 Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of DMTV Christmas special. I have a great honor and I'm very happy that tonight we have with us my dear colleague and friend Olga Dimitriyevich Olga Dimitriyevich is a she wants to call herself a Yugoslav playwright, theater director and also performer but as I said she is also my dear close friend and hello Olga, I would like to start with friendship if that's okay with you. Hello Maya, it's always okay to start with a friendship. Yes because I was thinking a lot by you know raising big serious questions at the beginning of our talk but then I realized that maybe friendship is a big serious topic that we do not talk about too much in today's world. We talk about the crisis of economy, the crisis of ecology, the crisis of the capitalist system, lots of crisis major crisis but we do not talk about crisis that I think is very important that that is a crisis of care and real friendship and in a way a crisis of comradeship in the real sense of the way. We relate to each other in a very often in a biological sense, we care about our biological relatives, we care about our immediate family but I think that this world has been in a way alienated of this real comradeship and solidarity and this is the basis of your work in a way so I wanted to start with that. What do you think is happening with real friendship today and can we do something to maybe make these bonds closer? Actually it's really great that we're starting with this because somehow the question of real friendship like whatever real friendship is but for me it is the question of love and the question of love for me is also the question of how we will imagine our future politics and how do we want to create the future world for ourselves and our future relationships and yes somehow this kind of love and care for each other and the topic of well mainly female friendship stands as one of the most important motives in almost whatever I work whether it is about you know methodology of the work or if it is about or if it is about how the topic and it's also somehow funny now when you say this like I had to remember that you know also coming from the queer community and learning about the history it was always somehow necessary to create for queer people it was always necessary to create these alternative bonds and these alternative love structures and these alternative friendship structures that will somehow actually supplement the nuclear family that is not accepting that is not accepting and this kind of this is already a huge history of trying constantly to create and recreate different kinds of connections from those that we that we learned in our childhood and with the birth and also within the confinement of this whole you know how the society how the nuclear families that the old story integral part of of capitalist society yes and also when you mentioned that these friendships are always female friendships and I also think that this is the basis of all your writing that you always write about this rebellious revolutionary female subject and you also very closely tied this to civil disobedience in a way we have this female subject in all like all your plays like in your plays now I will say some of the titles like workers die singing where this main female subject is fighting the work for the workers rights in your folk play this subject is fighting the traditional family values and your play my dear this main female character is fighting the system of inheritance in your play of the end of the world she is fighting for nature and in one of your last plays I often dream of a revolution she is fighting for a feminist revolution so how important is this this for you and why in a way do you how do you think that the brave women can save the world and how how important are these women rights in your work well at the first place I deeply believe that rebellious women will save the world like if there is anyone who will save the world it will be rebellious women and it comes from you know a simple fact that maybe we have there is very constant feeling that we have had enough of you know of oppression of many layers of oppression of patriarchal oppression of capitalist oppression of many many many layers of how we find ourselves oppressed in in the contemporary society and then at the same time it's also you know this affectual part this importance of affecting in our lives and in the women's lives that really creates on the one hand it creates the the reaction to the to the injustice and on the other hand it also is something that creates these big love bonds that are also friendship bonds and that teaches something about you know collective solidarity that teaches something about you know not only being focused on on oneself on on individual interests and individual agenda but also how to somehow share it how to find the common language between sometimes very different different people from different class positions or different positions in the society and how to like the store for me at least the story about you know different rebellious women coming together is one you know big story of of civilization if I can say so like the big story of of humanity that actually tells us about possibility to be together to live together and to fight together yes and you often talk about the partisan movement and the female partisan movement and the female partisans and hearings that people don't know much about can you tell us something about that well yeah it's very often in the focus of of some of the pieces one way or the other for example in the piece my dear it's very much in the it's very much the basis of the whole plot that the story starts with the funeral of one of women who was fighting in the second world war in the partisan movement and was also very prominent in in the socialist life afterwards and now she is dead because biologically that the generation is dying and most of them have died until now but their heritage and their legacy is something that for example in contemporary Serbia actually on the whole space of of duoslavia is thrown back in the in the shadows it's under very serious historical revisionism it's very undermined but we are talking about generation of women who were fighting in the second world war massively on really massive scale who were self-organized in the sense that they established parallel structures within the war conditions that helped them and enabled them to you know take care of each other try to take care of the children and try to work on literacy which was also a huge problem where there was insanely small percentage of women who could read and write back in the 40s back in the 40s here and who among all things in the whole this through the through this war effort and through this war struggle they managed to fight for themselves better life conditions and bigger rights for them after the war and this is the kind of emancipatory leap that was impossible to imagine until that generation and until the whole practically socialist revolution that was also brought out through the through the through the war in through the second world war in Yugoslavia and it is really the big question