COURAGE

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His work changed during the 1990s for a number of reasons. On the local level the country was at war, on the global level a transformation was underway towards embracing new technologies. In his own words “this new environment led me to question my acquired knowledge and in relation to that and the economic crisis in Serbia, I saw the strengthening of my personal feelings and relationship toward immaterial art as my initiation, precisely through the local neo-avantgarde and avantgarde.”

He was active in the Apsolutno art collective from its inception in 1993 until 2005. The collective focused on new technologies, traditional art projects and video installations. In the second half of the 1990s, through artist residencies abroad, he acquired an insight into international events and contemporary social and cultural challenges in Europe. The political shift on 5 October 2000 – when the presidency of Slobodan Milošević was ended by mass demonstrations of Democratic Opposition of Serbia supporters – pointed to the needs and problems in art production that reacts to and yet is not rooted in the infrastructure and politics of culture, where it could interface with societal relations.

After acquiring experience abroad and learning about organizational models, in 2001, together with other members, he established New Media Center_kuda.org with a space with permanent infrastructure, where people could gather, share ideas and information and collaborate. This became the basis for new artistic production, a hub, an archive and a library. The mission of kuda.org is to organize artist-activists who challenge the use of new technologies in art and society and to create a platform for the critical analysis of technology and society.

Žarana Papić is remembered as one of the pioneers of Yugoslav feminism. She set high standards in theory and in activism, struggling for a more equal and fairer society.

As a trained sociologist, Žarana first encountered contemporary feminist theory at the Croatian Sociological Society conference in Portorož in 1976. In the same year, she attended the first course of Women’s Studies organized at the Inter-University Center Dubrovnik. Together with other colleagues, she organized the first international feminist conference in Eastern Europe in October 1978 in Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC). At this conference feminists from countries like England, Germany, France and Poland were invited for the first time, which also provided the opportunity for exchange with Yugoslav feminists.

The conference was titled: Drug-ca žensko pitanje, novi pristup? [Comrade woman. Women’s question- A new approach?] This conference represented a new feminist movement and theory, which was driven by hosting renowned participants from around Europe. The conference critically examined the dominant patriarchic system, and enabled the founding of a group of feminist-oriented theoreticians and activists in Yugoslavia. The conference signaled the beginning of a feminist critique of patriarchy in socialism.

Starting in 1977, Žarana Papić published articles on the subject of women’s issues. Together with Lydia Sklevicky from Zagreb, she edited the book Antropologija žene [Anthropology of Women] (1983), the first of its kind in Yugoslavia. The book inspired many young women to engage with this topic. In 1989, Žarana became an assistant in social anthropology at the Department of Sociology. She completed her doctorate degree with the thesis: “Dijalektika pola i roda - priroda i kultura u savremenoj socijalnoj antropologiji” [The dialectics of sex and gender - nature and culture in contemporary social anthropology] and earned the position of assistant professor at the same department. Žarana regularly taught social and cultural anthropology and gender studies as a special subject. In 1997 her doctorate was published under the title “Polnost i kultura: telo i znanje u savremnoj antropologiji” [Gender and Culture: Body and Knowledge in Contemporary Anthropology].

Žarana Papić belonged to the first post-war generation of Yugoslav feminists and had a huge influence on the development of younger generations.

Vasile Paraschiv was one of those who repeatedly protested publicly against the Ceauşescu regime, from 1968 to 1989, for which reason he was several times admitted to psychiatric hospitals and diagnosed as mentally ill. Despite the abuses he suffered, he continually testified about the use of this barbarous method of reducing to silence all those who criticised the communist regime in Romania. Vasile Paraschiv (born 3 April 1928, Clinceni, Ilfov county, died 4 February 2011, Bucharest) was by occupation an electromechanical worker in Ploieşti and, politically speaking, a member of the Communist Party from 1946. In his biographical record at the Sighet Memorial it is mentioned that in 1968, when many others had only just entered the party because Ceauşescu had condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Paraschiv renounced the status of Romanian Communist Party (PCR) member, because, according to his own account, he had come to understand that the party no longer represented the workers. Consequently he was arrested on 29 July 1969 and admitted to the psychiatric hospital at Urlaţi, Prahova county, but he was discharged after he declared a hunger strike. From this time on, the experience of psychiatric repression became recurrent in Vasile Paraschiv’s life, and in time he became the most well-known witness to this type of forced marginalisation of those who publicly criticised the communist regime, which was practised constantly in Romania as in the Soviet Union, and to which there are a considerable number of testimonies.

Neša Paripović was born in 1942 in Belgrade. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1969, and studied in the master class of Krsto Hegedušić in Zagreb from 1971 to 1973. He collaborated with the Group of Six Artists that gathered at the gallery of the Student Cultural Centre between 1971 and 1973. From 1975 to 1980, he worked with Group 143, which was dedicated to the linguistic and semiotic exploration of art. From 1991, he was a member of the theatre ensemble of Belgrade’s Dah Teater. He has shown his work at numerous group exhibitions in Yugoslavia, Serbia and abroad.  

Andrei Partoş (born 1949) is a journalist and musical commentator who practically founded Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti. Born in Braşov, Partoş graduated in psychology from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest and practised for ten years as a clinical psychologist. In 1985, he gave up this profession to dedicate himself entirely to musical and journalistic activities.

In 1979, the year in which he first set up Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti in a tiny doughnut shop, he made his first appearance on Romanian public radio, and he was soon invited to join its Youth division. After a pause of two years, he returned to Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti in 1982, and became the most representative face of the station, making an impression on a whole generation with his summer programmes through the 1980s. In the period 1985–1989, he was banned from national radio and TV.

