Performance of Resistance in Croatia: A Chronotopic Review from the 1990s Onwards1

This work was supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project Narrating Fear (IP­2016­06­2463). Competing interests: no competing interests have been declared. Publisher: Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/), which permits redistribution, commercial and non­commercial, provided that the article is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2019. Suzana Marjanić Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb http://orcid.org/0000­0002­6158­3006

The text is conceived as a review of the performative practices in Croa tia from the 1990s onwards, with emphasis on performance art and actions, whereby I follow the situation of correlation of art and social engagement chronotopically -with regard to performance centres.2 In a way, the paper can Red Square from 1915), Black Peristyle (January 10/11, 1998) applied Malevich's (black) circle (Black Circle, 1924) as "The black circle on the Peristyle symbol ised the stain on the soul of every individual who could actively contribute to changing our society's reality, yet doesn't do so, remaining passive instead" (Grubić, 2011, p. 382;cf. Marjanić, 2014, p. 890). This ethical statement, formu lated by Igor Grubić years later, referencing also the then recent experience of the war, a war that was defined by Tom Gotovac as the war between Europe and the US in the Balkans (see below).3 The Red Peristyle action is the topic of the Split chapter in my book Chronotope of Croatian Performance Art (Marjanić, 2014). It was the first intervention in the public space in former Yugoslavia and a nearly isolated phenomenon from the late 1960s, whose protagonists were attributed as initiators of conceptual art in the region. The power of this phenomenon nearly voided the effects of similar actions in this city of potent performative energy, "the spontaneous theatre of morsels and buffoons in the literal sense of the word" (Marjanić, 2014, p. 875), as it is frequently called by Vladimir Dodig Trokut, a member of the Red Peristyle group, and a spiritual, though probably not actual, participant in the aforementioned collective anonymous guerrilla action.
It is beyond any doubt that among interventions in the public space in our region, only the two aforementioned actions have remained in such lively memory and with such potent aura -the collective action Red Peristyle from the revolutionary year of 19684 and the individual guerrilla action Black Peristyle, supported by the civic initiative, thirty years later. Unfortunately, following the latter intervention, we did not produce any new interventions in the public space with such aura and utopic gesture.5 This lack of equally meaningful continuation is regrettable but at the same time it underscore the importance of the Peristyle actions. Just like Želimir Koščević, I find the artistic actions in public space extremely important as they are situated in "the physical nucleus of the 'establishment'" (Koščević, 1978, p. 59) and take place "in situ, as a direct psychophysical obstacle to the wellestablished rhythm of the estranged technical civilisation" (Koščević, 1978, p. 59). Furthermore, as Koščević observed -while they do not endanger the system, they do cause an immediate disturbance in rhythm (Koščević, 1978, p. 59). Photo 1. A colourist intervention by Igor Grubić in the newspaper photograph which merged the actions Red Peristyle (1968) and Black Peristyle (1998). The inscription reads, "After the red square, a black circle followed: Peristyle strikes back." Photograph courtesy of Ivan Grubić. 5 In the context of the emphasis placed in this paper on public interventions, another such performance from postYugoslav Croatia that is worth mentioning is Lady Godiva (2001) by Vlasta Delimar, as part of which she rode naked on a white horse named Petko (Friday) through the centre of Zagreb. The aim of her action was, as she herself stated, to indicate, with the symbolic act of public and naked performance, the individual responsibility of every individual, as well as the choice of courage in facing conventions and imposed heteronomies, as was the case with Lady Godiva, who spared the citizens of Coventry from the imposed taxes by riding naked through the streets.

Suzana Marjanić
Performance of Resistance in Croatia: A Chronotopic Review…

Labin, or Performance of the Underground
Another artivist initiative I would like to present is the Labin Art Express collective (L.A.E.) and TransArt -the international transdisciplinary art festival and laboratory that the group has organised. In 1991, at the former coalmine in Labin, Dean Zahtila -together with the now late sculptor and sailor Krešimir Farkaš, and Graziano Kršić -established the cultural and artistic associa tion Labin Art Express, over which he has presided since its foundation until today. Furthermore, on September 12, 1998, as part of the former industrial complex of the Labin coalmine, L.A.E. also opened Lamparna Cultural Centre (KuC Lamparna) as the first independent and international cultural centre in Croatia. This was the first step towards the implementation of their main project Underground City XXI -the foundation of an underground cultural city in Labin as the first futuristic underground city in the world, 150-160 metres under the Earth's surface (Zahtila, 2013). From 1993 to 1996, Dean Zahtila was also Director of L.A.E. Radio -the first completely independent radio station in Croatia. In 1994, together with Massimo Savić and Krešimir Farkaš, he established the multimedia group Metal Guru, one of the factions of Labin Art Express.