of whether we will have again that kind of emancipatory leap for women or you know also other groups of people because if we know that I don't know maybe women could not could not vote before but very few women went to the schools very few women had like the laws about everything more or less for women were not in favor of the society and its laws back before practically second world war and their very selfish and big struggle was something that brought us okay whatever right to vote is only one of the things but actually it brought us the whole system of kindergarten's brought us the whole system of you know public kitchens that could be you know somehow used to remove part of of typical women's burdens from them and most of all if it was not for them probably both of us would not be sitting here talking together and doing what we are doing now because you know our lives would probably be predestined to you know work in the field never learn to read and write and you know it would be very very it would be much more difficult for us yes and it's planned it well yes you did and you said a very important point and that is that this emancipatory thing that came from from the socialist revolution is something that people do not talk so much about because we always perceive this as a western thing like you know the freedom came with with western thought the the socialist movement is very much when we talk about it in popular culture we imagine you know gulags and unfreedom and it's very important that you said this because I think that these big emancipatory questions concerning women's rights are also important in your work and also as you said like most of your characters mostly all of them or some of them are lesbians but the way that you treat the LGBT issues in in your work is different that then then I saw in in most literature that deals with with these kinds of issues and I would mention it because of things you just said and that is that in a way I think that the big problem is when treating LGBT issues is not treating the class issues with it and not treating this what you said the vulnerable the ones that are have low incomes the workers like all the categories of people that have have problems in a way being different and not being a part of the system so can you tell me in which way generally do you deal with these issues in your work and how important and how closely related are gender and class issues in your work yeah okay several things yeah first just to to comment slightly on what you said like with this idea that freedom comes with the with the west yeah like it always depends how you define freedom and I believe that we will talk about it more later in the case of socialist women and in the case of women in the in our space freedom and anticipation came with the socialist revolution of course we have to say that also socialists were patriarchal as well so like very soon that level of rights didn't go much more up but you know some kind of shouldn't be traditionalization happened but still that what happened after 91 especially here was the big big step back in the sense of also you know like ideological values of how we see where women should be in the society but at the same time ideological values in the sense where everybody should be in the society like it was like a serious how to say counter emancipatory backlash if I can say so when it comes to when it comes to you know representation of of LGBT characters or when it comes to represent this topic of representation I have always tried to move beyond the simple identity politics somehow and to especially because you know I was also studying a lot about the history of queer film and I was studying a lot about like I don't know just finishing I guess gender studies brings you and if you're interested in film somehow brings you in in that direction and it was very like some topics it was very easy to deduct what are the problems with this representation it was very easy to deduct what was bothering me when it comes to how characters and plots are being created and at the same time like always one of the big most important rules is that you should not have the plot or the character which is there only because it's LGBT or if you have it then let's make a bigger let's not only have it as you know metaphor for social commentary but give it something else make it more nice make it make your own coalition between the character and social commentary that will not that will jump out of the pattern and yeah which brings us again to the third issue that you mentioned and that's the question of gender and class and at least for me you know gender and class were always always intertwined and always that kind of intersection also as intersection with other forms of oppression was also something that you know at least in the feminist theory was much more my cup of tea than for example pure liberal feminism or something like that and like speaking about intersection of gender and class in in my place or in the stuff that I work it I was always interested to see how or to explore how it is possible to connect different classes along the lines of gender and what are the limits in in in that aspect and also the the other way around how it is or not really the other way around but somehow to explore also the ambiguity is that that arise from from these connections how to understand also different classes how to understand the classes is there a potential in the classes that are not my class that are higher upper classes than than the class that I belong to and so on yeah that's also interesting because at the beginning of the talk you also mentioned love like a very powerful category for and a very powerful place for maybe resistance and revolution so you are also a director and you directed you dramatized and worked on the book red love by alexandra colum tie the prominent russian revolutionary in this book she deals with the question of sexual politics free love also motherhood and camaraderie love so today I think that love is also a category that changed and we can also relate it to class in a way so if we say that love is today also a place for resistance and revolution possible revolution what would red love be today for you and what was it then and why did you choose this book to talk about this topic actually I chose it because it's not so much different than today somehow at least from from some kind of perspective of I don't know progressive movements and what we very often face is you know actually this big power this balance between men and women which are still within the in spite of you know that we are very much aware that it shouldn't be like that but it's something similar with our socialist comrades from 100 years ago that's why alexandra colum tie's novel was interesting interesting and it was really nice how in that novel it's really nice how that she has this incredibly kitschy simple language and I love that I love this kind of you know kitschy descriptions full of adjectives and I don't know what but at the same time the plot is about love between two revolutionaries and revolution happens and they're still in love but then five years later he is