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UKnowledge > College of Arts & Sciences > Social Theory > disClosure > Vol. 27 (2018)

 

Abstract

To Un-Become: Between Historic Reminder and Hallucination, Geographical Document and Childhood Memory, Collective Tragedy and Personal Healing is an multimedia art project, which explores the concept of un-becoming through revisiting Operation Storm in Yugoslavia and its consequences over two decades later. My interest in the concept of un-becoming was sparked by a court case in which General Ante Gotovina, a former Croatian military officer, was found guilty of organizing and implementing a permanent and forcible removal of the Serbian people in a 1995 military action entitled Operation Storm. Not long after, Gotovina’s convictions for crimes against humanity were reversed by the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Gotovina then returned to Croatia where many considered him a national hero. Furthermore, the Appeals Chamber also disputed the existence of a criminal enterprise whose purpose was the permanent and forcible removal of Serb civilians entirely. I wonder if this allowed Gotovina to successfully un-become a criminal, and also ask whether the same un-becoming process is possible for the survivors of his actions? To research this question, in April 2017 I retraced the journey of over 650 km from my first refugee house in Niš, Serbia to my former home in Karlovac, Croatia. For over two weeks, dawn to dusk I walked following the same route hundreds of thousands of other people were forced to take two decades ago during Operation Storm. This experience merged the evidence of war with my own memories, both actual and constructed, creating a visual noise that became my truth during the walk.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.27.06

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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