Optimism of Nostalgia – Looking Back, Forward, and Between Each Other
When we first started discussing the possibility of a collaboration, Dejan Kaludjerović and I departed from our long-standing and continuous interest in what could be best described as childhood politics—a theme both of us have systematically explored in various capacities throughout our artistic practices over the years.
During my tenure as Artistic Director of the Little Theatre Duško Radović in Belgrade (2002–2011), I explored how theatre and art for children and young people can profoundly impact a tumultuous, disorganized, and confused society—one struggling with a shattered value system following the downfall of Yugoslavia, the country I was born in and very much miss to this day. The atrocities of the Yugoslav Wars forever suspended the idea of the safety and innocence of the childhood we were brought up with. Carefree and seemingly apolitical childhood and youth—as well as the very idea of imagining the future—disappeared with the first signs of the unspeakable war, which coincided with both Dejan’s and my formal coming of age and entry into adulthood.
This abrupt transition between our childhood in Yugoslavia and adulthood in its aftermath—known today as the post-Yugoslav space—initially propelled my ongoing interest in childhood utopias, a theme that has informed several of my projects over the years, dealing with topics such as childhood politics, memory, nostalgia, and more.
I would like to mention, for example, a performance I directed in 2012 at Bitef Theatre in Belgrade, inspired by a series of children’s books that were popular not only in socialist Yugoslavia but across most of Europe—on both ideological poles of the Cold War. I attempted to observe the political situation in Serbia in 2012 through the lens of a once-pleasant Yugoslav childhood, now broken and disillusioned by the political reality of present-day Serbia.
In his famous short essay about the importance of proletarian theatre for children, Walter Benjamin wrote:
“The education of a child requires that its entire life be engaged. Proletarian education requires that the child be educated within a clearly defined space. This is the positive dialectic of the problem. It is only in the theater that the whole of life can appear as a defined space, framed in all its plenitude; and this is why proletarian children's theater is the dialectical site of education.”
Benjamin’s essay has been frequently revisited by progressive practitioners and theorists in the field of culture for children and youth ever since it became available after WWII. I was one of those deeply inspired by this text throughout my years programming the leading post-Yugoslav theatre for young audiences—Little Theatre Duško Radović—as well as in my broader artistic practice, which has focused significantly on the idea of ritualizing community through theatre for children and young audiences, just as Benjamin suggests.
Dejan Kaludjerović—who was primarily educated as a painter at the Academy of Visual Arts in Belgrade and later moved to Vienna, where he has lived and worked for many years—shares my interest in child-centered art. He has continually explored children’s culture as a tool for problematizing contemporary, primarily Western, society and its norms through numerous art projects exhibited internationally.
The most notable of these is Conversations (ongoing since 2013), which became a milestone in our collaborative research project.
We instantly bonded over our shared artistic interest in the political dimensions of childhood as a community-oriented tool, as well as our very specific positions as individuals born and raised in a country that no longer exists—yet continues to generate utopian and nostalgic perspectives that are often a source of artistic inspiration, including our own.
Finally, we were brought together by a shared feeling of displacement. We had both chosen to live and work in different countries, which resulted in a kind of double displacement: first, with the fall of Yugoslavia—when our Yugoslav identity was suspended and replaced with a Serbian one—and second, when we embraced the identity of a cultural immigrant, or more vaguely, the so-called “international artist.”
The project began with the idea of continuing our exploration of utopias, focusing on Yugoslavia and Sweden during the peak of the Swedish welfare state in the 1970s and 1980s, which coincides with our own childhoods. We followed the historical trajectories of both political projects—Yugoslav socialism and Swedish social democracy—which, from the perspective of today’s late capitalism, both appear equally utopian.
The aim was to examine our personal and artistic transitions between the utopian realities of our childhood and our current displaced artistic positions. We were interested in childhood as a reservoir of critical thinking—a formative source for our artistic work.
Thus, we decided to use Dejan’s ongoing Conversations project as a platform for new research based on oral testimonials from two focus groups: senior citizens aged 80+ and children aged 8–10, both in Serbia (a former Yugoslav republic) and in Sweden.
After designing a questionnaire with approximately 50 questions, we organized two workshops—in Stockholm (May 2023) and Belgrade (October 2023)—where we interviewed around 20 senior citizens and children. The questions touched on political concepts such as the welfare state, free healthcare, and universal basic income, as well as intimate topics like dreams, hopes, and fears.
The idea was to explore how the past is equally abstract and subjective for both groups: for those who lived it, and for children who can only imagine it. Interestingly, both groups struggled to imagine the future—for the elderly, because they didn’t expect to live long enough to see it; for the children, because the future felt dark, unattainable, and therefore not worth imagining.
This placed us in a liminal space—between uncertain pasts and uncertain futures—where the present felt equally elusive and dissonant, especially given the cultural differences and physical distance between the two participant groups.