you know typical general manager of the company who fucks his secretary and she is just not acclaimed and she's suffering and she's just regular she acts like a regular bourgeois woman and that's where alexandra colum tie takes that kind of a plot to practically explain how is that still possible and how is that possible for every woman of this world to fall into that kind of trap and also for every man of this world to fall into that kind of trap in order to make the big circle to come to the to the point that yeah the question of children should not only be the question of one dysfunctional heterosexual family but that the whole society should in a way take care but also she comes to the point that actually it is the story about female comradeship and she finds at the end of the piece or that was actually what was most interesting for me and the most important is that at the end of the piece she's actually speaking with her friend and then she asks her so what are you going to do with the child now and then she says we'll bring it up together like we really don't need anything else we need the organization we need to be with each other we need to be solitary and so on and so on um so the question of and also how it was called the red lab um i would say that alexander contein probably had the very very strong sense of irony in in her life back then and how she was calling um how she was naming her novels and uh looking at the situation 100 years later very often i have the feeling that somehow we never learned enough from our historical mistakes to say it like that like that very often similar patterns of struggle for power also within progressive movements keep repeating themselves and they keep repeating in a way that some you really have to ask yourself well but we have this hundred years ago why do we have it again let's you know finish with some problems that we already did deducted that there are problems like the you cannot have like for example i always think you cannot have socialism without freedom and love and then very often we fall into the trap that we think that we will you know reach socialism through different forms of um well mistakes from the past and then i'm asking myself about that yeah yes and then we go to the question is this the end of capitalism possible without the complete abandoning of patriarchy and the power games that it has with uh that comes with it because what you just said uh every revolution at the end ends up making the same mistakes and going again to power struggles that we of course always in a way tied to to patriarchy uh and that's also interesting uh what you are saying about the you know heteronormative nuclear family uh that is like um and and in a way uh is it uh uh in this emancipatory sense do we have to abandon also this kind of thinking of uh um of this family structure uh to make a different system possible i do not uh i do not know if we we have to in a way abandon it what do you think about that i also don't know i i also wouldn't say anything so you know strong radical statement like we need to abandon nuclear family because i don't think that's necessarily true i think we need to expand the ways how we want together in a way but they just to say immediately okay let's give up a nuclear family it's i don't know i i don't think that's the good way i somehow even find it very in a way you know childish desire um because also nuclear families offer way too much uh structure uh uh in our lives and way too much emotions and they built us in a way how we are now and uh that um it's not that um i would say it's pretty would be pretty irresponsible to just say yeah let's dismantle nuclear family no but not dismantle it completely but maybe uh just see it in a different way like expand it maybe like because uh in the good old days uh we had a family that was much wider than it is today i think that this neoliberal capitalism just made you know this this family smaller and now you're expected to have you know the the whole community inside one small household and i think it's really impossible and it's making people frustrated not like to abandon the heteronormative family well it will never happen of course but then it should not happen but maybe to uh make make it possible for these kinds of family structures to also be wider in a sense that you know you have not just relatives but you also have communities friendships neighbors all of these things that we had maybe in socialism you grew up in a in a socialist huge socialist building you like to talk about and your early childhood in some interviews i i read that you said that uh uh you of course had very close close relationship to all of your neighbors and you know you could go and play at another person's house so your family was in a way extended you know that's that's what i'm talking about when i say and not like yeah like in my building nobody was locking their doors like yeah it was just what can you go to the neighbor's place and and it was not only my building that was like experience of really a lot of people that i know um but what i wanted to say now yeah but i still think somehow it depends from society to society because you really have big you still have families that are pretty big and pretty wide and that hold themselves together and then on various occasions whether if it's some kind of holiday or some important date for for them then these connections are preserved and then people who are very diverse actually from who can belong to one family can get together and talk together and i think that's the practice that that has been um present since ever somehow the like it's it's really present and in some societies it's very important but the um i guess that this kind of trend that you mentioned this neoliberal atomization of of um of you how to say family structures yeah family structures this kind of atomization of people and and the family units maybe it's it's better world word um is um some kind of yeah so complicated societal contemporary trend and yeah i also don't like it i like a lot of people on one spot drinking cheering laughing fighting and you know having more or less meaningful meaningful conversations but having the sense that they're there together yes and what you were just saying also raises a question because at the at one side we have all these female characters that are uh by some kinds of ways of civil disobedience uh trying to fight for a more just world a world with more solidarity a world with more friendship and love uh and at the other side uh very often the male heroes in your work uh or uh in a way of uh uh personification of of nationalism of these really strong male heroes and then it makes me think of of what inspired you of course because you you uh you in a way talk about these uh uh these issues we deal with here on the Balkans and in Serbia um uh what is happening uh from the 19th to today uh with the right wing movement but also now uh when uh we are in a way after the transition and privatization while privatization entering to a new in a new stage uh we have a new rehabilitation of war heroes of this male power of of the right wing movement uh and uh i wanted to ask