What does it mean to be a witness? To participate tacitly in violence? 

A woman dancing in the sweaty, partying crowd suddenly recognizes the DJ. She carefully studies his movements, comparing them then and today, and she gradually makes out the face of a war criminal who was never convicted: “the man who kicks the dead”. 

APHASIA is an internationally acclaimed production by visual artist Jelena Jureša, actress and dancer Ivana Jozić, former soloist of the Jan Fabre/Troubleyn company, and experimental musicians Alen and Nenad Sinkauz.

Its starting point is the question of complicity in war crimes. Jelena Jureša examines this issue through a war photo taken in Bosnia in 1992. It shows a Serbian paramilitary soldier wearing combat boots and kicking a woman lying on the ground. The same man turns out to be a DJ in Belgrade’s Goa scene thirty years later. In her exploration of this man’s identity, Jureša finds an expression for the unspeakable. The audience becomes a co-player of the evening set in an immersive club atmosphere. The musicians Alen and Nenad Sinkauz and the dancer Ivana Jozić stand on pedestals; the space is filled with ambient and techno music and Jozić’s macho gestures. The spectators become witnesses to the war crime APHASIA is about.

The medical term ‘aphasia’ describes the inability to form words and sentences. For Jureša, the title is an effective analogy: how does collective memory come into being and how do we find a language for it? How are war crimes and guilt dealt with? In the course of this haunting evening, it becomes increasingly clear that those questions not only apply to the Yugoslav wars, but are just as relevant to the current atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza.