Aphasia
The moral standpoint we occupy as distant witnesses judging the psychology of an individual faced with war or societal havoc rests on the notion of psychological and moral continuity that we all share. However, research teaches us that situational power triumphs over individual power. Under certain circumstances and severe social pressure, ordinary people commit the most unimaginable crimes.
Aphasia performance stems from the six-year research during which visual artist and filmmaker Jelena Jureša created a film, a film installation and a book. Her eponymous film Aphasia (2019), is an unsettling inquiry into the representation of violence and the violence of representation, a highly corporeal documentary gesture in several movements that is deeply personal, political, and perpetually timely. Unlike a classical documentary, various parts of the film were formally and performatively indebted to media such as theater and dance. From Belgian colonialism in the first act, Austrian race experiments and Heimat films in the second, the third act brings to life the well-known photograph, taken at the beginning of the war in Bosnia.
A crucial motivation in Jureša's choice of creating a stage production lies in the fact that she wants to focus more deeply via a live event on the notion of perpetrator and complicity by experimenting with the position of the bystander. What does it mean to witness something? In a disturbing nightclub-like setting, we engage directly with the spectators and engage them with questions about group dynamics, polarization, and obedience to authority.
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