The fundamental programme of the group Labin Art Express is the conver sion of the former coalmines near Labin (Pozzo Littorio) and in Raša (Arsia), "one of the greatest technological achievements on the field of mining, into a futuristic underground city, an urban social sculpture in perpetual making," as characterised by Zahtila himself, who elsewhere added that the project can be considered a living sculptureinprogress of sorts, a modus of process art (Dean Zahtila, cf. Marjanić, 2014, p. 1254. The physical implementation of the project, as frequently stated by Dean Zahtila, was not deliberated until the Faculty of Mining, Geology and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Zagreb had completed, upon commission by the Istria County, the study on the project's feasibility in 2000, which confirmed that the artistic utopia can become reality. The basic idea of the project is to preserve the 400year mining tradition by transforming the industrial and historical heritage into an avantgarde art project, a cultural and tourist attraction of global signifi cance: a genuine city 150 metre below ground, with halls and tunnels carved in a living rock; connecting the towns of Labin, Raša, Plomin and Rabac, it will feature bars, galleries, pools, children's playgrounds, shops, restaurants, and the Museum of Mining and Industry of Istria.

Parallelism: Varaždin -Osijek
It is notable that in the same year (2001), two performance festivals were initiated in Croatia -Performance Day (later Days; Dan/Dani Performansa) in Varaždin (cf. Mesek, 2013), and Performance Art Festival in Osijek, which remains a trademark of Osijek primarily thanks to the enthusiastic engagement of Ivan Faktor, and his collaborator in later years, AnaMarija Koljanin.6 As regards Varaždin, the project was initiated when the local branch of the Croatian Associa tion of Artists (HDLU) took over and reactivated a group of youngergeneration artists: Ivan Mesek, Darwin Butković and Alen Novoselec. As Mesek put it, "I find it symptomatic that this role was assumed by artists instead of museums or cultural institutions" (Marjanić, 2014(Marjanić, , pp. 1679(Marjanić, -1680.
Particularly noteworthy from the perspective of artivism was the extremely pow erful topic of the 14th Performance Days (organised by the Varaždin Gallery Centre, Varaždin, June 11-14, 2015) -Tearing Down the Wall, conceived by art historian and curator Branko Franceschi. The festival poised the question of the physical and mental obstacles that we, as powerless individuals, are faced when encountering individuals who hold any kind of dangerous power, and did so in the context of the erection of barbed wires along the eastern border. (Marjanić, 2017, pp. 364-380). Ivan Mesek also reacted to the recent humanitarian/refugee crisis, and together with his colleague Zefrey Throwell recorded the short film Woodland Concertina (2016). The artists procured a duck, a rabbit and a pheasant, and took them to the Police Department in order to issue them passports. When this failed, they created fake documents for these animals, trying to have them cross the CroatianSlovenian border. Finally, the artists set the animals free outside of the strict border zone and away from the razorwire fence. The short film Woodland Concertina addresses the issue of animals forcibly being given a nationality in the refugee crisis, that of the refugee crisis itself, and that of the totalitarian praxis of border closing (Mesek & Franceschi, 2018, pp. 117-118

The Scene of Slavonski Brod: The Saturnian Melancholy of the Slavonian Plain
As Head of Barutana Art Workshop at the Fine Arts Gallery of Slavonski Brod, Ivan Šeremet stressed on one occasion that a performance art scene did not exist in that area, and that only he could be characterised as a conceptual artist and an artist of the cultural period (Ivan Šeremet, quoted in Marjanić, 2014Marjanić, , pp. 1554Marjanić, -1555. From this position, in his art strategies under the aegis of melancholic meditativeness -as summarised by Antun Maračić (Maračić, 1996) -Ivan Šeremet criticises the institu tions of power as well as the institutions of culture that advocate for failsafe projects.
