Passports

Amongst broad layers of the populations in BiH and Serbia, I found over the years, the SFRY passport allowed people to articulate resentment of their current entrapment in terms of their own past, both remembered and misremembered. Notwithstanding its uniqueness on a global stage, they asserted an entitlement to smooth visa-free mobility like the one they had lost. The red passport allowed everyone who was old enough, regardless of how much they had actually travelled, to say that they could have.'Normal lives' in Yugoslavia, then, were not only recalled in terms of living standards, order and welfare, but also of what we could call a sense of geopolitical dignity. Here, the red passport joined forces with Tito.

It is perhaps the ability of art to translate the singular into the plural that provides the greatest potential for art to affect change outwith its own borders. Each individual action mentioned in this text, taken out of their contexts and as isolated incidents, are simply acts of singular citizens having their passport stamped, receiving a counterfeit passport or dubiously obtaining an EU passport. Once viewed in their artistic contexts, however, they become plural, one passport being cancelled (in the case of Jarrar) becoming a symbol of the denial of citizenship in Palestine, one marriage (in the case of Ostojić) standing as an emblem highlighting the plights of innumerable citizens in a comparable position to the artist.