apparently represents paradox of self-isolation: nine-month process of serving your chosen vocation, the only “way out” artist has.

Zoran Erić