..NATAŠA GOVEDIĆ

Public Domain: Outside and
Against Institutions

Nataša GOVEDIĆ

During the “Theatre Night” 2010, when all city theatre houses gave free performances for general audiences, indulging in a fantasy of high availability of cultural goods, Selma Banich (dancer, choreographer and social activist) decided to stage a different political sentiment. She went to collect plastic bottles from trash containers in the street and entitled her work (RES) PUBLICA. In fact, the title of her piece1 is hard to translate, since “publica” in Croatian also means “audience”, but suffice to say that she suggested the real political position of Croatian audiences: being poor to the point of collecting plastic bottles for the small reward of state money. She literally refused the demagogy of the theatre institutions and exchanged social positions with the people who work on the streets and rarely go to the theatre. But while institutional elites welcomed new guests for just a couple of hours, completely aware that this “free theatre” is a kind of charity work (where the audience remains invisible, no matter how much they pay for the ticket), the street remained open and cruel to everybody without any temporal, ideological or spatial limitations, no matter if you are a theatre artist or just a regular poor person. The street turns everybody into a performer. You perform by the very fact that you are waiting for public transport or hanging around trash containers, as there are other people who observe you. Contrary to repertory theatres and the lies that are produced and financed therein, the street makes you all too visible, and painfully marked by your economic status. No charity. Only instant and harsh evaluations.

A month ago, Selma Banich also performed piece called Croatian National Surrender. She stood on street with arms lifted in a position of surrender, in front of the City council for culture and education. She protested in the same corporal position for three and a half hours. Different artists and regular people who were passing her on the street expressed deep solidarity with Banich, helping her physically and emotionally to endure, not to give up, and also commenting widely on our common, national “state of consciousness”, which is close to Banich's expression of hopelessness, despair and revolt, united in a single performative body. Here we also meet the case of collapsed, dysfunctional res publica – the people who care for people are not the people in the “City council for culture and education” (although that is their public duty). The people who care about their fellow-citizens are anonymous passengers who, surprisingly, exhibit high levels of compassion and altruism. How come the political tribe lacks these qualities? How come the theatre system is not encouraging them? How come the street is more creative and more interested in actual human suffering then the whole social system of “organized support”?

Chances in the street
Politically speaking, the street in Croatia slowly becomes the parallel cultural and political system, para-polis, as well as the only stage ready to confront us with the relevant questions presented by prominent artists. It is precisely the street where performance artist Siniša Labrović challenged the current Minister for Culture, Božo Biškupić, to answer Labrović's call to arms.. Biškupić had not appeared at the venue, decorated lavishly for boxing event, so Labrović went on with the ritual of proclaiming himself the new Minister for Culture. The accidental street audience and various representatives of the media used this case to [draw attention to] the idea that the Minister for Culture is not “above” challenges presented by artists, just as culture shouldn't be run by political bureaucracy, responsible only to leadership of their own political party. Culture, indeed, belongs to artists and other creative professionals and if they cannot work in the proper theatre institutions, it is only logical to take over the street space.
But you cannot run the street only by means of ideological dissatisfaction and counter-will.
What the street needs to become truly powerful site of new knowledge and new political courage is theatrical competence and expressive professionalism. The street needs articulation that surpasses both shouting and the gathering of many silent bodies, united in undifferentiated demonstrations.
For instance, the street as a site of political and theatrical “fight” between the independent scene and the commercially oriented City council was also staged around and on Varšavska street in Zagreb. The destruction of public space in Varšavska street, cutting down trees and eliminating quiet zones for people's rest, and only because of suspected corruption in City council and the private greed for the money that is expected to pour from the planned shopping centre next to Varšavska, has provoked mass demonstrations during this summer. However, although the Varšavska uprising proved challenging to city officers in political terms (and unfortunately ending with arrest of many protesters and the scandal of the disregard of various legal limitations on turning public space in Varšavska into a private construction area), this particular street-stage failed to organize a continuous cultural platform for creative rebellion and art productions, choosing only occasional concerts and pamphlets as means to encourage public participation in the event.

Experience of witnessing
It is, therefore, important to make a difference between truly public and just superficially “shared” or ideologically “marked” spaces. The human territory becomes public and therefore intensely political only when we use it as area for continuous creative expression. It takes a carefully targeted performance program to turn a regular street corner into a public domain. By the same logic, when institutional theatres use their stages to suppress or diminish the expression of common problems, the stage stops being public. In an extremely surveilled society, such as ours, the street becomes more and more theatrical, as it refuses to behave according to rules of the dominating political parties, and the street is dangerously free because it upholds the real, not virtual bodies, in real – not virtual – environments.
Street has also become the subject of the theatre piece This Could Be My Street (directed by Anica Tomić and Jelena Kovačić), which premiered in Zagrebačko Kazalište Mladih, one of the most progressive institutions in town. The play stages documentation about the brutal murder of a teenager called Luka Ritz, attacked without apparent reason one night in the street when he was on his way home from concert. Luka Ritz died from injuries inflicted by the teenage-mob that attacked him, nd the whole judicial process of dealing with this and other teenage murders has been almost farcical, since the whole community knew who the murderers were, but somehow avoided naming them. This Could Be My Street shows how much the street owes to theatre and how much theatre owns to the street. In both cases, the audience is in fact either a deliberate or an accidental witness, even if they only watch in silence. However, the experience of witnessing resonates very differently in an art medium as opposed to between the silent walls of city streets. When theatre takes over the street, it makes us immediately connected with various instances of political and media power. When violence is staged, not only acted out, new political opportunities arise to address violence, understand it and change it. It is as if the street is not public enough by itself; we must make it representational to the point of turning it into a performance site.
That is exactly what independent theatre company MONTAŽSTROJ did with their performance called Fire-starter: director Borut Šeparović invited the audience to examine the spaces of real political and economic corruption in Croatia from their bus seats, as some kind of mock-tourist expedition. Once again, the street served to point towards the towers of institutional luxury, built through various “privatizations” and “modifications” of common laws.
I will not discuss here the success or failure of theatre makers to turn the street into a stage and the stage into the street, but I insist that Croatian streets are now teaching dissent to all of us, functioning as the last remaining space of public consciousness. I wouldn't be surprised if we soon have university professors teaching on the street, not because of some romantic recollection of Socrates’ method, but because more and more knowledge becomes suppressed or denied in state institutions, and I know both scholars and theatre makers who refuse to accept silencing. To return once more to Selma Banich and her street performances, one can either succumb to social oppression or turn poverty into a political, ethical and aesthetic debate.

As long as the public domain continues to grow outside institutions, the fight for undisciplined solidarity (res publica) is not lost.