WORKS TEXTS
Two minutes before the crime, one minute before
2021
Video 12’ 02”, colour, sound, wallpaper, dimensions variabld
Conflicts Show, Drugstore night club, Belgrade, Serbia
The plot of Two Minutes Before the Crime. A Minute Before... connects several references. First of all, the title refers to the work of Vanet Bor, Yugoslav surrealism and his work of the same name. The plot of the video, like in Bor's photographs, is a fiction created as an idea to reconstruct an event that precedes an act that at the moment of the photographing we cannot know whether it will happen or if it ever happened. In the case of the video I am creating, I am reconstructing an incident that really happened in the local political reality. In fact, I am reconstructing the immediate time period that preceded the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. The reconstruction is based on references from the trial transcript in which the assassin Zvezdan Jovanović, better known to his associates under the nickname Zmija / Snake, describes in his testimony the moments before, during and immediately after the assassination. The accused states in his testimony that for several hours, while waiting for the prime minister to appear, he smoked a pack of Davidoff cigarettes by the window from which he had been watching his victim. This statement served to build the work in which we see a room in space that is re-lit and smokes cigarette after cigarette in an uncertain time interval that obviously precedes some greater and obviously more desperate act for that person. By analyzing - fetishizing this working desire to more realistically depict the cold-bloodedness of the predator who is tearing apart his victim, but also to temporarily, at least in a fictional space, escape the discomfort of encountering the consequences of the tragic act that follows. He observes her in a way exposed to a banal action that, outside of the given context, says nothing in itself, but at the same time, unconsciously, he himself observes the exposed gaze of the fictional predator from the projected image, similar to the gaze of the Snake who observes the prime minister from the window before the brutal act.
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Photo: © Ivan Zupanc