Andrei Partoş is conscious that his activity at Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti before 1989 had a discreet but constant subversive character, which he describes in a nuanced manner: “I do not put what I did under the umbrella of a radical position. I was not an illegalist fighter. I was not a radical guy. But I was conscious that what I was doing there at Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti, together with my colleagues, was very different from what the official state culture offered. I knew, I was conscious that it was an alternative to the minus that young people got from public TV and public radio, and from public cultural institutions in general. And we were different; it was a distinct alternative.”

With regard to what he did consciously and subversively, Andrei Partoș comments: “above all I let the music speak instead of me.” As far as Romanian music was concerned, it was obtained through official channels: shops dealing specifically with music, the Electrecord record company, public radio, public TV. However, Romanian groups that were banned at the time were also played on Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti, and this was observed with displeasure by those charged with monitoring the radio station. “I would play Phoenix,” says Andrei Partoş, “although I wasn’t allowed to [they had been banned since they left for the West in 1976] – and I said I was playing Mircea Baniciu [the only member of the group who had not emigrated]. There was no proof cassette, but there were records and tapes there. Sometimes they came and scolded me for playing that sort of thing. They said they had ‘taken note’ – and they wanted to show that they were clever too. If they had wanted to make things very nasty, they could have done so – they would have found arguments for it. At the same time, what we had there was an outlet. A zone that functioned by a more permissive logic.” The group Phoenix was one of the most influential rock groups in pre-1989 Romania. It was first banned from radio and TV following the departure of Moni Bordeianu, one of the group members, to the USA in 1970. Then, the group reinvented itself, switching from being a Western-oriented rock group to becoming the main promoter of ethno-rock in Romania, which was apparently in tune with the cultural policy of the regime. They registered a huge success with this type of music, which was accompanied by verses inspired from pre-Christian folklore, and formulated in such a way as to imply double meanings. After their emigration and final interdiction, Phoenix reached a mythical status among Romanian rock groups, while their vinyl records were only sold on the black market.

When it comes to foreign music, however, the story of how it was acquired is itself an exemplary tale of Romanian communism. There were various methods, as Andrei Partoş recalls: “sometimes [it came] from the American Library: everything on the Top 100 Billboard. They would always give you the new songs that appeared in the charts. They wouldn’t give the tapes to just anyone – but they did give them to me. Generally I took them home, copied them, and took them back. The irony is that there was a Securitate investigation room just ten metres away. Then there was a trade in tapes copied by various guys that they used to call ‘mafiosos’ at the time because they didn’t know what the Mafia really was. I also had very good relations with some people who received music on vinyl records, and I copied those too. I should also mention the connection through people on aeroplanes and ships. Pilots, stewardesses, sailors – I gave them money and a list of what exactly I needed, and they would come with the music. In addition, around 1984, even the BTT (Biroul de Turism pentru Tineret – Youth Tourism Office) started to order music, through a contract with a company in Germany. They brought in singles, small vinyl discs, good ones. I was at a discotheque where you paid in hard currency, and when I was leaving, the boss there let me have several hundred singles.” At times this activity was not without its risks: “Those of us who bought foreign music, of course we were followed. But I had no problems with the people who were on the watch – because I wasn’t selling, just broadcasting. I was, so to speak, in the accepted zone.” Even some of the Securitate people asked for music from the West. It was said that one of those who gave approval, tacitly, to the large-scale broadcasting of foreign music was Nicu Ceauşescu, the eldest son of the presidential couple Elena and Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was practically a sort of unofficial “patron” of Radio Vacanța-Costinești. It is a fact that the acquisition of the latest-generation equipment that made the Vox Maris discotheque in Costineşti the most advanced and most sought-after discotheque in the summer season in Romania before 1989 was approved by the son of the then Romanian dictator.

Andrei Partoş was not a member of the Romanian Communist Party. “Seemingly my Hungarian and Jewish origins didn’t inspire sufficient trust, and I didn’t ask or want to be a member of the party anyway.” As regards his relations with various institutions of the communist regime, Andre Partoş adds: “I had a tense relationship with the Securitate. I always felt they were nearby, and sometimes I had dealings with them. In 1976, my sister emigrated to the USA – so I had an additional vulnerability. I don’t say of myself that I was a hero. Perhaps I was just a bit reckless, but no way a hero. I didn’t make crazy, radical gestures; I was a lucid, calculated, rational person. The music I played was my constant way of being subversive towards that regime. When I played ‘I want to break free’ [by Queen] at a discotheque or on Radio Vacanţa, everyone knew what we were referring to. And at the discotheque they sang along from the heart. Or on 23 August [the national day of Romania before 1989] I would put on ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath. What more was there for me to say? There was no need to say any more.”

Andrei Partoş believes in the benefits of recovering the memory of problematic times, and pleads this cause: “It is important to know what it was like then – both for us and for the generation that will come after us, because otherwise the history of this country will not be understood. For example, there were lots of drastic restrictions – and perhaps those of us who experienced the Costineşti episode are in a position to appreciate freedom differently. And to talk about it as something very precious. Apart from that place, Costineşti, you had all sorts of restrictions – the problem with water, with light, with food. At Costineşti you forgot them, you were in another world. And the memory of that world has to be told.”

Currently, Andrei Partoş is the presenter of a well-known marathon programme on Romanian public radio. This, he says, is a natural continuation of what he did, in the summers of the 1980s, on Radio Vacanţa. He believed then and now he is convinced that “radio must be dialogue. Not talking on your own, but talking with people, for people.”