To Conjure Her
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The following text is an excerpt of a larger, unpublished autotheoretical work by artist and curator Žana Kozomora. In it, Kozomora engages an autotheoretical, ex-Yugoslav feminist mode to consider representations of Balkan women in contemporary art. In the larger text from which this piece is excerpted, Kozomora takes American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer's Lustmord (1993–1994), a work that looks at violent war crimes against women in Bosnia, as her starting point, reconsidering the ethics and politics of Holzer's work. Here, Kozomora writes reflectively through the figure of the Slavic "witch" via feminist scholar Silvia Federici and works by artists Selma Selman and Šejla Kamerić.
(i) ВЕШТИЦА / VJEŠTICA / BABA YAGA: WITCH, SORCERESS, SHAPE-SHIFTER
The first time I was called a vještica, or "witch," the word came from my mother, and was not a jovial reference to a presumed Halloween [End Page 537] costume or school play, although amusingly I would take up both of those roles from childhood to adolescence. To be called a vještica as a young girl in our Balkan context is a scathing label reserved only for the most atrocious little girl who has done something egregious. In adulthood, the sharp insult feels similar except for the fact that what is constituted by "awful" behavior or actions is immensely expanded, here no longer hurled at me as a measure of discipline but solely to bestow shame. The second time I was called "witch" was as a slur in childhood, as playground boys easily spotted my insecurity and preteen angst. In these experiences, I recognize the presence of a sharp twofold visibility: the institution of shame and the ways in which the masculine gaze determines the validity of feminized presence.
The conniving image of the witch that is conjured is dualistic: the threatening, hypervisibility of the always-sexualized female body (either raped or nation-bearer) alongside the invisibility of the ugly, usually elderly woman (possessing social influence). In ancient Slavic folklore, another dualism is found in the witchy figure of Baba Yaga, who exists in the liminal space between life and death, youth and old age, human and animal, male and female, constantly shape-shifting to carry on through cycles of death (cremation) and growth (fertility).1 Demonized today as a grotesque and threatening figure of horror for young children, her roots are traced to pagan matriarchies where women were traditionally the bearers of sacred knowledge, performing practical and ceremonial assistance in death, birth, and marriage.2
Marxist feminist Silvia Federici theorizes that the witch-hunts borne out of the rise of capitalism in the Middle Ages necessitated a new regime of terror that subjected women to mass killings, pain, and torture, enforcing a new model of femininity for a capitalist society: sexless, obedient, submissive, and subordinate (to men).3 Federici contextualizes land expropriation during the fall of medieval feudalism and rise of colonial expansion through two methods: war as a means to transform territorial and economic arrangements, and religious reform.4 She contends that the European population crisis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, instigated by failing markets and disease, wreaked havoc on peasant classes, turning reproduction and population growth into a state matter and an object of intellectual discourse, which ultimately prompted the persecution of witches and criminalized women's reproductive control over their own bodies.5 While the South Slavic Balkans didn't experience the particular witch-hunts that Federici's reading of history charts, her theory helps consider contemporary conditions that reflect neocolonialism, particularly the outbreak of the 1990s Yugoslav war with the official destruction of socialism and transition to fully fleshed capitalism.6 If this violent transition casts women as witches, then the degree of power they held was [End Page 538] reaffirmed as a threat to the construction of the new capitalist nation-state.
The immediate recognition by women's groups in Belgrade and Zagreb of increased and new forms of domestic violence during the onset of the Yugoslav war found women classed as "national traitors" by an increasingly dominant, chauvinistic discourse that understood women as metaphoric markers of the national body, a symbolic battlefield in which women's bodies...