It is in this context of the Saturnian melancholy of the Slavonian plain that I would like to mention the artist's performance Slavonian Fugue (2002), presented in front of the main administrative building of BrodPosavina County and the City of Slavonski Brod (courthouse, county seat, and city municipality). In a benign ges ture of thorough nosepicking, the artist expressed his personal opinion stemming from overall humiliation. Describing his entire tenyear multimedia project Sketches for Melancholia, which featured Slavonian Fugue, among other works, the author noted that it ensued "as a consequence of war, and my own desire to analyse from my own point of view this specific experience in which melancholia is imposed on us as the modus vivendi. In this case, melancholia is neither a disease nor denial of life, but an organism's integral reaction to the nature of existence" (Šeremet, 2009). Photo 4. Ivan Šeremet, Slavonian Fugue (2002). The performance of resistance by nosepicking was presented by the artist in front of the main administrative building of BrodPosavina County and the City of Slavonski Brod (court house, county seat, and city municipality). Photograph courtesy of the artist.

ARL (Dubrovnik) + MMC Palach (Rijeka)
We must begin the story of the action and performance art scene of Dubrovnik with Lazareti Art Workshop (ARL), founded in 1988. In addition, ARL initiated in 2007 the Quarantine Scene as a programme of contemporary performing arts, independent production and contemporary dance, which came after the Quarantine Festival of independent and contemporary performative production that they had produced and organised during a tenyear period (1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006).7 From the founding of the ARL until 2012, its Head was visual artist Slaven Tolj, who then went to Rijeka to become Director of the local Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and Art Director of the project "Rijeka 2020 -European Capital of Culture," which at the time of writing these words is the largest cultural project in Croatia. It is worth noting that another reasons for which Tolj left Dubrovnik was to express protest against the munici pal authorities, who are transforming the city into a port for tourist cruisers. Slaven Tolj frequently refers to the epithet that was ascribed to his works by Janka Vukmir, who used the excellent syntagma "perceptual art." Or, to quote Tolj himself on the subject of his own works, "This tissue is fragile, I cannot rely on artefacts. Recently I have had a few humorous situations with curators who have asked me to show them my works" (Tolj, 2001(Tolj, /2002. We can safely say that from 1997 until 2008, Rijeka's central point of actions and performances was Palach Club (Multimedia Centre, or MMC, Palach), operating in that period under the management of Damir Čargonja Čarli and his Multimedia Centre Ltd., which is often associated with the concept of cultural entrepreneurship (Čargonja, 2012). The Club then closed, and for a few years, the "maladjusted" artistic current gathered in KUNS (the Sušak Artists' Club); when KUNS was also closed in 2013, the current was completely delocalised, to put it mildly. This changed in 2014, with the inauguration of the periodical MMC Days of Performance, a festival initiated spontaneously in OK Gallery, which operated the former location of MMC Palach.8 7 For a more detailed account on Lazareti Art Workshop and Slaven Tolj, cf. Art radionica Lazareti (n.d.) and Marjanić, 2014Marjanić, , pp. 1047Marjanić, -1142  Alongside performances in alchemical format that detected the nigredo state of consciousness, the first edition of MMC festival also featured a political performance by Damir Stojnić, entitled DIESELL, which he presented on a cloudy afternoon in Korzo, Rijeka's main promenade, whereby he "attacked" every ATM machine installed along the street. As the artist himself explained, "It is in the title itself: DIESEL as a type of fuel with an added L, which reads as die -sell, a demand or suggestion. The neologism 'gastroeconomics' includes the following: 1) gastronomy as a form of cultivated gourmet consumption, 2) economics as a cultivated grabbing of resources, and 3) necronomics, which has long become a scientific branch in its own right due to the complexity of the exploitation of the deceased, from copulation to organselling. 'Die and sell' imposes itself continuously as an oxymoron […]" (Damir Stojnić, cf. Marjanić, 2014Marjanić, , p. 1386. Damir Stojnić''s "attack" on the ATMs consisted in putting on each of them ATM a sticker aimed against bankocracy, with the inscription "DIESELL or the gastroeconomics of blackness. At least two things connect capitalism, oil, and death: 1) they are all black, 2) they all thrive on corpses."

