Refracted Visions: “Ethnic Cleansing” and the De-mythologization of Gender

Abstract

In 2009, the artist Milica Tomic walked through the streets of Belgrade, casually carrying an AK-47 assault rifle and a plastic shopping bag, passing through the sites where the People’s Liberation Movement carried out successful resistance operations against Nazi occupation during World War II. The action/intervention was accompanied by a video work, which used the film-making technique of Russian avant-garde filmmaker Lev Kuleshov to construct a “creative geography” where various locations, places and times all appeared to occur in the same site over a continuous period. Tomic argues that the use of “creative geography” actually imprisoned her character in the editing loop of the video, “unable to find a way out, for this newly-created/old territory. This territory, even though it is made up of emancipatory politics, decisions and actions, is imprisoned and occupied by a new time, the era of permanent war.”1 Through her action and media work, Tomic sought to resist the forms of collective forgetting in Belgrade, not only regarding the recent violence in the Balkans, but also in the global context of increased militarization around the world. Dedicated to the “Belgrade 6,” the performance created a doubled vision, tying the current climate of militarism and “security” to the resistance to fascism in World War II. The “Belgrade 6” were activists accused of inciting, assisting in and executing an attack on the Greek Embassy in Belgrade in 2009, in solidarity with the hunger strike of the political prisoner Thodoros Iliopoulos. Members of the Serbian Anarco-Syndicalist Initiative (ASI), they were arrested and held in custody for six months, charged with “international terrorism” (Figure 1.1).