Museum of Yugoslavia

Despite everything: Plan C (text by Natalija Paunić, introduction to Pivot by Margherita Raso, in the context
of Tributary, a show with Margherita Raso and Michael Ray-Von at Autokomanda, Belgrade)

Our project and exhibition started from an intuitive decision. We felt that, as people, we see something in
each other; some facets of our realities matched well together. Thematically, it then became about the present: what is it, that we share, have in common, in this very moment?

Therein comes theory. Margherita Raso, the author of the short film you’re about to see, sent us something
written by Pier Paolo Pasolini — Observations on the Long Take. In it, Pasolini uses the filmed assassination of John F. Kennedy to argue that each long take captures reality as a subjective present, bound to a single embodied point of view. Incomplete. Even when multiplied into many perspectives, reality remains fragmented—the simultaneity of multiple realities produce ambiguity and possibility, but not the truth. Meaning only emerges retrospectively, when these perspectives are ordered—through montage—into a
sequence that transforms the unstable present into a coherent past.

This process is not just cinematic but existential: life itself is an endless long take that lacks meaning while
unfolding. Only after the “cut”—as in, death,—can events be fixed, related, and thus understood. One can,
for example, think of the ending of The Sopranos here.

In cinema, A long take is a single continuous shot that lasts longer than typical editing rhythms, without cuts. It can be static or moving (tracking, handheld, etc.), but the key is duration and continuity—time unfolds in real time, without interruption. Thinking about this, also makes me think about the legacy of something supposedly dead — Yugoslavia, the longest take of my life. The fact that we are watching this, I called it short film, but in fact a long take, in the house of Yugoslavia’s legacy, carries both subjective and general significance. The very purpose of this house is to reconsider history, a task that seems more relevant than ever in trying times, like these — we need not more than empirical evidence that we are indeed in an era of neofascist tendencies in the world.

Speaking with Michael and Margherita, it was in fact them who reminded me of the third way. In the way they questioned who even has the right to speak about Yugoslavia, an entity with more facets than languages and countries of which it consisted, the number of which we still cannot agree on. What does it say about the current state of the world if it is a matter of potential offense to study or question history?

This brought us to the main point in question — the visual representations in our show at Autokomanda, and
the shape of what you’ll see here. Someone told me once that history is a helix, a spiral that repeats itself. It feels relieving to think of complex things in terms of simple geometry. Think about it: whenever times got hard, art got simple. Cubism and dada developed in parallel with World War One; abstract expressionism during the Second World War. Degenerate art, they called it, things that lacked representation and could then become dangerous in the simplicity they carry. A circle can be anything — a reflection of what you want it to be. So can the square. Facets of simple geometry — a circle — can also reveal the dark side of the moon.

Margherita’s video gives us an aerial view of Donauquelle — the supposed representative origin of the river
Danube. To think that something so obviously linear, water that travels from the mountain to the sea, can be
reduced to a circle baffles me. But it also reminds me that this is not a circle but — a cylinder. Or, as I mentioned already, a spiral: think of the water draining in your sink, spinning in continuity. A cylinder is a circle from the top, a rectangle from the side.

Things you do over and over again in a loop, and things you let go off, in a seemingly non-nonsense, linear
way, might in fact look different from different angles, with exactly the same consequence. What you don’t notice is time, which we always consider as an imperative force that can only move linearly. Like I just did, a simple human, from one edge of this platform to the other. And maybe you did not even notice. A long take.

Please enjoy Margherita Raso’s beautiful eye, or rather that of a Drone and a lens, the tools we use to make
sure reality is not only a one-sided thing.

Natalija Paunic