Sandra Križić Roban on Infertile Grounds series by Sandra Vitaljic

The earth in Kljuc Brdovecki is brown and friable; on the surface it is mixed in with grey and white round stones. At first glance, or if we look at the photograph from a distance, it seems like a ploughed field on which unpicked crops have remained. At the moment of shooting, Sandra Vitaljic was standing completely calmly on the edge of the field, gaze fixed on what was just in front of her. No kind of additional details push their way into the scene, nothing either defines or describes it. Only a blade of grass at the bottom edge hints at the usual changes that take place according to the season. The other shot from the same place is very different. The thicket into which she has come is dominated by diverse kinds of plants, interwoven tendrils of unkempt, conical, tent-like constructions that have been created by nature. One senses the author’s dubiety about which way to turn, her uncertainty in finding a way out of this place.

Spaces. Spaces of history, myths, narrative, everyday spaces; places steeped in traces, in which we seek for the possible, the inherited remembered or retailed identities, uncertain of what we are coming upon.

Almost everyday we pass by places at which, once, some particular events took place. Described in chronicles, some remembered by the older folks, some come down to us by traditions, or by the aid of reports only recently made available to the public. Are there any mechanisms for the automatic assumption of their meanings? Is it possible to identify with them today, take over something from the experiences that once in history, close or distant, defined them? The stories that describe them are as numerous as the steps that have passed over them, the steps of persons from the whole unconscious identity that Sandra Vitaljic has endeavoured to find in them.

We often treat places at which once in history crimes have happened in kid gloves, seemingly assured by the gap in time that has led to an unjust and inappropriate equalisation of sufferings. Ten years back Sandra Vitaljic started to explore place of mass executions and hushed but not forgotten graves, wandering how it is possible to photograph such things at all. She is interested in whether at some places there is some mark, some aura, anything at all that we might feel even if we don’t notice it. Like many other photographers who take an interest in places of conflict, loss and sorrow, she explores the nature of wartime events and the changes that have affected the space that surrounds us. Although at first sight unobtrusive, these sufferings have conditioned certain aspects of social psychology and the identity of individuals who call upon justice or expect the ultimate end of that part of history to which long ago a defined point of view should have been taken.

Spaces once caught up in war, places of mass graves, where died the hopes of captives, who have sometimes been known to hold tightly onto photographs of their families even after death; quiet places, in no way particularly defined. The new path that leads to Ovcara – a grey paved path that turns to the left and vanishes behind the trees – “is mirror imaged” in the dusty path in the centre of which the grass is worn down and that turns to the right. It leads to the nearby empty field over which the birds, as it seem, avoid flying. The softness of its form in no way hints of the horror hidden below the waving stems of wheat. I recall the stories of the Vukovar woman who led me around the places of mass executions in this area and the incredible documentary of her statement of how pilots had noticed changes in the topography of Ovcara until the dark liquid mass began to work its way up from the ground, confirming the suspicions. How can this be recorded, how told to anyone at all? Will the young plants among which Sandra Vitaljic noticed the crumpled remains of a flag in any way contribute to the identity of this place? Can photographs bear the weight of memory that is at once personal and general, local and national?

It is possible to address photos from the series Infertile Grounds from the existential position and to accept Barthes’ adventure that is in its very nature uncertain. For in these photos too we can tell the being-together of two elements – of interest that is the product of the knowledge, moral and political culture of the observer, the recorder, and the punctum, the sudden knowledge of meaning that is mediated to us by intuition, with the help of the title of the works and the occasional written comment of the artist.

“Each landscape, no matter how calm and lovely, conceals a substratum of disaster”, stated land artist Robert Smithson.¹ The Susan Silas series of photographs called Helmbrechts Walk, 1998-2003 shows melancholy landscapes, empty paths, mournful forests, rails that lead nowhere.² We might ask of these photos too, whether we would understand them if we did not happen to know what she took. Is the author’s re-taking of the path along which, in 1945, six hundred Jewish women from various parts of occupied Europe were forced to walk understandable by the mere act of looking at these poetic scenes? Landscape, in the opinion of W. J. T. Mitchell “is read as a compensation for and screening off of the actual violence perpetrated there.”³ And indeed, much of it looks idyllic at first glance, the landscapes slowly merge below the late sunbeams, new plants sprout in the fields, in the forests the leaves have covered the death pits to which it is today practically impossible to get. Collective amnesia is a tribute of a politics unready to look realistically at causes and effects, or of populist demands that erase the character of the victim and a given place and burden their meaning in an inappropriate way. But it seems that the places that Sandra Vitaljic photographs, just like those that Susan Silas shot, function as spaces at which it is possible to sense the violence but that at the same time do not accept oblivion.

The places taken are not dumb, for the nature that Sandra Vitaljic points her lens at tells us something. The landscape resists forgetfulness, it has survived the deliberate destruction of memorial slabs, healed the desecration of the barks of the trees. Knowledge about the past is neither accurate nor precise, writes Tvrtko Jakovina.⁴ Landscape has no capacity to tell tales, cannot construct a story or affect the course of remembering and forgetting. It comes before us via photographs that are devoid of the usual political rhetoric, compromising signs (often the case at Bleiburg) and the presence of people. We feel them in that mist achieved with shifts of (or rather, decentralising) the lens,⁵ which works like the latent energetic charge of a given place. We see them in the distance, like the tape in national colours that edges Bleiburg field. We sense them in the scene shot in a forest thicket with which the photographer mediates to us the terror remaining among the branches, before the victims stepped out onto the clearing that at the moment of shooting is nevertheless lit up by the sun. We invoke the uncertainty of movement in the motif of the tracks; wonder whether they lead anywhere at all.

Joyce wrote that places remember events. They are part of the emotional map of the world on which, at least speciously, we do not notice the constructions of social and political relations that at a moment in history determined their meaning. In her search for them, Sandra Vitaljic endeavours to understand their individuality, become aware of and recognise them; she refrains from post-hoc constructed balances of belligerent parties, does not even out, does not comment. Her glance is warm but distanced. It searches for possible parts of the landscape that are capable of taking part in the creation of the national identity. But she does not find them, for the places do not change their identities, and have long since absorbed the traces of mourning. Mysteries that have evaded oblivion have remained available to her.

¹ Tacita Dean, Jeremy Millar, Place, Thames&Hudson, London, 2005., 90.

² Brett Ashley Kaplan, "Susan Silas. On 'Helmbrechts Walk", Camera Austria, 98/2007., 38–49.

³ Quoted in Kaplan, op. cit. (note 1).

⁴ Tvrtko Jakovina, "Zašto nam je Srb važan?" [http://h-alter.org/vijesti/hrvatska/zasto-nam-je-srb-vazan; withdrawn 4. 11. 2009.]

⁵ The photographer uses tilt and shift lens with the capacity of decentralising perspective.