Degenerates, Monsters, and Traitors (1573)
Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it.
– Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)
Wise serpents and innocent doves beware: this room is full of big bad wolves. A perverse pastoral, a site of a trickster weaving plots against all us fools. You may recognize the story. You may even recognize the faces. It takes us back to 1573, to the wake of the Slovenian-Croatian Peasant Revolt, also known as Gubec’s Rebellion. The revolt lasted twelve days and took the lives of over 3,000 peasants – an uprising, so the story goes, triggered by the despicable cruelty of one Baron Ferenc Tahy.
Notice that the serfs’ hero, Matija Gubec, is missing.
But the Baron is present in all his devilish glory, a horned figure armed with bells, beads, leather scraps, and bottle caps. A monster? Perhaps. In any case, he is not alone. The Duchess’s severed head waves a jiggling flag, adorned with the same language of meticulously crafted materials and found debris. Horns protrude through her cheap dyed wig, red ceramic teardrops are scattered across her figure, in place of her noble throat, a collar of broken bottles. She’s loud. She’s obnoxious. She’s a freak. Yes, someone unexpected has also joined this violent farce. The Bishop’s face hangs on the wall, a mask radiating beatific power. A mute chameleon, defaced and disfigured. Finally, nameless gargoyles spewing forth nooses accompany these villains. The deadly ropes echo the fate of the sixteen mutilated peasants left to dangle from a wild pear tree as chronicled by Nikola Istvánffy in 1622, a witness to their grim defeat. Fake grass, trampled flowers and lovely picket fences face these moral abominations.
Who defines what is right? Who names the rascals? Who holds the pen? Yellow, green, white, and red strike the scene – simple colours for simple stories. Pasts are crowded with winners and losers, oppressors and the oppressed – absolute mythologies shaping nations, fuelling romantic conspiracies of power, cruelty, and loss. Bygones are bygones, as fantasy creates blueprints from reality. Isn’t it so, so, sweet to give in to villainous betrayals? To conjure grotesque ghosts of traumatic defeats? To romanticize loss and revel in others’ inhumanity? A familiar story, indeed.
The trickster’s tongue, however, is sharp and full of surprises.
History becomes a playing field in which tales and heroic gestures are game to bend the rules. This room is deceptive, seemingly opulent, yet cobbled with everyday scraps and broken glass. Trickery bleeds, clouding virtue and vice. Tragedy mutates into folk jest, horror into blasphemous extravagance – a satirical exhumation of a collective identity founded on defeat and subjugation. Sweet mixes with sour, could-have-beens unravel, lines of fiction and fact blur, ancient truths swell with complexity and contradictions. Could the beast be the same as us? Donning the wolf’s skin, stripped of the privilege of an unassuming lamb. Could it be that fabrication is endurance? Surviving past disasters, weathering present collapse because we once triumphantly failed. Could it be that God’s will works both ways – to revolt or to rule over others?
As the trickster’s plot thickens with ambiguity… Maybe it’s time to run wild.
Author of the text: Luja Šimunović (KUĆĆA); Co-author: Klara Petrović (KUĆĆA)