Zagreb, ATTACK! The Final Story of the Chronotope
And finally, as regards Zagreb in the 1990s, I use this opportunity to point out the performative energy of ATTACK! (Autonomous Culture Fac tory) that was established in October 1997 as a community and culture centre. Embodying Hakim Bey's idea of temporary autonomous zones (Bey, 1991;Bey, 2003), the centre carried out an array of actions and events performed in the city's public spaces. According to information from the 9th issue of the Newsletter of the Autonomous Culture Factory (Newsletter Autonomne tvornice kulture) from 1999, already at the point ATTACK! had organised as many as 82 performances since October 1997 -of which 51 had been per formed during FAKI (Festival of Alternative Theatrical Expression) -and an unknown number of street performances/initiatives.9 Furthermore, there were many artivist practices, particularly in the first years of ATTACK! One such action that warrants mentioning is the street event Books and Community -22%, organised by Igor Grubić in collaboration with ATTACK!,10 and implemented as a joint actionreaction of around thirty artists to the imposi tion of VAT on books. It was also the first collective artistic action in post Yugoslav Croatia. As part of the that event, anonymous masked performers on Cvjetni (Flower) Square -among whom Grubić himself was the central figure -handed out to the citizens large black dots (targets, marks) on paper, the microfatal dimensions of which corresponded to the macrostain on the Peristyle, the black stain on the soul of all of us who could have reacted in the 1990s, but failed to do so. 9 In this sense, we can talk of the performing city, the city itself as performance (Whybrow, 2014, p. 2), to which ATTACK! strongly contributed in the 1990s. For a more detailed account on ATTACK!, cf. the monograph Our Story: 15 Years of ATTACK!: Autonomous Culture Factory (Cvek et al., 2013).
10 It is important to note that the same year saw the performance of Grubić's action Black Peristyle, and the organisation of the event Books and Community -22%.

Paranoia View Art from the year 1984/1986
Art of Great Tom, Tomislav Gotovac a.k.a. Antonio G. Lauer,11 the anar chofather of performance art12 in former Yugoslavia, rests on the matrix of conspiracy theories. Specifically, on the narrative structure of the conspiracy theories related to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. I shall base of discussion on some of Gotovac's performances informed by his concept of Paranoia View Art, which were presented at the retrospective exhibition Crisis Anticipator -Don't Ask Where We're Going (2017) at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (MMSU), whose title itself thematises the artist's permanent preoccupation with conspiracy theories as alternative historical truths. This was his second retrospective exhibition. The first one, which took place in 1986, recapitulated the then 30year period from 1956 onwards, and at the same time marked the beginning of the 10year Employment Action 11 Tomislav Gotovac presented himself at the Birthday Performance on February 9, 2006 (Nova Gallery, Zagreb) with a new name of Antonio G. Lauer ("G." being the trace of his father's surname, which needed to remain as was required by the state administration). Tomislav Gotovac a.k.a. Antonio G. Lauer (Sombor, February 9, 1937 -Zagreb, June 24, 2010), film director, actor, performance artist, multimedia and conceptual artist, a doyen of struc turalist film, guerrilla performer, and actionist who followed the principle of oneman art, famous for his street strippings -minimalist actions in which he used his own body (the body as a readymade) (Denegri, 2003, pp. 4-11) as the sole medium in the concept of behavioural art, exYugoslav and Croatian veteran of body art, the first streaker in the EU (Susovski, 1982, p. 29), cinephile, a protagonist and witness to numerous cultural events who was justifiably given the title of a "walking archive" (Greiner, 2011, p. 126), a culturological blasphemer whose projects indicate culturological polylogues between film tradition (testified to by numerous homages to film directors) and art history, between jazz and popular culture; briefly put, a close ally of art that had originated from the Fluxus antimovement, the Gorgona Group, and American Pop Art (Milovac, 2002).
12 As regards the conceptual scene of Yugoslavia, among the first who shared with Tomislav Gotovac the performative line of resistance was Katalin Ladik (b. Novi Sad, October 25, 1942), multimedia artist, author, film and theatre actress, whose range of activity includes litera ture, acting, creation and interpretation of experimental sound compositions and radio plays, the phonic and visual -or, briefly put experimental -poetry, happening, performance art, actions, and mail art. The artist's monograph The Power of a Woman: Katalin Ladik, Retrospective 1962-2010(Šuvaković, Ugren, & Šuler, 2010 points out that she was the first female performance artist in former Yugoslavia. As regards the local scene, Sanja Iveković and Vlasta Delimar are considered the founders of feminist performance in Croatia, on which I have written in more detail in my book on performance art (Marjanić, 2014, pp 539-722: chapter on feminist performance). as well as the proclamation of the Paranoia View Art concept as the beginning of the artist's fourth decade of activity).
