Dialogi
Eurozine
Dialogi
2012-01-12
Summary of Dialogi 11-12/2011
Boris Vezjak asks in the introductory editorial: "Is there any tangible difference between the verbal conviction of a communist that religious believers must give up their faith and the verbal conviction of a believer that communists (leftists) belong in hell? And if so, what is it?"
The reason the question arises is because in advance of the December parliamentary elections in Slovenia a village priest gave clear instructions to his parishioners to vote for the political right, since voting for the political left is a sin. Reactions to this excess were limited to the usual media alert that church and state according to the Constitution are supposed to be kept separate, and light-hearted ridicule from those who do not believe in hell. The Roman Catholic Church did not distance itself from the priest's views. Vezjak concludes that in Slovenia there are dramatically large conceptual difficulties in identifying hate speech: we do not recognize it or try to suppress it.
Visual arts editor Natasa Kovsca interviews art historian Breda Kolar Sluga, director of the Maribor Art Gallery, about her work as curator, about the revival of public monuments in the city, and about the exhibition program of the foundation which manages it. The core of the conversation is of course devoted to the construction of a new gallery which was supposed to be Maribor's core investment as a European Capital of Culture in 2012, but constant problems have arisen in the planning and construction. In the current situation, as the gallery director states, we can only conclude that the ECC will act as an impetus for a new cultural offering of the city after 2012.
This issue's Article is contributed by Srdja Pavlovic, professor of contemporary political and cultural history of Eastern and Central Europe at the University of Alberta, Canada. The author defines the process of constructing collective memory. For history as a branch of knowledge the firmness of the concept of historical truth is becoming increasingly questionable. The past is shown in the frameworks of stories and narrative, and thus it is always a matter of perception and construction as to which part of it denied or forgotten. The author cites numerous examples of this kind of oblivion, displacement or erasure. The fact that events on Beijing's Tiananmen Square were well documented in Western Europe and the United States is in no way a guarantee that people in China will not fall under another amnesia created by their state bureaucracy. A radical example from the Balkans could be Srebrenica, and it is a fact that despite the relatively extensive and accessible documentation about everything that occurred there, there are still people who do not believe that a crime really happened. The example of Austria is a good illustration of the vitality of an alternative version of the past. The interpretation of the role of Austria in the Second World War is reduced to a story about being a victim of historical circumstances, hence this part of the past is analyzed in the context of victimology. A parallel can be made in the case of Poland and its rejection of any share of responsibility for the Holocaust.
In the literary section, writers Dusan Sarotar and Matej Krajnc publish excerpts from their new novels, and poets Jan Smarcan and Adam Suligoj new poems.
Marko Golja writes about the new film melodrama Good Night, Miss, directed by Metod Pevec, and Tina Poglajen about the Swedish-Danish-Finnish co-production Play directed by Ruben Östlund. Katja Cicigoj analyzes the feminist response to the work of director Agnes Varda on the occasion of the screening of the 1965 film Le bonheur (Happiness). Tanja Tolar reports on the retrospective exhibition by German artists Gerhard Richter in the Tate Modern in London. Robi Sabec presents the third notebook of the anthology of anarchist writers published by Krtina in Ljubljana.
This issue's Diary was written by Leonora Flis during her visit to the New York Film Festival, and concludes with the interesting thought: "The Ljubljana Film Festival LIFFe in no way lags behind NYFF: the only difference between the two festivals is that we don't manage to attract a lot of very famous names. Who sometimes, as I was able to observe, don't really have much to say."
Finally, we publish an obituary written by Bernard Rajh for Bruno Hartman, a highly distinguished citizen of Maribor, Slovene specialist, theatre worker, librarian, cultural historian, public employee and from 1967-1968 also the editor-in-chief of Dialogi.