Making ourselves understandable.

Existing political institutions and practices have impoverished our possibilities to think beyond known political concepts.

It seems impossible to step out from prescripted social roles. In this situation, art has to reinvent ways to repoliticise public space it represents. In other words, art has to avoid to be just another representation of current relationship of power.

Oliver Frljjic will be leading a workshop in which he will introduce methodology and strategies he puts in place in order to reintroduce politics in Theatre from the perspective of content and representation.

A starting point will be the problems between Flemish and Walloons' communities; how to explain the roots of this problems to somebody who is from a completely different cultural context?

In collaboration with La Balsamine.

Oliver Frljic

Oliver Frljić was born in 1976 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but the war caused him to relocate to Croatia.

He studied philosophy, religion and theatre direction and was soon considered to be one of the most innovative and controversial Croatian theatre director, moving freely from street theatre to performances in established institutions, from small intimate spaces to the large National Theatre.

Through raising public interest in engaged theatre, Oliver Frljić has consistently sought to establish and spread public dialogue on essential but taboo topics, such as responsibility for war crimes, collective oblivion and culture of impunity, and radical ideologies.

Time Out Croatia

"Opinionated, taboo-breaking and internationally lauded, theatre director Oliver Frljić appeared in the Croatian press more often than any other cultural figure during the course of 2012.

Born in the Bosnian town of Travnik in 1976, Frljić has made a habit of touching society’s raw nerves. His 2008 version of Euripides’s Bacchae contained uncomfortable parallels with crimes committed during the Homeland War of 1991-95, and was notoriously removed from the repertoire by the Croatian National Theatre in Split. No less provocative was 2009 Turbo-Folk, a cocktail of sex, violence and Serbian folk-pop (co-written with Borut Šeparović of Montažstroj) that went down a storm with young liberal audiences and offended the cultural mainstream at the same time.

Since then Frljić has barely stopped to catch breath: his plays have rarely been off the repertoire of Zagreb’s main theatres, and success in Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia has turned Frljić into the most talked-about director in the ex-Yugoslav region. One of his most-travelled productions is the autobiographical I Hate the Truth! (originally produced for Zagreb’s &TD Theatre), in which different members of the Frljić family (played by actors) discover that they have profoundly different memories about precisely what happened in their collective lives. Pushing unpleasant memories under the carpet has become a way of life in the societies of the ex-Yugoslav region, and it is the spread of this voluntary amnesia that has become Frljić’s main theme.

His abrasive, socially critical play Zoran Đinđić (dealing with the assassination of Serbian prime-minister Đinđić in 2003), performed in Belgrade in 2012, provoked mass walk-outs and standing ovations in equal measure. As an arch provocateur in a region whose collective conscience is still in need of a good pricking, Frljić is likely to remain in the news for some time to come."

Time Out Croatia

Illustration

The Cifas asks contemporary artists to illustrate its communication. Carl Roosens illustrated the workshop "Making Ourselves Understandable".

I do illustration, engraving, singing, video and animation. I made several books and animation films with Noémie Marsily. Recently I released an album in French on the Brussels label Humpty Dumpty Records.