Reaching The Little Wall Across the Street

One of the first visions I had in my mind when digging through the documents, interviews, and articles in the initial research of the show, was a poetic image of Dunja sitting on the little wall across the street from the apartment her husband was murdered. Little walls often appeared in our conversations; She'd wait for him leaning on one in front of her house when they were just starting to go out with one another. So I imagined the little walls as the destination where I wanted to take my audience.

The first person I shared this vision with was Maja Milatović-Ovadia, my Personal Academic Tutor at Central. Her supportive words and reflection on this image that I wanted to invoke, I'd often lean on, especially in stressful periods during the process. When all hope I felt was lost, I kept going back to the little wall, and the letter-writing, as true backbone of the becoming show. One to provide the destination and a general sense that I know where I'm heading (the wall), the other to provide the sense of what worked in initial experiments (letter writing).

But the show is much more than these two things.

The feedback that kept coming to me after the show was how impactfull is the letter-writing mechanic, as well as the strenght of the ending that looked a little bit like this:

The final image is that of Dunja sitting, onlooking the river of written letters, photographs, doucments that remain like the river Neretva between the audience members on two sides of the table. It wouldn't have been as impactful if it didn't have a strong lead up to it. It wouldn't be as strong hadn't it been for everything in between, Including the things that didn't make the final cut as well.

In this section of the documentation, I would like to share my own journey to the little wall, and how it shaped the audiences'.

The Inciting Incident

„To whom it may concern / Onom koga se tiče“, abbreviated as TWICM, is an immersive, documentary performance I developed as a solo project whilst studying at the MA in Advanced theatre practice programme. Initial provocation for the piece was Predrag Blagovčanin’s 2017 article titled “Murders for Political Purposes: Is Politics Hiding the Murderers of 28 killed people of Mostar?” (Blagovčanin, 2017), which I had previously worked on packaging as a submission for an edition of Sarajevo Film Festival’s True Stories Market in the summer of 2024, an event dedicated to connecting film industry professionals and filmmakers with curated articles considering true stories, in hopes of instigating a potential collaboration and production of films based on the materials. Inclusion of the forementioned article to the showcase yielded no interest of further exploration of the story in any media. Coincidentally, I learned of this just two weeks before the deadline for submitting initial proposals for a sustained independent project, which is meant to be the crown achievement of students’ experience at the course.

You can access the article following this link.

At the same time, I was facing the difficult reality of coming to terms with the fact that I was left to do the project completely alone, so I had to be practical. And I believed that making an immersive, interactive, concept touring piece was something achievable. I paid no heed to the heaviness of the story at that time. I was focused primarly on the formal aspects. I knew the material well from before. I reached out to the journalist, and he said he'd be there for me to provide me with any other info should I need it.

The reason I didn't calculate how the grim story could affect my mental health was that I knew that we as artists are in position where we need to be strong. There is no escaping from the new fascism that are well beyond the establishing phase. They are well and flourishing, and in times like this, even if they are unpecedented just by the live-streamed aspect of it, I find it unacceptable to deal in escapisms. This is my personal credo. I try to look for silver linings, shining moments of good protruding through the darkest of clouds, I do. But the skies are heavy, and it's getting harder to breathe. Even if I chose a lighter subject, I would still be breathing the same heavy air. The heavy smell of ruins of humanity blowing from the cradle of civilization, exarcebated by the idleness and the comfortable cushions of the chairs in grand halls of decision making across the colonizing west. For me, taking the time to dive head first into a personal testimony, was a way out. It was a way to give something to my hands to do. And they yearn for doing.

Offering Dunja's story the space to be listened to, her complaints a way to go, was my attempt at instigating healing.

The interim sharings

The First Sharing

In the following presentation you can see what the initial proposition I presented to the cohort looked here:

The first sharing instigated interest for further progression. The concept developed from my initial idea over the following term largely thanks to the third sharing.

The Second Sharing

For the second interim sharing, I wrote a poetic textual excerpt and printed out photographs. This is the first sharing where I played around with being present around the table with the performers. It proved to be impactful. Here is the text and the showcased photographs.

I printed out the photographs, and pasted them to a thicker paper, tracing over the pen markings. I also played the participants the following song which stayed in the show until the end:

The Third Sharing

For the third sharing, I maintained the table arrangement with a limited number of participants, and introduced the letter writing element. It is during this sharing that I was introduced to the term "feminist ear" which significantly boosted my analytical framework. This introduction to the term boosted my understanding and helped me become conscious of what I was actually doing with my piece. It also affected my further thinking on devising.

It was after this sharing aswell that I realized I wanted to include Dunja on the little wall to the piece. Soon after, I came up with a scenic organization which I maintained largely until the very end, albeit adopting my artistic mentor Silvia Mercuriali's idea of keeping the audience around a single, long table.

writing

After the interim sharings, I mostly devised in solitude and on paper.

In large part, it looked like endless pages with writings like these:

I have several iterations of the show script. The key moment was when between 4th and 5th version, I removed the parts about me. I struggled the most with the aspects regarding my own positionality and the context in which I myself was making the piece, as well as the mostar content. The biggest breakthrough in this aspect was the addition of the art class episode at the beginning of the show in which all participants learn how to draw the old mostar bridge.

The presentation of the art class looked like this:

The results looked like this:

The final version of the script is available for you to look at here as well:

The final results you can see in the show part of this online archive of this show.