Utopia

“That spring day in 1994 on the Croatian island Krk was one of the most special days in my life,” says Marko Peljhan. On this island in the Kvarner Gulf, where there were practically no tourists in the first half of the 1990s, he – together with a team of co-workers with whom he was contemplating his third performance – set off for a location marked only by a signpost displaying a backpacked traveller and the words “The Way to the Moon.

” While they were hiking in an area reminiscent of the moon, military aircrafts flew over them and explosions from Lika (disputed region in Croatia) and Bosnia resounded in the north wind. “On that day, the war touched me in both a poetic and hyper-real way, and I said to myself, ‘If the structure of the world enables these explosions, then we have the following possibilities: 1) either a complete withdrawal into one’s own subjectivity, a sort of psycho-religious option, or 2) an embrace of the sort of ignorance that predominated the Slovene and broader European space at the time. Though perhaps a third possibility exists …’”

Marko Peljhan, who is a theatre director by training, got into art particularly through Russian constructivist Velimir ...