Afterwards

2006 - 2009

Between emptiness and in-form

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There's nothing to see. Bushes, brushwood, disconnected fragments of roads going nowhere in particular, apparently suspended in the void of the scrubland. A landscape that has a hard time identifying with any sort of character: an almost colorless landscape, without any seasons, temporally indefinable,uncertain what time of year it is, a day balanced on that knife-edge between winter and spring when nature tells us nothing about itself.

The horizon is low, thick, dense and obscured by brushwood, by unadorned branches and dry leaves. The eye comes to rest on an imprecise point, midway between the foreground and the background, yet in itself neither foreground nor background, both of which are as though lost in visual uncertainty.

It is hard to imagine anything further from and more unlike picture-postcard landscapes, panoramic views and the type of photographthat focuses on details. There is simply nothing here to show: no "view" and no detail.

This is what the artist Ana Opalić has written about the Afterwards series (2006), the most direct precedent of the work she has been doing recently in Bosnia, on the sites of mass graves or in places where mass executions took place during the war.

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"Afterwards is a series of photographs taken on the hills above Dubrovnik, where there were direct conflicts between Croatian and the Yugoslav army (on the Srđ-Strinčijera-Bosanka-Žarkovica roads) during the Homeland war. Fifteen years after the first conflicts, after the area was declared clear of mines, I decided to take a series of photographs walking down paths connecting the demarcation line. I wanted to know what I would find in places which, to my mind, had been crime scenes since the beginning of the war. Is it possible to recognize or perceive such a place?

And was the unease which I felt walking down those paths produced by my idea of what had taken place - perhaps exactly here - or is it possible to feel the past and the story of a place?"

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So this is the scene of a crime, but of a distant crime, one that was committed some time ago and can now only be perceived through the historical awareness of what happened there; in other words through our suggestion, our imagination.

Ana Opalić has created the conditions for a significant hiatus to intervene between vision and knowledge on the basis of a strategy that has already amply tried and tested by a variety of artistic idioms in the course of the twentieth century. In other words, it is the audience that comprises this theatre, while the image escapes it, or at least refuses to confirm it...

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Martina Corgnati

(excerpts from the text published in the exhibition catalogue)

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