COURAGE

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‘Goli Otok’ 1–5 is a five-volume book of memoirs comprising almost 3,000 pages.  It includes the memories of Mihailović himself as well as of others who survived Goli Otok. Mihailović explores the topic by combining research and a journalistic approach. His research efforts and work to shape the material into a book took a full 37 years. He has mentioned several times that he modelled his work on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his ‘Gulag Archipelago’. ‘I chose a journalistic form of dialogue about Goli Otok with people who had survived it themselves, and who are able to formulate some conclusions about this terrible experience.’ He had gathered, ‘ten people whom he respected, liked, and who trusted him’.[1]

Mihailović admitted that he had waited a long time for someone else to tackle the topic. ’I expected, maybe for a whole twenty years, that some other person would tackle this, someone with sufficient talent and patience to commit to it, but that didn’t happen, and then I concluded that I would have to start myself.’ He believes that Goli Otok is not particularly topical today and is not given enough attention. This is one of the reasons why he decided that he would take up the task of writing about Goli Otok himself. Another lies in the significance of the topic in his personal history. ‘For me, this is directly relevant. I don’t have the right to allege that it’s important for everyone, because that would, perhaps, be immodest. But it’s important to me, why I, as a young person, was arrested and sent away to Goli Otok,’ Mihailović explained.

Through the combination of documents and oral history, Mihailović has created an original work – a ‘history-memory’, a memoir based on facts and real-life testimonies – and in this sense the five-volume opus represents an indispensable work for investigating the history of Goli Otok.    

Mihailović’s five-volume work is accessible to researchers and is kept in the Goli Otok collection in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade.

[1] http://www.rtv.rs/sr_lat/kultura/dragoslav-mihailovic-o-petoknjizju-goli-otok_324436.html

Vytenis Andriukaitis made the university’s flag according to a description by Viktoras Kutorga. All the parts of the flag, like the colour and the emblems, had a meaning, and the composition had a philosophical basis. The colour yellow symbolised a microcosm, and black symbolised a macrocosm. The colour green meant harmony and ecology, and red symbolised the people’s humanistic altruism. The flag has survived until today. Vytenis Andriukaitis keeps it in his office in the EU Commission in Brussels.

(reconstruction by György Galántai, based on George Maciunas’s idea, 2001)

George Maciunas’s idea and work made in 1976 was reconstructed by György Galántai on the occasion of the exhibition Impossible Realism in 2001. Maciunas imagined the Flux Ping Pong as a ping pong table with rackets being made unusable for playing ping pong: one half of the table has a big hole, the other half is not flat and not horizontal; the rackets are superposed with interfering objects and surfaces. Though the equipment is thus unusable, using it to play guarantees an extraordinary experiment. The audience had the opportunity to try to play on the table in the exhibition entitled Fuxus East – Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe, which was organized in several venues; in the Fluxus (Sport) Events in 2011 at Galántai House in Kapolcs; and a different version was also on show in the frameworks of a project in Sidney in 2013 (http://artpool.hu/2013/fluxpingpong/).

http://www.artpool.hu/lehetetlen/real-kiall/nevek/galantai_pingpong.html

(Presented at Fluxus Flags on the Liszt Ferenc square, Liszt Ferenc square, Budapest, September 25-October 11, 1992)