SANDRA VITALJIĆ

INFERTILE GROUNDS

Karas Gallery, Praška 4

8.12.2009. - 3.1.2010.

Opening 8.12.2009 at 7pm

Sandra Vitaljić was born in Pula in 1972.  She took her master’s degree at the Academy of Performing Arts, Film and TV in Prague.  Currently she is ABD in the doctoral course of the same institution, having specialised in the history and theory of photography.  She is employed as associate professor at the Cinematography Department of the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, and is head of the photography chair.   She is a member of the artists’ associations ULUPUH and HDLU.  Her works are placed in the permanent display of the Modern Gallery in Zagreb and in the collection of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.  She was awarded the following scholarships:

in 1997, ArtsLink at The Ansel Adams Center for Photography, San Francisco,CA

in 2006-2007, a Fulbright at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY.

IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR INFERTILE GROUNDS?

The places of the bloodiest battles and the worst kind of human suffering are usually empty fields that differ in nothing from the ordinary spaces on which nothing important ever happened.  When there is a wish completely to destroy memorials of the ugly past, man will intervene by knocking down that which he has built. Jasenovac no longer has any buildings from the time when there was a concentration camp. There are no huts of the camp on Pag. It is probably hoped that returning to the beginning can wipe out or hide what was. That hope is in vain, for it is all in fact quite the opposite.  At the place of the Battle of the Nations in Waterloo in Belgium, where Wellington’s and Napoleon’s armies clashed, there was also nothing. Just fields and then still forests in the plains of the Netherlands.  William I, King of the Netherlands, who also ruled Belgium at that time, as early as 1820 at the place where his son was probably injured, had an artificial steep hill built, with a leonine figure at the top.   The land had been excavated from a part of the battlefield so that the leonine hill could be erected. French writer Victor Hugo wrote that the wish for the place of the battle to be glorified had in this way ruined it, made it less holy.  The real event was fuzzed with the human intervention, something had been made that at the time of the battle had not been there at all.

There further we go into the past, the less painful are the sacrifices, and the events less contested.  Matija Gubec and the Peasant Revolt in Stubica in 1573 are just like that, irrespective of the fact that, as regimes changed, various meanings were inscribed into the event.  In “the people” Gubec was a king who would come out of the ground and liberate the oppressed. Later he was a symbol of the cooperation of Slovene and Croatian peasants who had fought together against the feudalists. Today, as is shown by photography, Gubec is a medium who leads us as tourists and consumers into the Middle Ages. No longer is the class struggle recognised in Gubec. International collaboration has become démodé because of the deteriorating relations with western neighbours or recollection of times when fraternity and unity were so much insisted on.

Some places were once very important. Thousands of pilgrims, voluntary and half coerced, traipsed to the places that legitimated systems and ideologies.  Srb in Lika and Zagreb’s Dotršćina are examples.  Then they became entirely unimportant, marginalised, and the monuments, if not destroyed, were then devastated.  Other places of recollection and crime, like Ovčara, are still so fresh that the dead, the graves of many of whom are not known, still live, still are not the present only, but also the future, for the resolution, in a court or otherwise, is still to come.

The photographs of Sandra Vitaljić show places important to people, but without people. Accidentally these are symbols most important to the citizens of the Republic of Croatia. Similar sequences could be organised elsewhere for others. The soils on which something has happened show two things: the pleasant and the unpleasant, the bloody and the good, if they have happened, cannot be erased, however much everything is taken back to the original, the primary. Such soils show that the meaning of many events in changed circumstances also changes, irrespective of the place, even with human intervention, usually being the same, bare, similar to places where nothing important has ever happened.  Monuments can be destroyed, the crime can be completely ignored, it can be forensically cleaned up, but because of various reasons, justice or politics, ethics and logic, it will reappear at a certain moment.  The members of the Zec family who had remained alive were received in the Government of the Republic of Croatia with the intention of excusing themselves for those who were now just remains, somewhere underground. Some of the destroyed monuments are being restored. Some events, like Bleiburg, which were swept under the carpet for decades or were talked of only somewhere, among the expatriates, or in the privacy of the home, have now been for two decades a topic of everyday politics. And then again, every one of the places at which something happened, when you draw the line, is just bare land.

