The case of the closure of the Sarajevo Jazz Festival and everything that has been going on around its organization for years is a paradigm for incompetence, lack of ideas and indolence of managers and distributors of budget cultural alms and those involved in the process of creating cultural -art artistic movements in this environment. Needless to say: obstructions, malfeasance, clan greed and rudeness within the cultural and artistic field, miserable allocations to support projects and productions have led to a situation where the swamp is small and all crocodiles want to be helped in that swamp to be cultural figures and artists.

Fanfare and shards on the red carpet

In such a narrow framework, without any indication that things in the near future can move from a standstill (and how to move when the awareness of managers of the importance of this social branch does not exceed the village fairs and beer festivals, without understanding the fact that without a dynamic cultural field and artistic productions there is no society), nervousness, closure, narrowing the space for creative and creative impulse created a whining pot, as the only legitimate and known strategy for dealing with the deep problems of our culture as a whole. In that sense, everything that has happened here in the last three decades, every success, every progress, has been exclusively an incident created by the burning of a few conscious individuals.

The system never existed. The effort to raise the awareness of the citizens about what surrounds them, about the problems they face, through critical tools of the cultural-artistic practice, in order to find possible better solutions, has never reached the awareness of the decision makers. As ignorant and dumb as they may seem to us, they have in fact done everything to marginalize such processes, to reduce them to fanfare and chants on the red carpet, because the uneducated, culturally meaningless population can not act subversively or critically. It is unable to bring down existing value systems, change worn-out paradigms and shed light on new ways of doubting our role in this historic moment.

 Nothing new and authentic

On the other hand, the narrowing of cultural and artistic exchange at the state level, the lack of flow of creativity and ideas, has brought us here where we are. To the point where this society and this culture has not taken a step away from the ethno-nationalist narratives of the early 90s and the restrained return to what "once was." We have not produced anything authentic and original, we survive by recycling to the core of drained materials and forms, expecting an unknown high representative in the field of cultural and artistic production to appear and guide us with his divine hand and tell us where to go.

The depth of our historical delay and exclusion from modern trends testifies to the provincial provincialization, which, because every game as an essential movement of creation is killed with a hammer in the back of the head, as its basic product produced the culture of death and statics. Everything around us was regressing to such an extent that we had already penetrated deeply into the process of fundamental acculturation and disintegration.

The government does not care, nor will it

But no matter how hopeless things may seem, no matter how much the petty-trade political castes disguise any other point of view, deny resources and narrow the scope of action, can we afford to take such a situation as an alibi, as an excuse for stagnation and inactivity? ?

I have the impression that this is unacceptable in every way. To give up the destruction of cultural boredom, worn formal or stylistic patterns, the paradigm of the groaning pot means to accept total defeat. Although under normal circumstances the state would be obliged to invest some of the citizens' tax funds in the development of these areas, because that means its survival, our constant refusal to understand that the three-headed Dayton monster will not open space for thorough cultivation of cultural works , at the very least, seems tragicomic.

The question is, in the end, what are we and what can we do? I do not get the impression, I admit, that we have compensated for this limitation of systemic resources, in spite of everything, with our willingness to create and move the cultural and artistic sphere towards modernity. To the creations that are not painful, for which nothing is taboo and nothing is in itself untouchable for critical antinomies. Hence, because such processes are lacking, we have collectively suffered from apathetic whining, and all we know how to do today is to lament the authorities' shameful treatment of culture and art. And the government does not care, nor will it.

Нthe highest range

Until we connect along the lines of the common good and find our place in the non-systemic channels of creation, of the production of works and events, moaning will be our greatest achievement. Which means darkness. Under Stalin, the Russian avant-garde created monuments that today are rightly among the most important artistic achievements of mankind. They knew they would end up in the Gulag, but they knew that the human need for creation, daydreaming and imagination was not what we were encouraged by the applause and government grants. But the deep inner urge to express what is deeply anchored in our essence as beings.

Taken from "Liberation" from Sarajevo