Placing the info-board on site
In September 2020, 64 years after the dissolution of the camp for political prisoners on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur, Andreja Kulunčić, for the first time in the history of the island, installed an informative board about the history and structure of the women’s camp at both locations. The text on the board is as follows:
“Alternating between island of Goli otok and the neighbouring island of Sveti Grgur from 1950 to 1956 there was a camp for political prisoners through which passed more than 850 women accused of having cominform connections. With an exceptionally cruel punishment system, in which the women inmates were forced to assume the role of torturer, the camp was a place of suffering and humiliation. The harassment and police surveillance of the accused women continued even after they had been let out of the camp.”
As Anca Verona Mihuleț, one of the exhibition curators of the project, explains in her text names, only names...[1] “By appropriating the role of a decision-maker against an indifferent political regime, Kulunčić re-establishes the necessary order of things, the one that was absent after the closure of the camp, almost as if the installation of that board – a normative and responsible gesture in every democracy – gives these deserted islands an alternative existence. (…) The existence of the board represents the end of the state of emergency and the beginning of a new regime of meaning beyond the new politics.”
After the guerilla artistic action of placing the information boards in hard-to-reach localities, the area marked for the first time becomes visible to the general public thanks to an elaborate media strategy that is an integral part of the project.[2]
[1] In the second edition of the project publication, published by MAPA & Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Zagreb, 2022.
[2] Media about the installation of information boards on Goli otok and Sv. Gregory. Available at: http://www.zene-arhipelag-goli.info/en/press-en/
Muzealization of the board
After installing the information board on Goli otok in guerilla action, the artist exhibits a photograph of the board with the aim of introducing the marginalized topic of women’s historical suffering into institutions. Part of the artistic strategy also referred to the fact that the artist herself took photos of the information board on Goli otok. The presentation of this work also questions the role of photography itself, whereby it does not function as a picture, but encourages the opening of a field for problematizing the relationship to women and their place in society and history with the aim of dissolving narratives that have remained on the margins of the main historical lines.
Irena Bekić, one of the exhibition curators of the project, explains in her text that the gesture of setting up the info-board was museumized into the exhibition setting in order to turn the guerilla gesture into an art object. “By placing a representative photograph showing the board from the site in the Museum, the author re-establishes the identity of the place, showing that it is an official turning point and that the histories of Goli otok and St. Grgur can no longer be ignored.” [1]
[1] Bekić, Mihuleț, Stvaranje antispomenika.
Inscriptions: Visual punctuation of female memory
After the installation of the info-board, the testimonies of female prisoners were written into the stone, which rounded off the interventions at the site, which left, on the one hand, a strong and visible sign (info-board), and on the other – a hidden trace of a constant reminder of the torture of prisoners (inscriptions of testimonies).
In September 2020, the testimonies of the former inmate Vera Winter, written in the handwriting of her granddaughter Nina Winter, has been carved into the stone on Goli otok island:
“We carried the stones from the sea to the top of the hill. When the heap on the top was large enough, we would carry the stones back to the sea.”
In June 2021, the testimony of the former camp inmate Ženi Lebl, transcribed in the hand of her niece Ana Lebl, has been carved into the stone on Sveti Grgur island:
“On your hump, St. Gregory, began the classic question ‘To be or not to be?’* If you beat up – you will be. If you do not beat up – you will be beaten up.”
(*the verb BITI here has 2 meanings: to beat up, to be)
At the exhibition of the project at the MMSU in Rijeka, the testimonies were turned into an antimonument with the aim of transmitting memory through audience participation. Two stacks of 850 posters each (numbered, dated and signed by the artist and specially produced for this exhibition) had photographs of stones on which the testimonies of Vera Winter and Ženi Lebl were engraved. Visitors are invited to take the posters and thus take responsibility for passing on memories. Somewhat contradictory, the posters in the Museum are a more visible and materially present trace than the sentences carved into the rock in a rarely visited and hard-to-reach locality, which means that the posters take on the role of transmitters of memory.
