Slovenes Upraised by Slovenes: Mare Bulc on 39th week of Slovenian Drama

26.03.2009 |

By presenting a series of images about Slovenian characteristics and interacting with the audience, Slovenes Upraised by Slovenes focuses on the question: what is essential in establishing national identity in the modern world? As suggested by a map of the Greater Slovenia on projection screens (by Vuk Čosić and Davor Bauk), the point of identification is no longer the territory of a particular community, since its borders have become seriously variable in today's global and virtual reality. The communities, whose dedication to various national paradigms we perform, are absurdly vacant; they manage to re-establish themselves, but are about as relevant as a pile of carefully ironed and folded handkerchiefs.

The national community has radically changed, the sense of community is no longer a result of joint physical rituals and collective passivity, in which individual perception and senses are subjugated to a unified group of members of group that is formed on a particular territory. Today it is made of different practices of belonging that far exceed the territory of individual community. The community is randomly constructed as a multitude of different, even contradictory identities, settling and extra-territorial connections.
Bojana Kunst, dramaturg

Maska Production, Slovene National Theatre Drama Ljubljana