Infertile grounds do indeed suffocate us. They are places of trauma and they can be communicated with in two ways. It is possible to let time pass, for them one day to be turned into half-legends, like Gubec. It would be much better though to talk about them. After some time, death is no longer seen, becomes what it was: nature, coldness, nothing.  But because something is not seen, it does not mean that it has vanished  and that it cannot appear greater than it was.

If it were possible completely to explore some historical event, to find all the documents, collect all the memories, to write the most extensive book, one day, even an event treated in this way would be returned to and reanalysed by future generations.  In everything, they would find new meanings, earlier neglected, or completely marginal and invisible.  The writing of history is above all an endeavour to explain what has happened, as well as an expression of what is happening in society the moment the writing is happening, what the historian bears in himself, the setting in which he or she works.  Since it is never represented in schools written down in the textbooks in this way, nor is the result of historical investigation, it is not unusual for what is written to be trusted with blind faith or not to be believed at all.   Sweeping under the carpet will not halt speech and truth.  Destruction will not manage to destroy what was, just as new monuments will not permanently be able to redirect interpretation. At the end, everything will go back to where it all began.

In her photographs, Sandra Vitaljić shows what is. Clearly, she is concerned and bothered by the infertile grounds.  They do not have to stay barren.  Meanings will constantly be inscribed in them, and if this is done with the intention of showing everything, of passing over nothing in silence, there is no need for fear. The only problem is for us not to let history suffocate us, just because we cannot cope with the present.

Tvrtko Jakovina, DSc

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Places of Runaway Mysteries

The earth in Ključ Brdovečki is brown and friable; on the surface it is mixed in with grey and white round stones. At first glance, or if we look at the photograph from a distance, it seems like a ploughed field on which unpicked crops have remained. At the moment of shooting, Sandra Vitaljić was standing completely calmly on the edge of the field, gaze fixed on what was just in front of her. No kind of additional details push their way into the scene, nothing either defines or describes it. Only a blade of grass at the bottom edge hints at the usual changes that take place according to the season. The other shot from the same place is very different. The thicket into which she has come is dominated by diverse kinds of plants, interwoven tendrils of unkempt, conical, tent-like constructions that have been created by nature. One senses the author’s dubiety about which way to turn, her uncertainty in finding a way out of this place.

Spaces. Spaces of history, myths, narrative, everyday spaces; places steeped in traces, in which we seek for the possible, the inherited remembered or retailed identities, uncertain of what we are coming upon.

Almost everyday we pass by places at which, once, some particular events took place. Described in chronicles, some remembered by the older folks, some come down to us by traditions, or by the aid of reports only recently made available to the public. Are there any mechanisms for the automatic assumption of their meanings? Is it possible to identify with them today, take over something from the experiences that once in history, close or distant, defined them? The stories that describe them are as numerous as the steps that have passed over them, the steps of persons from the whole unconscious identity that Sandra Vitaljić has endeavoured to find in them.       

We often treat places at which once in history crimes have happened in kid gloves, seemingly assured by the gap in time that has led to an unjust and inappropriate equalisation of sufferings. Ten years back Sandra Vitaljić started to explore place of mass executions and hushed but not forgotten graves, wandering how it is possible to photograph such things at all. She is interested in whether at some places there is some mark, some aura, anything at all that we might feel even if we don’t notice it. Like many other photographers who take an interest in places of conflict, loss and sorrow, she explores the nature of wartime events and the changes that have affected the space that surrounds us. Although at first sight unobtrusive, these sufferings have conditioned certain aspects of social psychology and the identity of individuals who call upon justice or expect the ultimate end of that part of history to which long ago a defined point of view should have been taken.