you um uh what do you think about this and if you can tell us a little bit uh from from the aspect of the male characters in your work yeah like when it comes to male characters in my work it's very simple like it's literally my decision to you know treat them in the same way as i don't know male authors treat uh when they have one woman in in their films or works so yeah they're the function they're there to represent patriarchy and they're not important more or less that's also why probably male actors doesn't like really to don't like to play in them um and uh yeah and they're very much embedded in the in the in the like Serbian society of of nowadays and they're very much embedded in this society that has been through serious repatriarchalization and this kind of coming back to the traditional values whatever that means um and it went through that process like also starting with the the the solution of Yugoslavia and with the war um no matter how socialist Yugoslavia was patriarchal what happened after 91 is 10 times worse like it really cannot be compared and it's some kind of serious backlash that that happened that was also examining examining the scientific literature until now and um like and also very big aspect of of of the war was also very serious war on women like mass rapes at the Serbian army and paramilitary units uh did in Bosnia was uh their way how to carry uh that war and uh it all left serious profound consequences on uh how we perceive gender in in also Serbia nowadays 30 25 years later um and this whole um so we really witness to this kind of display of power of you know young or less young aggressive uh manhood uh on the streets uh in the public space who insist on certain kind of appearance insist on certain kind of violence and insist on certain kind of hegemonic masculinity which is um well not only deeply toxic but really turns out to be our main enemy because how else can i what can i say for you know groups of young men who are organized well practically by the state but they appear to be self-organized um in order to you know go and attack uh some of the first gay prides go and attack uh antifascist meetings go and uh you know paint the walls with uh war criminals that are considered to be heroes and that's this typical typical terror of hegemonic masculinity in combination with nationalism that i'm really like i can't i can't i really can't and seeing from that perspective yeah when i integrate like the main focus if i'm writing it is about um people from the margins and it is about you know rebellious women who decided to you know raise up from some from um a certain reason and in that kind of script yeah they're really there is the only place that male characters take um in this kind of script is practically to be only personification of you know practically ideology dominant ideology in the society and that ideology is nationalist and patriarchal and also very much capitalist and um yeah that's uh and it has to be opposed to to what characters in the play are fighting for yes and what you just mentioned about uh uh the state in a way also influencing these younger people this these right wing movements that are not not just political but also social movements and recently what is happening in Serbia is this kind of uh um revival and rehabilitation of war criminals from the past like Ratko Mladic convicted war criminal that now after so many years is getting attention because they are starting to draw like murals of him and the full capital of of Serbia Belgrade is full of stencils and graffiti hero and why do you think this is happening because it's very interesting that our government and our president which is mostly perceived from the west and the western government as somebody that brought neoliberal values to to Serbia which is really funny you know because I think that with him in in the way giving the place for for this kind of wild privatization and wild like all these factories that are coming to to our you know country that don't have any kind of regulations like Serbia becoming this playground also for the west where they can do all their dirty work and it's interesting that they do not perceive him at all as as what he was and that was a very right way he was a part of a very radical right wing movement during the 90s so how how do you look at this this kind of a way of the west perceiving the territory of ex-Yugoslav countries and why do you think that this right wing movements are happening today here and also in Europe also yeah like no but most of the time the way how west perceives the the our our space is very like insulting in a way and it's very much clear especially when it comes to you know how our governments were being constructed in the past 30 years that it's not always about you know the freedom and democracy but it's very much about different interests and stuff I'm pretty much sure that Mucic will lose the elections once when he loses the support of of the important western countries and in the same way as Milosevic also they was removed from power with the big big influence on the one hand because of the big satisfaction among Serbian people but at the same time because of big big influence of of western powers so to say and it's very it's also very somehow hypocritical how all of a sudden in the case of Ucic and him rising to power and also maintaining this power and doing everything that he is doing like completely taking over every aspect of the state and deep state in in Serbia and how it was so easy to simply forget for everybody to forget that only you know 10 years ago he was the one putting boulevard of Radkom Ladic signs on the boulevard that was called back then boulevard Avnoia that then changed the name to boulevard Zoranaginjic so it was called the boulevard of anti-fascist anti-fascist alliance of how do you translate Avnoi like Avnoi that decided to form Yugoslavia in Ica on 29 November and this kind of anti-fascist alliance of how do you say people's liberation struggle and then that name was changed into boulevard of Zoranaginjic of the shop prime minister and then on that boulevard which was putting the signs boulevard of Radkom Ladic only 10 years ago and why would be be surprised that now he is and we know that he has all the power in the state that he's protecting you know these people who are going through Belgrade and painting the walls with Radkom Ladic like it's the same line that goes also from Wucic's involvement in the in the war in Bosnia where he was having his famous statements like yeah we will kill 100 Muslims for every dead Serbian stuff it was all forgotten it was all completely forgotten and he has the history of being in power actually since the 90s until now and he has the history of being you know having his public appearances that are simply outrageous from the 90s until now but at the same time he is the final stage of introducing privatization and the final stage of post socialist transformation and the so-called transitional process in in Serbia and it's the the process that also started with the solution of Yugoslavia it did not start anytime later it's the whole historical trajectory that starts with Milosevic starts