New Identity Cards

Few weeks ago, via Facebook, I received an invitation for a promotion of new IDs in Macedonia. “Not again?!” -was my immediate reaction that comes as a reflex of any kind of governmental PR propaganda. My country passed through many transitional phases since the break down of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. The formation of a new independent state brought necessary change of all possible forms of documents including: passports and IDs, driving licenses and many others. Such “transitional practices” have affected citizen’s sense of belonging to a community, nation, ethic group, ghetto, family and so on, until infinity.  

Thus, when I first saw the invitation my immediate reaction was that I don’t want to change my IDENTITY card AGAIN! As a side effect of all possible campaigns for strengthening the national feeling and feeling of belonging to a European community, many citizens, and here I am not an exception, would react with resistance. Leave me alone with your PR propaganda!

It is not only the PR propaganda that gets on my nerves, the one that instructs me constantly to whom I should belong, to how many children should I give a birth, how rich and eternal Macedonia is, but it is the actual visual and architectural reconstruction that takes place nowadays as a materialization of this propaganda. If you ask me, not a big difference from any previous fascist propaganda of any dictatorship. A quasi  “Goebbels” PR machinery that is zealous to determine us, the folks! As a matter of fact, they are doing quite good.

Acctually, this invitation was of a different kind. The invitation, definitely didn’t belong to the PR activities govern lately with great firmness by the governmental apparatus. The invitation is part of an independent artistic projects, that tries to “use the strategies of the creative activism”  to draw attention upon very serious political issues in Macedonia. Thus, the organizers of this absolutely marginalized and side-off event, with almost sect flavor, won my sympathy. Firstly, because of the nostalgic moment connected with the old IDs that have marked my personal transition into full age (and leaving the fool age). Secondly, because of the humble effort to join together the sense of socialist brotherhood with the new age spirituality vogue.

When I asked the artists (using FB of course, I didn’t go to Macedonia to attend the event, which would be rather DADAistic stroke to pull up) is there a deliberate intention to connect the notion of socialist “brotherhood and unity” with the symbol of the radiating heart, they didn’t confirmed it directly. Irena Petkovic, one of the artists that I have talked to, instead made emphasis on the effort to create a contrast between the “ideal past” and the “reality”.

Firstly, the artists, try to create a virtual state, using an esoteric aesthetics, as a “contrapunkt of the public sphere which is largely occupied with the discourse of hatred, discrimination and social exclusiveness” (Irena Petkovik). Their intention is, through resisting the “reality” they are not willing to belong, to create a contrastive STATE of Love and Equality. In such a state, the differences are not repressed but celebrated, and the marginalized groups are the heroes of the community! They have created blank pages in the IDs where each of the participants could write all the heroic deeds he/she have done in life. These two pictures can show you the resemblance between the Pioneer Booklet, that each one of us possessed it as a Pioneer (in the ages of socialist Yugoslavia), and the concept for new Identity Cards.               

Here I would like to stress out the importance of naming these marginalized groups, that are of central interest for this project! They are named as follows: single mothers, unemployed, lesbian and gay population, atheists, sexual workers, drug addicts, Gypsies! Please take a look at this selection and imagine, just imagine the “Macedonian reality”, that these artists are trying to change.

Why would a single mother be a marginalized group? Why would that be one sexual worker?!!? And the atheists, are they serious?! Is it possible that atheists, nowadays, in a country that has EU integration aspirations, are treated as marginalized group? Unemployed, as statistics shows in the last 15 -20 years, are THIRD of the population (and the other third have left the country because they can’t find jobs)! They are not marginalized; they are the majority of the population!

Ok. I’ve read Gramschi, and Marx, Neruda and Racin (Macedonian leftist poet from the beginning of the 20^th ct.) and I am still confused: how is it possible that the apparatus of hegemony works so smoothly each time?! Simply incredible! The above mentioned groups are the absolute margins of the Macedonian reality, although they are more than third of the population. The abyss between the normal-successful-manager-antic-Macedonian—Orthodox- Christians and the Losers is strategically fostered by the neo-liberal radical politics that leaves no space for compromises. I don’t know if the overarching radiating heart of the IDs will help to slow down the radical RIGHT flowing river, but I am sure is not able of stopping it.