Ko'laž

A well-known and well-used literary method is the reconstruction of vague childhood memories through a free, associative enumeration of images, because live images are precisely what was ripped from a wider context and they are the only memories from the first years of our life.

The movie Déjà vu discusses that invisible line between memories and history, but again depending on an angle of view, of on observer. French historian Pierre Nora, explains how memories and history aren’t synonyms, but quite the opposite terms, claims that memory is life, that is carried out by real people, that in permanent evolution, sensitive on adoption and manipulation, subjected to a long pauses and sudden revival, and that history on the other hand always problematic and uncompleted reconstruction of a past.

if we turn our attention, in the film Déjà vu, to a more general level, to symbols and archetypes, as well as to the formal procedures the author uses in order to evoke memories, we will see not only an intimate story, which becomes lost in its insignificance among the intimate stories of billions of people, but also an artistic articulation of consciousness, which we can immerse into and which speaks to us. In fact, if we enter the swamp the artist shows, we might see our own memories, fears or fascinations.

Fragmented, non-fluid frames of the lm suggest the fragmentation of memory, time lag in which past experiences turn into images of uncertain authenticity and where the imaginary mixes with the experienced. When the non-existent and subjectively defined consciousness is often the only warrantor that something really happened, we may ask ourselves whether there is any difference between real and imaginary past.

Film music with its long tones, does not suggest the feeling of threat lurking from the swamp the dolls in the lm stroll through, as much as a huge life energy, passion and Eros, hidden within them, behind their innocent faces. They are in the field, in the woods and the abovementioned swamp, soaking in the wonderful and frightening world around them. In such climates the life flourishes, and transforms from one form into another. It is impossible to think that the silent protagonists do not feel that flourishing in all their whole plastic bodies.

The need to habituate oneself with this indifferent, but also extremely dangerous hundred-headed Hydra we call the natural order, as opposed to the civilized life of a contemporary man, was accentuated in the works of Jack London and D. H. Lawrence, and it is also the motive of John Brooman’s film Deliverance (from 1972). However, our culture, and all its fruits, were created while fighting that Hydra and by successfully conquering it. In this ordered world the law penalizes the escalations of dark passions (at least formally strives to), and the comfort we achieved made life easier and longer. However, in our consciousness there are still atavisms, from the times we lived “in harmony with nature“, as romanticists and environmentalists would say. It was a bloody harmony however, but it still left significant traces of violent impulses, or genetic adaptations to such a world, which Sigmund Freud called the uneasiness in culture. Ivana Fischer’s works draw these never forgotten instincts to the surface, allowing our dark aesthetic fascination with them. Any story is irrelevant here.

The author would sometimes add the elements of folk costumes from Slavonia to the babies in the film and the ones amassed on Talisman, and this is the only indicator of her childhood, that initial motivation for this exhibition. The scenography of Kopački Rit, with blues soundtrack, reminds more of the Mississippi Delta, which is also the element that raises these works above narrow local framework. Similar landscape create similar emotional frameworks, similar memories and traumas, that transcend time and spatial distance, and sometimes, creatively expressed, create intriguing works of art.

Feđa Gavrilović