with the solution of Yugoslavia starts with the war and then has different stages and different outcomes and now we're probably in its final stage and that's the final stage where probably there is nothing else left to sell I mean there are some stuff but probably we won't get there yet but now this like when it comes to you know all the water all the railways all the maybe it will also be sold I don't know it's always possible but now there is no more factories left to be sold and now we can finally become this kind of playground for different you know greenfield investments for where the state is subsidizing some foreign investors to come and build the factory out of nothing to pay 300 euros wage minimal wage to people and then after five years when sub subventions subsidies are off then they pack their bags they live and we are still left with you know devastated economy and very huge lack of dignity in people's lives yes and also talking what you were talking about those are the happy scenarios because we have also scenario of of the yura South Korean factory where the workers had to wear diapers you have a ling long factory that is now being built the Chinese tire factory where they discovered I don't know how many hundreds of workers from Singapore without papers that they were keeping in from Vietnam keeping closed in in some kind of a playground like the Serbia is some kind of the playground of of you know contemporary capitalism on European periphery and it's this like I started saying like we will this world will Europe will not recover from the fall of Berlin wall for another 50 years like you literally mean that like this kind of ideological damage done with the whole demonization with the defeat of of socialism socialist idea because the fall of Berlin wall was perceived as such and this big ideological damage that all of a sudden like we need to practically recover the thinking that social justice is fine that it's fine to have you know state taking care of education and of the health care system that it's fine to you know put the collective effort that it's not about you know desire of one predus ethnic of one you know the person who is investing that it's not about you know private capital but it's about actually society and it's about public institutions we have to rehabilitate that this is possible and that this is a good idea and what happened with you know as the one of the consequences of this historical defeat of socialism in Yugoslavia was you know it's the most the bloodiest consequence of them all and what we got from the whole process at the end is that we have all this you know we have this something that they call this folklore right-wing this kind of folkloristic right-wing nationalist ideology that is it's like some kind of atmosphere in the society it's underlining every social movement that appears it's underlining every new politician that appears it's underlining everybody who gets some kind of power in the in the public arena like for example now with these ecological protests it's one of very strong that brought so many people to the streets but you have very strong right wingish appeal to them you have very strong thing of all Serbian land Serbian peasant our land our rivers and so on and so on but you really have it like you know have some violin playing you to the ear that it's this kind that it's so embedded on in political right that I really don't see how the way how to in the in the near future how to get the society out of out of that ideological background that was really carefully set and that part of ideological background goes perfectly perfectly hand in hand with the privatization and I'm not going to say wild privatization or criminal privatization because more or less every privatization is you know there because of the regulation and somebody's profit and it's criminal in itself it goes perfectly hand in hand with the whole process of post socialist transformation with the privatizations and with the this kind of taking at the at the very end taking the power away from the people and taking the in the case of Serbia taking away also the dignity from their lives yes and I think this is very important that you mentioned because we had these huge ecological protests concerning the Rio Tinto making a lithium mines taking lithium from from Serbia and it also had some very problematic laws that were supposed to be put into power but what you just said I think was very important because the two of us also went to these protests and that that was the thing that we both realized when we were there that the problem is that all of these anti-globalistic in a way good ideas are very closely related as you said to the right and also with the combination of the demonization of the socialist idea and still after the Cold War being over we still have this kind of demonizations of most of the socialist idea in the west also here and saying that I would like to maybe raise the question of the project that we did together in 2016 when we went together to North Korea and we did a project called freedom the most expensive capitalist word we visited North Korea as western tourists going there on a tourist tour and we were there with a lot of western tourists also and it was very interesting that when we came there compared to most of our friends in the group that were very like shocked with everything they saw there for us it was very familiar in the way and we were in the way like we felt at home in a way so I wanted to ask you how can you this demonization of socialist idea that you were talking about how can we relate it to this thing that happened to us in North Korea and the way that people are looking at North Korea as like the worst mysterious black hole in the world like being you know the but for me when we went there I was thinking about it a lot later and I actually think that part of the whole familiarity with with what we encountered in Pyongyang had much more to do with our exactly our history and our you know our memories that relate to you know our childhood in the second half of the 80s but also to our childhood during the 90s because what was different between two of us and the majority of our group who practically came from you know rich western countries most of them was the while they were seeing this kind of Stalinist black hole around them we actually saw a very familiar way of propaganda in the combination with something that insanely reminded actually on reminded of some aspects of Serbian society in the 90s like with the way how the small shops emerged how you could see actually some private businesses functioning in the gray sphere how they have the double way to calculate the exchange rates one is the state rate one is the black market rate how is the like everything all of that was very much familiar to us and we could see these subtle differences or not so subtle if you ask me it was very obvious but it was not obvious for them because the only thing that they expected to see was this big propaganda thing with the posters with the leaders with and then it was very much in in the line with what they thought that they will get and that at the same time we simply