Last summer, visual and multimedia artist Dejan Aatanacković was a guest at Trg pjesnika as the laureate of NIN's award for the novel "Lusitania", but also as an example of that rare excess of someone who is not an established writer receiving one of the most prestigious literary awards in the region for his first , a debut novel.
This summer, Atanacković presented himself through the arts to which he belongs, so the promotion of his new book "A Man Without Language and Other Stories", conceived as a performance, showed the large audience gathered on the Budva square a different experience of a literary evening - as a dialogue of words, live music performed by the famous violinist and composer Manja Ristić, video work (black and white images displayed on the monitor), and sound.
Atanacković began his performance by reading a passage from the award-winning novel "Lusitania", and the new book "A Man Without Language and Other Stories", as he stated, was published by his same publisher, the company "Besna kobila". It is a collection of 26 short stories, some of which were created over a long period of time, even more than 15 years.
Atanacković introduced the audience to various heroes who find themselves in strange situations - forgotten artists, good neighbors, travelers, lovers, doppelgängers..., with their fragments of life interwoven with humor, riddles and unexpected twists, through the stories "Announcement", "Fragments", " A suitable mirror", "Roberto and Vincenzo", "A favorable wind", "An unusual case"..., which he read. What connects all these characters, as we could hear from these stories, is the feeling of not fitting in, not belonging, disappearing, but also a great desire to rediscover humanity, closeness, love, the beauty of life and those small, small, simple values that are people lost in an attempt to understand the "big world" and its harsh dictates.
After the official program, asked to comment on his performance and who, in fact, is the man without a language for him, Atanacković said that through this type of work, through performance, he returned to something that is his original art.
"And my original art has to do with video, with performance, as well as with writing, and for me every opportunity to connect these different media, different forms of art, is an extraordinary privilege. I am grateful to the organizers of the City Theater because they invited me to present my book in this way - said Atanacković, who is a lecturer in the field of visual arts and culture at university programs in Florence, a collaborator with the Florentine Museum of Natural Sciences (on the subject Body Archives, dedicated in the history of representations of the human body), and in Belgrade, with the support of the Museum of Contemporary Art, leads Second View (an initiative for new narrative flows through the public work of Belgrade's alternative guides).
A person without a language is, for him, a maladjusted person, one who has no chance of being adjusted.
"This is a man who constantly strives to disappear, to disappear, if he has not already disappeared. At the same time, it is a person who is sought after, who doubles up, who meets his double. Of course, readers will definitely suspect through the stories that here and there it is an alter ego of the author himself. And they won't be wrong about that. Some of the stories in this book were created relatively recently, and when I was making some kind of selection and looking for a thread that would connect them, I found out very unexpectedly that all of them are connected by one theme of losing, searching, searching, even that certain motto of the book at the beginning it indicates that something is being sought somewhere, something that is lost, tiny, and the easiest to lose track of. That is why this topic of search turned out to be the main one in the book "The Man Without Language".
Unlike "Lusitania", which, as he pointed out, is basically a political novel, a political allegory that apparently dealt with some historical topics, but actually talked about our present and some recent past, at first glance it is quite different from "Man without a tongue".
"It must be said, however, that 'Lusitania' is also a meeting place of intertwined paths of many maladjusted, many other and different people and their destinies, and in their allegories of madness their unusual humanity is also hidden, because we all live in societies that do not suit us , which oppress us, which make the citizen not feel like a part of his city, as I currently feel in Belgrade, which is being destroyed before our eyes. And that's why we are all these crazy people, these maladjusted people, who somewhere fail to find what represents some kind of their past, and concretely face the erasure of their own identity. Of course, that is getting in the way in an organized way, and that has to be put in the way, and that is something that I hope we will have the opportunity to see in the coming months as a clear political program in Serbia," said Atanacković, who lives in Belgrade - Florence.
And although there is no politics in the stories "The Man Without a Tongue", through the desire of its heroes to find those lost values of life that have disappeared, one still feels a rebellion against circumstances and a society that devalues humanity, empathy, truth, love, kindness... rebellion against that feeling of inadequacy, alienation and loss. Atanacković says about this:
"Rebellion can manifest itself in different ways. Of course, unlike 'Lusitania', which is specifically intended to be a political allegory that deals with very specific topics of our present, although it pretends to deal with history, the new book really does not have those topics that directly concern the analysis of some of our political situations or time. But it certainly deals with what we live. In my opinion, a person today can oppose what the government, the system, represents in various ways. It is almost impossible not to do this, just because a person expresses himself honestly, with one intention to talk about his time, to speak from a personal perspective, from his experience, at the same time he opposes a perversion of mediocrity that reigns in these areas. I really perceive the environment I come from as an usurped environment, an environment in which the government hijacks and destroys all that are urban, civic values, simultaneously promoting banality and vulgarity as desirable, affirmative models of behavior and living, and creating an environment for that," says Atanacković. .
They are taking cities away from their citizens
What Dejan Atanacković cannot adapt to and what he experiences the hardest is an obvious situation of taking the city away from its citizens.
"That can be seen today more than ever. We went through different governments, through very destructive governments that led us into a war against the whole world, and in essence we still have the same set of people in power today and its underlings, what represented the worst in Serbian politics in the XNUMXs. The three parties that were destroying the country took key positions in Serbia, and the same thing happened in the region. Now we have an upgraded, improved version of the same authorities from the nineties, and we see that there has been an additional perversion of everything that was vulgarity, vulgarity, populism, evil. And that is an evil that visually, architecturally, not only politically, grabs and robs cities from citizens, while destroying everything that represents urban, civic, civilizational tradition in the best and broadest context", Atanacković points out.
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