This first retrospective exhibition, entitled Tomislav Gotovac: Retrospective of Documents 1956-1986 Art, opened at the Gallery of the Com munity Centre in Trešnjevka, Zagreb, on June 13, 1986, with the date stamp "June 11, 1986," although originally, the opening of the exhibition was sup posed to take place on June 6.13 In the invitation leaflet, Tom Gotovac placed the logo of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), founded in 1908 by J. Edgar Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Joseph Bonaparte, the latter being better known as Napoleon's grandnephew. At the exhibition opening, Gotovac performed his "cursing action" (the first of its format), whereby he used curse words as an apotropaic talisman against the overall social and cultural cyni cism. Final Haircutting and Shaving -Calling the Artistic and Public Cultural Employees of Zagreb Mother-Fuckers was his last action of public shaving, as he himself stated e.g. in the interview for Polet magazine (Gotovac, 1989, pp. 2-4). Thereby he also marked -in terms of gesture and costume -the beginning of a new, paranoid phase in his art. Specifically, with the haircutting and shav ing he seemingly renounced the iconography of the flowerpower anarchy of the 1960s and 1970s. Following the costumed role as the unfettered man with long hair and beard, Gotovac assumed the equally unsettling image of a large, cleanshaven man. This was a literal translation of his own figure into another performative mode of everyday life. In the monograph accompanying the sec ond retrospective, the exhibition curators brilliantly emphasised the following: "Although he put himself in the position of prey, Gotovac directed his own movement and appearance meticulously so as to regain control and make it difficult for the 'hunters' to make out the target" (Orelj & Šuković, 2017, p. 323).
The final shaving action -with ritualised curse words as apotropaia against necropolitics and the culture of fear -was specified by Gotovac as the pin 13 The reason for this had to do with the artist's action Shaving -Non-Shaving that defined the third decade (1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)) and consisted of a fiveyear period of nonshaving (the fiveyear action Growing the Hairs on the Head) the and the subsequent pivotal action Haircutting and Shaving in Public Space III (8th actionproject; a homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer and his film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and to its lead actress Maria Falconetti; performed on the former Brotherhood and Unity Square, Zagreb, June 6, 1981 at noon), followed by five years of shaving (of hair and beard). With his unconventional appearance, Tomislav Gotovac drew attention to his own figure. The timing of the action was the exact reason as to why the retrospective exhibition was supposed to open on June 6, 1986. nacle of his artistic activity, that is, as an instance of art of the paranoid worldview that constitutes, by his own definition, "an attempt at disclosure of the structural legitimacy of the global order," a phrase which is also an apt desciption of his overall artistic activity. Or, to use Gotovac's diagno sis of paranoia and the resulting conspiracy theories, as a more accurate understanding of the world order: "Everything happens according to a set order, like in film directing; everything is, in fact, some kind of conspiracy" (Marjanić, 1998, p. 14).
The war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina was thus interpreted by Tomislav Gotovac as a large scale conspiracy; as he understood it, it was not a war for territory, but rather the war between Europe and the US. Even though there was talk about the US and its involvement in the Balkan war, this "word of mouth" was dismissed as precisely a conspiracy theory. Specifi cally -according to this alternative interpretation of the sequence of events -as the Cold War was allegedly ending, the US planned out the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The plan was put forward on October 31, 1988, in a memorandum of the National Intelligence Council, entitled Sense of Community -Report on Yugoslavia. As stated by journalist Wayne Madsen (Madsen, 2016), the author of the memorandum was Marten van Heuven, who was then National Intel ligence Officer for Europe.
