W. G. Sebald and Oliver Frljić or How Can Art Negotiate the Discursive Circulation of (Mis)Information in the Face of Global Insecurities?
Keywords:
art and society, German literature, Sebald, Winfried Georg, contemporary theatre, Frljić, Oliver, politics of stage, politics of fiction, Slovene theatre, altermodernism, glocal societyAbstract
For the purposes of our examination of how literature and art take part in the circulation of significations and representations in the construction of social reality, the essay uses two examples. The first is the novels by Winfried Georg Sebald, with his wanderings between “signs”, punctuated by black and white photographs that Nicholas Bourriaud defines as emblematic of mutations in our perception of space and time, in which history and geography operate a cross-fertilization, tracing out paths and weaving networks. The second example is Oliver Frljić, a Bosnian-Croatian theatre director, with his disturbing, shocking performances in which he uses his own personal, wartime and political traumas to ask the universal questions about the boundaries of artistic and social freedom, individual and collective responsibility, tolerance and stereotypes. Beyond examining the contestation of subject positions, the essay follows border-crossing figures to the shifting battlefields of today’s Europe and beyond. It concentrates on the dialectics of “art” and “society”, where fluid, uncontainable subjects are constantly pushing the contours. Revising the critical consensus that contemporary art primarily engages with the real, the essay describes how present-day theatre and fiction navigate the complexities of – the discourse as well as the social realities of – neo-liberalism in the age of terrorism. We are interested in ways art negotiates, inflects, and participates in the discursive circulation of stories, idioms, controversies, testimonies, and pieces of (mis)information in the face of global insecurities.References
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