When we placed them into an imaginary dialogue—one they would never realistically have due to the political divide between EU and non-EU realities—we realized the project’s "present moment" was suspended. It could only be reenacted or reinvented, never fully lived or shared. We found ourselves documenting a utopian past, based on testimonials from a utopian present, while finding it nearly impossible to imagine a utopian future.
We ended up becoming the very ghosts we were chasing: incomplete, broken identities, with little hope of re-establishing themselves. We began to understand our artistic position as one of continuous discontinuity and ambiguous presence.
How is this different from the usual position of a theatre maker? someone might ask. That depends, I suppose, on how one understands the role of theatre.
Theatre exists within liminalities and ambiguities—or at least good theatre does. So, no, perhaps it’s not so different. I’ll skip the usual mantra about building sandcastles (a favorite comfort of theatre artists when reflecting on the ephemeral nature of their work).
But what about visual art? Or any art form that aspires to permanence, to being widely shared and preserved?
The ultimate goal of this research was to bring us closer to the artistic work we were planning to do together. But after the second workshop in Belgrade—where we had already gathered a significant amount of material—and as our discussions around performative models intensified, we realized we were spending more time discussing format and artistic mandates than content.
It was around this time that I stumbled upon Claire Bishop’s essay, Black Box, White Cube, Grey Zone.
In the essay, Bishop observes a growing tendency in museums and galleries to “activate” contemporary art exhibitions by introducing performance elements. One approach is through contemporary dance, with works by artists such as Tino Sehgal, Anne Imhof, and others. Bishop defines the ideological and aesthetic overlap of the black box (theatre) and the white cube (gallery) as the “grey zone.”
To elaborate on what she calls “performance exhibitions,” Bishop writes:
“Performance exhibitions began to appear in Europe around 2008, directly influenced by the precedent of German artist Tino Sehgal. Their emergence has produced a particular assemblage of effects that I call the ‘grey zone.’ The grey zone results from the convergence of experimental theatre’s ‘black box’ and the art gallery’s ‘white cube’ and gives rise to a new set of spectatorial protocols, at the centre of which is networked technology.”
Coming from the ideologies of the black box and the white cube—and having been shaped by formal institutional practices and education—we soon realized that instead of focusing on content, we needed to focus on collaboration protocols. We needed to enter and explore our own “grey zone.”
Although our interpretation of the grey zone is looser and broader than Bishop’s original definition, we still recognize the relevance of the questions she raises. Her essay focuses on contemporary dance as the core of the grey zone, but for our purposes, we extended the concept to encompass all contemporary performative strategies that exist between the visual and performing arts.
We had discussed our artistic mandates early on, but these discussions became more urgent as we transitioned out of the data-collection phase. It became clear that neither of us was particularly interested in collaborating from a place of “knowing.” What truly interested us was stepping beyond the boundaries of the known—into less familiar artistic territories.
This is when the process began to unfold—and challenge us.
Although we had agreed on the idea of full collaboration, it turned out to be much harder to leave the safety of our primary disciplines and step into each other’s unfamiliar territory. We found ourselves asking: What defines an artistic mandate? Is it formal education? Years of experience? Institutional recognition? Or perhaps something more existential—like the fear of letting go of the legitimacy we’ve earned, in exchange for the uncertainty of a new, unformed identity?
Our next research question emerged:
Is our artistic experience enough to safely carry us into unfamiliar artistic territories?
To find out, we organized a third and final workshop in Stockholm in May 2024. The aim—playful but serious—was to explore how far we could go when entering a different artistic field without formal training, relying only on instinct and artistic sensibility.
It turned into a vibrant and rewarding experience. I spent a day learning how to draw—or rather, how to copy a drawing—while Dejan spent a day directing for the first time on stage, with two actors.
The intention was not to produce refined artistic results (that would have been difficult given the timeframe), but rather to engage in a ritualistic transgression into the other’s artistic world. We guided one another, but also observed silently as the process unfolded.
This is a good moment to admit that neither of us was a complete stranger to the other’s medium before this project. I’ve always had a strong interest in visual art, and Dejan has participated in performative collaborations before. But these prior experiences were cautious and filtered through the lens of our “primary” disciplines. This time, we stepped fully out of our expertise and into the role of curious, unknowing artists. It was a generous, even luxurious place to be—a place that rarely exists within institutional frameworks, where artistic legitimacy is quantified, ordered, and seldom open to risk-taking.
What changed after this workshop was our inner sense of agency—to test our boundaries, to enter territories that require no permission but our own. Even briefly, and even within the protective irrelevance of the academic bubble, it was a liberating insight—one that we will certainly try to carry into our further artistic collaboration, as the project now enters its next, production phase.
Anja Suša
Professor of Theatre Directing
Stockholm University of the Arts