A R C H I V E2 0 0 0  
.18
  Dan Oki
Vice Versa
  Croatia/Netherlands 2000
videotape – 60:23 min
 
War destroys not only human lives and forms of human interaction, it also destroys people's history and future. It divides the world into 'here' and 'there', into 'we' and 'they', into 'before', 'during' and 'after'. It changes ideas of 'mine' and 'thine' as a result of which people can feel justified in confiscating the property of others, a moral shift that occurs at both the level of the individual and of the state. Even the path through the wood on which a man walks to summer cottages is altered by war. The cottages have been completely stripped of anything that could be taken away and they bear the traces of previous inhabitants and other times. The man finds clothing in a bag standing there. He changes clothes, puts his own in the bag and his image of himself and the world changes. Oki was brought up with the idea of respect for human life as an implicit and explicit message, but as the tide of history has swept him into the middle of a war, he seeks a solution to his inability to exist in the midst of so much destruction by writing love letters to himself. He preserves his spirit through physical self-destruction and finds a way out from the military machine, but not from the war itself. It rages around him, infecting the world and penetrating everyone's actions and stories. Until it happens to you, the fact that everything is changed by war remains an abstraction, a story told to you by others, the significance of which you cannot comprehend to its fullest extent. Waging war has also become an abstraction through advanced technology, degenerating into a costly computer game: the world has been mapped out and can be destroyed without knowing who and what the victim is. A virtual war that stands in stark contrast to those experiencing it: the man swims in the sea that lies there silent and unaffected, but his world is permanently altered.

– Carla Hoekendijk
Camera: Jelena Nazor, Dan Oki
With: Jelena Rouge, Ivan Sebastian
Thanks to: Marija, Ivana, Atsushi, Sandra

Dan Oki, 1965, Zadar (Croatia)
Lives and works in Amsterdam (Netherlands) en Zagreb (Croatia)

Top
  Divine Beings