A similar version of this paranoid worldview had been announced by Tomislav Gotovac two years prior by the series of marketing actions entitled Selling Polet Magazine (Mask of Death + Cyrillic Script; The Mummy; Hammer, Sickle and Red Star; Chimney Sweeper; Street Sweeper; Sandwich Man with a Dinamo Ad; Superman; Santa Clause), in which he used the performa tive strategy of appropriation, i.e. masking of identity under the sponsorship of Polet on Republic Square (now Ban Jelačić Square) in Zagreb. He assumed a different identity each week -from a death mask, worker with a ham mer and sickle, to Santa Claus -and sold Polet in those disguises. In his book Kino Tom (Šijan, 2012;English translation: Šijan, 2018), Slobodan Šijan marks the performance Superman (1984) as the announcement of Gotovac's concept Paranoia View Art, and defines as the first performance in the cycle the action Sickle, Hammer and Red Star, presented on November 9, 1984 on Republic Square in Zagreb. Gotovac proceeded to distort the aforementioned figures of Superman and worker over the years; finally, in the performance Paranoia View Art / Hommage to Glenn Miller (Das gläserne UBoot, Krems Stein, Austria, September 24, 1988) -with which the author suggested that the entire former Yugoslavia was an art project in which Tito, as the Great Tom frequently stressed, "was generously funded by the Americans throughout his entire reign" (Marjanić, 1998, p. 15) -Tomislav Gotovac activated in paral lel the iconography of all necropolitics. Gotovac aimed to demonstrated that, in accordance with his anarchoindividualist comprehension of governmental hegemony, the governments do not exist to serve people, but are above them. Thus, instead of Superman and worker from 1984, to whom the artist evidently assigned the role of the saviour (the first one of the American, the second one of socialist provenance), in 1988 -when certain power structures and circles were already quite familiar with the strategies of preparation for the Balkan war -Gotovac's hero becomes an antihero who merged all antiheroes of political systems into a single iconogram. Especially noteworthy in this regard is the costume segment of the introductory part of the Sarajevo performance from 1990 (Paranoia View Art. Hommage to Glenn Miller, Zvono Café and Gallery, Sarajevo, February 15, 1990), which was accompanied by the song I'm Old Fashioned performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The artist stood on a pedestal, halfnaked, in red underpants and underknee socks as rem nants of the costume of Superman; instead of the red fivepointed star on his forehead, he now has a Groszlike mask of death -a grinning, sneering black and white skull that is reminiscent of the concentration camp terror or a nuclear catastrophe (he had used the mask in the 1984 living sculpture Mask of Death + Cyrillic Script from the series of actions Selling Polet Magazine) -and, alongside the aforementioned song, he now performed the ideological saluta tions of all types of necropolitics. Alongside the conspiracy theories related to Miller's disappearance, the jazzswing music of Glenn Miller indicated in many of Gotovac's performances the sound backdrop of American military operations against Germany, but also the fact that Josip Broz Tito had risen to power to the sounds of Miller's big band music.14 In short, Tomislav Gotovac -the anarchofather of performance art in for mer Yugoslavia -produced with his artistic actions the effect of moral panic in the context of the global paranoia of large and small scale conspiracy theories, of which he systematically spoke within the framework of his individualistic performative narrative art.
Photo 7. Tomislav Gotovac. As part of the series of marketing actions Selling Polet Magazine, the action Superman (1984) denotes the announcement of Gotovac's cycle Paranoia View Art; the performance/action Hammer, Sickle and Red Star is recog nised as the first performance of the cycle (Šijan, 2012, pp. 177-178, 179; Šijan, 2018).

The Downfall: Beginning of the End: Black Nylon Peristyle and Ponerology
Allow me to return to the peristyle in Split, where in 2013 another civic initia tive/action took place, this time called Black Nylon Peristyle. The official celebration of the accession of Croatia to the EU was marked, inter alia, with the event Europe's Greatest Feast (Zagreb, Ban Jelačić Square, June 27, 2013), as part of which citizens could enjoy various specialties from European countries, according to the maxim "panem et circenses" (G. Ut., 2013). Alongside these festivities, the common attribute of all, Croatian and otherwise, EU accessionrelated public events (or, to use Sally Falk Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff's [Moore & Meyerhoff, 1977] term, "secular rituals") are what Don Handelman calls representations (Handelman, 1998, p. 49). Handelman classifies public events dyadically into models and mirrors, whereby a model denotes events that are formed so as to transform society, i.e. to directly influence social reality, whereas mirrors are public events that are structured as presentations, or re-presentations, i.e. events that represent the social conscious anew, by offering suggestions and countersuggestions on the very nature of the observed reality (Handelman, 1998, p. 49).
