Death to Fascism, Freedom to Others / 2022

Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

October 2022

 

It is called the people (narod), population of a country as a set of free and equal citizens, regardless of social status, kinship, education and religion.

 

 With the anachronistic Dayton Peace Agreement and the newly adopted peoples/nations, the concept of equal Bosnian people disappeared from socio-political vocabulary and usage. Therefore, following the same process, one of the most imposing works of our great painter Vojo Dimitrijević, the stained glass window "Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People (1966)" located in the atrium of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, loses its original basis of understanding the Bosnian people as a unique entity, i.e. geographical community, and socio-political subject and bearer of sovereignty.

 

By reformulating the historical phrase of the Yugoslav anti-fascist movement from the Second World War "Death to fascism, freedom to the people" and putting the term "Others" instead of "People", work explicitly criticize the voluntary appropriation of belonging to the "constitutive" peoples, as opposed to one's own historical geographical-national Bosnian identity, and on the other hand, this work favors all those OTHERS (OSTALI), who REMAINS (OSTALI) outside the state-forming national-religious institutional distinctions and who, by their existence and personal belief, worship the democratic system of equal citizens, regardless of social status, education and religion.

 

This in-situ intervention in the public space is the second part of the triptych in which the author deals with the social phenomenon of the unfortunate political term "Others". The first part, the photographic series "Ostali/Ostali", was published in Gracija magazine in 2013, and was installed in 2018 in the gallery of the cult cinema Cinélux in Geneva.

 

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     Original stained glass window "Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People (1966)" by Vojo Dimitrijević