When art loses the right to tell the truth, the institutions that should protect its freedom lose their meaning. Decision BITEF Board to reject the arrival of Milo Rau, one of the most important contemporary directors, does not speak only of a festival program, but of a deeper, ethical crisis of the way we understand artistic autonomy.
The decision is not artistic.
According to the statement of the members of the artistic directorate of the festival, the Board did not even consider the artistic quality of the performance Pelico Process, nor the fact that Belgrade would be only the fourth city in the world where it would be shown. Instead, the decision was made based on the personality of the artist and his speech last year about mining and exploitation in Serbia.
Therefore, we conclude that the decision of the Festival Board is not an artistic one, but a moral-political one. And that is exactly why it is deeply unethical.
Because when the institution of culture, under the influence of the state apparatus, explicitly or implicitly, it doesn't matter, decides who is allowed to speak, and not what he has to say, it undermines the very purpose of culture as a space of freedom, and thus of disagreement, questioning, and criticism.
The members of the artistic directorate, consisting of Miloš Lolić and Borisav Matić, found themselves faced with a choice: to sign the "censored program" or to refuse to agree to a compromise. They chose the second and thereby showed that the ethics of artistic action is not a matter of politics, but of integrity.
Because there are moments in time when an institution cannot be "saved" if what makes it an art institution is lost: the freedom to speak and to take risks. In the case of the Bitef festival, this means a profound misunderstanding of the reasons for its creation and survival.
So this is not a story about a festival, but about the way we understand responsibility today.
That's why the question that Bitef opens today is much broader than one and the same decision:
do we still believe in art that has the right to question us?
It is not unclear who rules this country, nor is it difficult to understand the motives of a government that sees culture as an instrument of the ideological apparatus. But what remains unexplained, and more painful, is how we got to the point where institutions, or committees themselves start to carry out the government's task: to remain silent, to adapt, to find ways to "understand the circumstances".
How did we agree to that? cooperation with such authority becomes an expression of professional prudence, a self-censorship form of responsibility?
Because what the government does not manage to destroy, the institutions do more and more often on their own.
And perhaps that is the greatest success of the regime: to convince us that we keep freedom the safest when we ourselves agree to cancel it.
The author is an assistant professor at FDU and coordinator of the Departmental Committee for Culture of the Democratic Party
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