As regards the antiEU performative demonstrations that were organised on the occasion of accession of Croatia to the EU, a civic action occurred in the early morning of July 1, 2013 (the first day of Croatia's membership in the EU), in which a group of dissatisfied citizens of Split laid black nylon cov ering on the Peristyle, thus expressing their disapproval of the assessment of politicians that the accession to the EU was the best thing that had happened to Croatia since gaining independence. The gesture of covering the Peristyle in black nylon was accompanied with a statement, proclaiming that the colour black represented "the depth of the abyss, and the rushing of Croatian political scene in the brainless selling of our homeland, its heritage and sovereignty" (Hina, 2013).15 On the leaflets handed out by the participants of this civic action on this occasion, the word ponerology was highlighted, which is a term proposed by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski, according to whom the ultimate source of evil is the consequence of two human factors natural human ignorance and weakness, and the existence and activity of a statistically small (4-8% of the overall population), but extremely active group of psychologically deviant individuals (psychopaths). Failing to recognise (ignoring) the existence of such psychological differences is the first criterion of ponerogenesis, which opens up space for the unnoticed operation of psychopaths (Hina, 2013).16 15 Note also the exhibition Re: Referendum by the curatorial platform of the New Media Gallery in 2012 in Split, at which the Organisation for the Promotion of Experimental Art DADAnti performed the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters as an alternative anthem of Europe. Dressed in differentlycoloured shirts with the same logo, the artists read the different parts of the Ursonate at the same time. They stated the following: " The work does not reflect YES or NO to the EU. They want to say: WE ARE ALL THE SAME, BUT WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT. This is not necessarily related to the EU, but also to the smallest communities like marriage, as well as to the biggest ones, like general globaliza tion and unification of all countries in the world" (Kadin & Kadin, 2012, p. 20).
16 Let us observe how the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Croatia assessed the political progress of the country: "In the twentytwo years of indepen dence, Croatia has become an internationallyrecognised state, a member of NATO, and now a full 28th member of the European Union. We have every right to be proud of what we have achieved" (Ministarstvo vanjskih i europskih poslova Republike Hrvatske, 2013).
Such is the situation from Red Peristyle, Black Peristyle, to Black Nylon Peristyle and in all other variations that pay homage to the action Red Peristyle (Marjanić, 2014, pp. 875-914). Performances of amusement and pleasure, as well as manifestations contesting the mode of the accession to the EU,17 are part of what Guy Debord termed society of the spectacle -in all of them, the citi zen is transformed into an observer, consumer of visual spectacles, a Homo Spectator (Debord, 1995, p. 9) -the observing man. In this sense, the macro policies of the political spectacle, as represented by the events of the afore mentioned type, should certainly be interpreted subversively. This is mainly what is brought to us by the contemporary form of ponerocracy -we become mere observers, but not actors, as has been the case so far.18 Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist have perfectly identified this era as the era of netocracy with the ruling system of totalist thought, the essential feature of which is the anthropocentric worldview (Bard & Söderqvist, 2002, p. 99). An absolute dominance of speciesism. On the other hand, Jeffrey Grupp terms it corpo ratism, and identifies the year 2008 as the starting point of its third, roughest and darkest phase (Grupp, 2007, p. 65). Pierre Clastres defines it as voluntary captivity of long duration, implicit in the very paradigm of the State from the beginning of the national concept (Clastres, 2010, pp. 105-119). There are, however, spiritual and historical perspectives that take a somewhat more mild approach towards today's world.
17 For example, theatre director Mario Kovač, who began his performative activity as a secondary school student on the platform of ATTACK!, rejected the offer to direct the cer emony of the accession of Croatia to the EU -he himself being a eurosceptic -"even though it would present a challenge to [him] in the professional sense" (Kovač, 2015, p. 68).
18 One of the first domestic performances that critically questioned that unification was duoperformance by Pasko Burđelez and Rodion entitled I Shall Embrace My New Friend (2009), with the following three definitions of friendship as mottos: "to promote friendship is thought to be the special task of political science" (Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1234b[Aristotle, 1935); "I do not survive the friend, I cannot and must not survive him, except to the extent to which he already bears my death and inherits it as the last survivor" (Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship [Derrida, 2005, p. 13]), and finally -"a company of porcupines soon felt one another's quills, which induced them to separate again despite cold weather. And now, when the need for warmth brought them nearer together again, the second evil arose once more. So that they were driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other, until they had discovered a mean distance, between attraction and repulsion, friendship and ani mosity, at which they could most tolerably exist" (Schopenhauer, quoted in: Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921[Freud, 1949, modified translation]) (cf. Marjanić, 2014Marjanić, , p. 1075.