had the eyes and we had the life experience that could tell us well come on really you cannot say you know like if you call this totalitarian then it's full of cracks in that totalitarian image and but it also big and then again like the whole I always I also never liked the notion of totalitarian regimes because it's so easy to to jeopardize it for for simple you know very redundant and reductionist way to I don't know talk about you know certain countries or regimes or somehow it kills the it takes the complexity out of the picture and in order to understand the societies and the world better it really we should see them as much more complex than usually I know that propaganda tells us so or in this case western propaganda and it's also somehow how at the end we made the show because that show was not at all about North Korea it was more about our position in that whole thing it's about our position between you know some kind of nostalgia for the past desire for the better future and also the position in the society as it is now and how we deal with how can we play with this notion of tourism how we can play with serving people what they want to hear in order to extract some kind of gain from them that was the whole first part of our show how to serve them you know insane amount of actually fake news and post truths like before the terms even became popular we that's actually what we were doing in the show in order to get back you know the gain through selling the false souvenirs or you know demanding money for adopting the false child and stuff like that but it's interesting you just mentioned the false realities because I think that was one of the for me the most interesting things that happened in our tour and that is that of course our friends from the west they perceived North Korea as some kind of a totalitarian disneyland on one hand but on the other hand they were perceiving the whole country as some kind of a Truman's show that was made for them like them being you know Truman because it was interesting that we were we had a situation when there was a festival of Kim Il-Sung's birthday called the the festival of the sun and we were walking on some kind of a mountain at one point we saw these old women that were dancing to some popular North Korean songs and we of course danced with them and it was really fun and afterwards a couple of our friends from Western Europe they said did you see that they did that because of us and we were like what well did you see that they played the music when we came they were sitting there but when we came they played the music and started dancing and we were like what are you talking about like well it's it's all of that is done because of us and it was very interesting this arrogant position of the western tourist thinking that everything that is happening is happening for his own eyes you know that that was very interesting to me also yeah I mean it's really that kind of arrogance that starts seriously getting on your nerves and you notice it much much easily you easily notice it especially you know when you know when you come from the country on the periphery and then when you are looking at the way how tourism is developed and how everybody's talking about yeah let's make this friendly place for tourists and then you see tourists acting as everything belongs to them and it becomes really really annoying like in belgrade the way how I don't know the certain aspects of city life in the city center are being adjusted to the tourists is deeply deeply annoying and somehow I actually think that that's the feeling that most of tourist places like local people in tourist places commonly share that's this kind of arrogance of I'm coming there to leave you my money and now you shouldn't be at my disposal I'm sorry no no no yeah and it is a way of contemporary colonialism that has to do you know with with the colonialism that the west is used to and we were also inspired when we were looking at that movie documentary from 1988 you remember the cannibal tours it's a very great documentary it's on youtube people can see it just right in cannibal tours it's about these western tourists from europe and america that went as ecotourists to Papua New Guinea and they were actually trying to you know like to see how how the the people the indigenous people lived there of course with a great amount of arrogance and you know full only whale of behavior but the great thing that happened there is that they that the people there the they started joking with the western tourists you know they started making fun of them there is this great scene when one of them is talking and you see that he's doing that on purpose talking how they eat meat of people you know and for me it was really great and we had a little similar experience we will see now a video an excerpt from from our show we have a similar experience with with the north koreans and i loved that that they were keeping us in some kind of they were keeping us also as some kind of wild animals and we very often felt like we were performing also a choreography for them because we had to walk in a in a specific way we had to behave in a specific way and it often happened to us in these places like when we went to the palace of the sun where where you have the remains of the leaders we had to behave in a certain way and we saw like the the the workers and the the the army people of the north korea looking at us and like you know laughing at us yes because we were like this you know performing this choreography for them and i really love this yeah i love this position and so we i would like for us to see this small excerpt of of this visit to the palace of the sun we where we had to perform this kind of ritual ritual how to bow to to the dead just just to add something that's exactly the point like what our friends from the group never realized they were thinking that everything was being around directed for them for us but at the same time they did not realize that actually we were directed by north korean guides by the whole system how the tourism functions there we were the ones who were performing we were the ones who were set up for for uh we were the ones in the middle of of that direction and set up and that was very funny actually to realize how you know you think one thing that's also the liminal position um that that enabled us to somehow you know analyze better and to be aware of that yeah okay so let's see this excerpt so can we talk about uh freedom today uh with uh with global surveillance uh with the way we live our lives with the technologies uh uh with parliamentary democracy uh can we talk about freedom in the western world that west likes to say that freedom only exists in you know democracies yeah depends what you think that freedom is i guess and what is freedom for whom i believe that somebody feels really free with the fact that you know has in the smartphone with the click of with one swipe the whole you know information of this world like in one in one gadget and then at the same time it can be you know the horror it's the ultimate horror for me or you probably um and this kind of like in one moment like we all started believing