Closing The Book of Revenge

The Book of Revenge in the title is the author's award winning memoir, published by Random House Canada in 2006. As an editor of culture and art sections in several underground magazines in Belgrade in the years leading to and during the war in Yugoslavia, the author was in a unique position to observe and analyse the deep currents in arts and public life that started working with the first shots fired. There are numerous parts strewn throughout the book that deal with the relationship between art and war (this idea is in the very centre of the book). Now, almost two decades after the war, some of the artists mentioned in the book have gone into external or internal exile, some have profited and added to their body of work, and some have disappeared from the scene—all this as a result of their political engagement. This is the core of the performance presented at the Conference ‘I too remember dust’ - Peacebuilding, Politics and the Arts, at the University of Winchester. On the intertextual level the performance was a ritual of reconciliation (the wars had ended, the fog of war was gone, making the narratives clearer and the art involved sharper). The performance was not a chapter added to the original text, but an exploration of the ways the politics interfere with arts and, in return, of the influence arts have on significant social events involving large masses, such as war.