Before the Fall There Was No Fall. Episode 02: surfaces

Anna Dasović
Before the Fall There Was No Fall. Episode 02: surfaces
One-channel video installation
2020

Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Dutch with English subtitles

Episode 02 of Anna Dasović’s project Before the Fall There Was No Fall is a comparative analysis of the raw material from Episode 01 and the traces of the Dutch soldiers’ presence in the “UN Safe Area Srebrenica” twenty-five years later. Episode 02 poses the question: How did the hands of Dutch soldiers touch these surfaces? What do the marks they left behind communicate to the viewer about the Royal Netherlands Army’s bias? How is the culture of Dutch military doctrine understood by the people who subsequently left its traces in their military base in Srebrenica?

In Episode 02, the artist continues to research the racial aspects of representation or the extent to which the Bosniak “Other” was racialized during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Western politics, she says, produced a “civilised” Europe by (re)producing its “barbaric Balkan” counterpart as the radical “Other”. It is in this context that the UN signed one of its most controversial resolutions to date, formally establishing the “Safe Area Srebrenica”.

The art work contains archival video material that is at times explicitly sexist and racist.

Commissioned by Framer Framed and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen.