I’m Too Sad To Tell You, Bosnian Girl

The lecture performance investigates the practice of self-reflection which, along with the practice of self-presentation, forms one condition for the contemporary constitution of the subject. The space of self-reflection is viewed as one that eludes binary divisions, which refuses to draw a boundary between subject and object and collapses the roles of director and actor into one another. The time of self-reflection is understood as a time of eternal present that envisages an obsessive repetition of the same performative acts, in which the subject can fall into an ecstasy, an excess of presence. The concept of space and time defined as a result of this follows a model of civilization intended to produce security and control among equal citizens, but it simultaneously produces brutality and violence.

The precondition for successful self-presentation is its failure at the point at which all human existence is defined: it is the nonhuman, which is blamed for transforming the civilizing model of space-time into a zone of barbarism, underdevelopment and uncontrolled affects and which should be kept at all times prisoner in its own retrograde past.
Ana Hoffner