that freedom is only about parliamentary democracy and that freedom is only about you know how the freedom is usually perceived um in the in this kind of the world that won the cold war to say to say it like that and then at the same time we discovered that freedom is not only in um the way uh how you dress and how many pairs of different genes you can own and how many different products you have in the supermarket but maybe it's also about you know maybe freedom to go to the school to go to the university maybe it's also about you know the freedom to go to the doctors whenever you need it and not to you know be afraid if you will be if you will be able to pay medical expenses maybe you know the freedom is about the possibility of you know class transgression from generation to generation maybe it is about you know to leave your work and don't go back to the work but do something else with you know friends and family or by yourself and that many different some we got some forms of freedom and many other forms of freedom we irreversibly lost and for me at least quite a lot of these forms of freedom that that we lost will be something that I consider to be the freedom that that is worth fighting for and yeah I don't know what what else to add today and when we talk about freedom we cannot not mention the unfree lives we have been living the the last now it's it's been two years with the pandemic uh when the world actually stopped and when we saw that it is possible for for the world to stop for the world to stop in a way and also our jobs also stopped because you and I are also free freelance workers and used to this kind of precarious work and what do you think will happen to arts and culture in the future because of the whole situation and do you think it will disappear or transform and yes what what is your your take on the whole issue of the pandemic and the post-covid reality that we will be facing yeah well arts and culture will not disappear but they will be transformed in a certain way and the question is how like what we can notice in in our lives for example at the moment is like this ability like certain aspects of our lives and of what was making you know this this job in a way very appealing like meeting live and communicating live and traveling and having that kind of exchange and experience is really being reduced to only you know the basic things and in this moment okay pandemic is still on and constantly there is some new crisis appearing and I'm very much afraid that you know this idea I also noticed that some like big funding open calls that appeared last year were all about you know open calls that should reimagine the future of touring in the performing arts and then like come on we are freelancing in the performing arts touring is one of the most important things that we actually do and if you take away the touring from us then I mean what what will be there what is there what we will be left and it is also interesting because during this BTF where the BTF festival it's a huge international festival in belgrade we the team was Ecology and there was a there was a great discussion about like again some European big European artists that were one of those saying that we should not travel on planes we should let you know by train yeah by train and then the the artists from from South America were like yeah it's easy for you in Europe to travel by train but and car but you know exactly electric cars but what should we do take a boat for I don't know two weeks to come to Europe you know yeah yeah it is a different position again or or as I would as I would comment on the same thing yeah the train is beautiful I completely agree with traveling by train if the politics of European Union towards Serbia have not destroyed a railway network in one way or the other so I mean how can I travel by train because the train network is really not functioning anymore yeah and this raises also the the question of ecology because we have been thinking about the ecological issues more and more with the with the global climate change crisis and I think of course it has been here for a while but now I think that as it being again I think that is now influencing also the the richer societies and the more developed societies they have realized that by them being ecologically it will not save the whole world that is going into a global disaster now we have also we had a situation with planes not flying and of course it made a great impact to ecologies of course that didn't last for long and now we have of course we had the whole COP26 which ended up in raising questions that will at the end nothing will happen as always so you're one of your most recent plays has been dealing it's called the play of the end of the world and it has been dealing with the issue of in a way of nature your main character is trying to save a tree in a symbolic way she does not want to let the government tear down a tree and she is she is tying herself to the tree and in this kind of dystopia that you imagined she will be convicted to death because of this and then who actually saves her nature saves her the trees in a way they they they become alive and they they go to save this main female character destroying all the things like destroying all the institutions destroying the surveillance cameras so do you think that nature can in a way teach us solidarity and can we learn something from nature first i want to hear from you and then i would want to see an excerpt yeah well she's dead the tree the trees do not save her and but what that you know that act of rebellion provokes is that it has been enough and then you have the coalition of you know her mother and the friend and the tree and other trees and then other people join who will make this kind of coalition to turn over the social relations that are deeply unjust in the moment when the play begins yeah nature can teach us a lot and for example that play of the end of the world is like it's very easy like i also call it this eco feminist play that i have but practically it is the play about impossibility to move on in the world like it is now and it is about this kind of feeling that we are at the end of certain epoch that we are at the end of one era and that something new is starting and all of you knows what the new will be and it's also the the the story about this kind of trans trans human trans species solidarity that is the part of this coalition between the how humans and the nature need to re-establish the connection again and how they have to build it up from from a completely new new family family new ground ground yeah and it's also about it's this story about how actually we can from and it's not by accident that it's about the tree and about the trees and about you know this is one tree in the park but the tree in the park also talks about how trees actually know what the communism is and how this big forest ecosystems function for themselves and how they know how to distribute the resources and how they simply do not care about private property and private ownership and private interest doesn't play any kind of important part in the forest unless when people bring it so it was also the somehow my way to think about this ecological approach to to how we see the world somehow also from more leftist perspective not to take it away from this thing that I somehow see with the politics today that the green movements are getting a lot of a lot of support with deep reason with really really deep reason but at the same time a lot of green agenda is still deeply embedded in the capitalist policies and really do not seek to and we the seat really often that there is also a lot of green red coalitions or green movements with some kind of leftist rhetorics or values but once when the things really become serious they more and more act on on the liberal scale and I also think that that kind of approach to how we think about ecological policies and politics will not actually bring us any substantial change that the whole thing needs to be completely restructured and not to find the solution within the system that created the problem problem in the first place yes I completely agree and I would like us to see an excerpt from a great movie by Jelena Maksimovich called comb lands and you wrote a monologue for the end of this movie maybe you can tell us just in one sentence what the movie is about and then we can see the excerpt yes Jelena Maksimovich approached me when she was working on that movie it is actually the movie about her heritage and it's a movie about the heritage of her grandmother who belong to the family of Greek partisans who had to flee the Greece in 47 and they came to Yugoslavia who accepted the Greek communist refugees back then and in a way this woman was fighting against injustice and patriarchy in her own country and then came to Yugoslavia and ended up in some kind of socialist patriarchy and but at the same time she was teaching her granddaughter all these revolutionary songs she was telling her about her past in her youth she was telling her practically she was learning how to think about social justice and about better world and in one moment Jelena Maksimovich decided to go back to this village that her grandmother came from and what she found there was on the one hand the ski resort and then on the other hand the ruins of the houses of people who were communist affiliated them that all were killed or expelled or had to flee so this movie is about relationship between you know in a way ancestors and nature and the village and the author of the film and the final somehow outcome when Jelena asked me to write this final monologue for this final monologic sequence it was supposed to somehow get together all these different aspects but also to think about what is beyond how to go more how to imagine the new rebellions how to think about that in a way and that's how this this monologue actually was was made how why it was written and how it was developed let's see it and we will not become in the heat of the sun now this wind that appeared I am a blessing to the grass, it is coming out of the house, the darkness is opening a house around a tree and a secret life of the village here once lived a woman who became the most important in the world ruševina are the monuments that make nature the heritage of the communists who have lived here before I think that the war against nature in the hands of the communists, the tree is actually a living communism, it knows exactly the right distribution of resources and good through its roots, it knows that together as a forest lives and grows, if everyone is good, and if one of the grains is left to die, the trees know that the resources must be taken care of and make a part of it, they know what is to be done, but they know the world I like to say that you inspired me well being your friend and working with you you inspired me to become less of a pessimist than I was and less of a person imagining dystopia all the time and in your work and in your way of dealing with the world you like to imagine a better world and like starting from your early works to your later works you can see this shift from sad endings and catastrophic endings to somehow happy endings or some kind of storytelling that imagines better worlds. In one of your last plays called I often dream of a revolution you imagine a radical social and political revolution of course led by women, free women, so what would this revolution be? You said then you also say in the text that you cannot imagine a revolution without the blood, do you still imagine this kind of a bloody revolution or do you think we can invent a world where the revolution doesn't have to look like the revolutions in the past? Yeah that's very actually one of the crucial points in that play of and that's also the moment that somehow also explains that whole I don't know splitting between what is happening in the play and what is happening at the end and a lot of these works, a lot of these plays are pretty much catastrophic in the sense of what is happening in them but then the end of the play is reimagined like somehow all of a sudden it becomes happy end and that's something that I call the political happy ending that I deeply insist on because if the scripts that we produce somehow take part in how we imagine the world and how we imagine the relations, social relations in the world and what is allowed and what is not what is possible and what is not, I want to insist on the fact that happy endings are possible and then we come to the question of revolution and the way how I imagine the revolution and of course that I imagine it you know brought out by women and brought out in blood and then that play I often dream of a revolution is really the play about limitations of political imagination, it is about limitations of my political imagination and if they could be if somehow I can overcome them or if how on the wider scale how we can overcome the limitations of how we invent and imagine tomorrow and that's exactly that kind of ambivalence between my possibility to imagine the revolution that does not happen in blood and my desire that it still happens in a in a different way and the way how it is maybe easier for me than for some other people and it's easier for me because you know or you we are writing we can put whatever we want on the paper is that I can articulate these ambiguities and desires in a structured way through through the written word and somehow every step that I take in that direction maybe brings me closer to actually expanding these limits of imagination that are brought on to us by the world we live in in the widest sense of that word and I deeply deeply believe that the if there is a hope and if there is a rescue for for this world and for us it will come through it will first appear in our imagination and through expansion of that political horizon and then through love and then through political action and then maybe there is hope. Thank you Olga very much and thank you for ending with this thank you for being our guest tonight and I would end by wishing you a happy new 2022 hoping that we can maybe not have a revolution in the next year but maybe try to imagine it thank you all and thank you Olga and thank you and happy new year to you and to all the listeners and yeah happy new year. Happy new year.