Spaces once caught up in war, places of mass graves, where died the hopes of captives, who have sometimes been known to hold tightly onto photographs of their families even after death; quiet places, in no way particularly defined. The new path that leads to Ovčara – a grey paved path that turns to the left and vanishes behind the trees – “is mirror imaged” in the dusty path in the centre of which the grass is worn down and that turns to the right. It leads to the nearby empty field over which the birds, as it seem, avoid flying. The softness of its form in no way hints of the horror hidden below the waving stems of wheat. I recall the stories of the Vukovar woman who led me around the places of mass executions in this area and the incredible documentary of her statement of how pilots had noticed changes in the topography of Ovčara until the dark liquid mass began to work its way up from the ground, confirming the suspicions. How can this be recorded, how told to anyone at all? Will the young plants among which Sandra Vitaljić noticed the crumpled remains of a flag in any way contribute to the identity of this place? Can photographs bear the weight of memory that is at once personal and general, local and national?

It is possible to address photos from the series Infertile Grounds from the existential position and to accept Barthes’ adventure that is in its very nature uncertain. For in these photos too we can tell the being-together of two elements – of interest that is the product of the knowledge, moral and political culture of the observer, the recorder, and the punctum, the sudden knowledge of meaning that is mediated to us by intuition, with the help of the title of the works and the occasional written comment of the artist.

“Each landscape, no matter how calm and lovely, conceals a substratum of disaster”, stated land artist Robert Smithson.  The Susan Silas series of photographs called Helmbrechts Walk, 1998-2003 shows melancholy landscapes, empty paths, mournful forests, rails that lead nowhere.  We might ask of these photos too, whether we would understand them if we did not happen to know what she took. Is the author’s re-taking of the path along which, in 1945, six hundred Jewish women from various parts of occupied Europe were forced to walk understandable by the mere act of looking at these poetic scenes? Landscape, in the opinion of W. J. T. Mitchell “is read as a compensation for and screening off of the actual violence perpetrated there.” And indeed, much of it looks idyllic at first glance, the landscapes slowly merge below the late sunbeams, new plants sprout in the fields, in the forests the leaves have covered the death pits to which it is today practically impossible to get. Collective amnesia is a tribute of a politics unready to look realistically at causes and effects, or of populist demands that erase the character of the victim and a given place and burden their meaning in an inappropriate way. But it seems that the places that Sandra Vitaljić photographs, just like those that Susan Silas shot, function as spaces at which it is possible to sense the violence but that at the same time do not accept oblivion.

The places taken are not dumb, for the nature that Sandra Vitaljić points her lens at tells us something. The landscape resists forgetfulness, it has survived the deliberate destruction of memorial slabs, healed the desecration of the barks of the trees. Knowledge about the past is neither accurate nor precise, writes Tvrtko Jakovina. Landscape has no capacity to tell tales, cannot construct a story or affect the course of remembering and forgetting. It comes before us via photographs that are devoid of the usual political rhetoric, compromising signs (often the case at Bleiburg) and the presence of people. We feel them in that mist achieved with shifts of (or rather, decentralising) the lens, which works like the latent energetic charge of a given place. We see them in the distance, like the tape in national colours that edges Bleiburg field. We sense them in the scene shot in a forest thicket with which the photographer mediates to us the terror remaining among the branches, before the victims stepped out onto the clearing that at the moment of shooting is nevertheless lit up by the sun. We invoke the uncertainty of movement in the motif of the tracks; wonder whether they lead anywhere at all.

Joyce wrote that places remember events. They are part of the emotional map of the world on which, at least speciously, we do not notice the constructions of social and political relations that at a moment in history determined their meaning. In her search for them, Sandra Vitaljić endeavours to understand their individuality, become aware of and recognise them; she refrains from post-hoc constructed balances of belligerent parties, does not even out, does not comment. Her glance is warm but distanced. It searches for possible parts of the landscape that are capable of taking part in the creation of the national identity. But she does not find them, for the places do not change their identities, and have long since absorbed the traces of mourning. Mysteries that have evaded oblivion have remained available to her.

Sandra Križić Roban