Portraying the Balkans

Under a packed gazebo in Mantua's Piazza Sordello, Anna Dietzel and Christian Elia push the audience to truly explore the Balkans while presenting their latest works: Dietzel’s graphic novel Qui io non conto (I don’t matter here) and Elia’s editorial project, the biannual magazine R/Est, structured in eight thematic issues. Using different mediums, the two authors dismantle the clichés and stereotypes through which we understand this region, offering a more varied, rich and true-to-life depiction of this area of the world.

As Elia argues, this region of the world is often cast in a dark, violent, and stigmatising light. Today’s Belgrade is crowded with Serbian nationalists attending Ratko Mladić’s funerals. But it has also been the theatre of massive student protests against a corrupt government. Only ne of these crowds tends to occupy media space.

Here media narratives and the school system tend underplay or even hide the ways in which Italy and the Balkans have been entangled throughout history, “as if Italy turned its back on the Adriatic Sea." For instance, we often forget that, in 1941, the Croatian island of Rab, a popular destination for seaside and nature tourism, came under Italian occupation, and that in 1942 Italian authorities established a concentration camp where about 6,500 civilians were killed in the first eight months alone, often starving to death.

Part of R/Est's mission is to uncover these stories. Without these efforts, we would risk a “touristification without memory.” Besides, R/Est publishes works in Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Albanian, which often struggle to find editorial space. For Elia, translation is a political act, a practice that can give every area of the world the right to be the subject and not the object of its own narration.

Anna Dietzel tells these stories from an autobiographical perspective. Dietzel’s grandmother Miranda grew up in a loving family who taught her to be proud of her Yugoslav origins. But she also went to a fascist school. There Slavic people were 'barbarians', a steretoype normalised and enforced by racial laws.

When Miranda decided to emigrate to Nova Gorica to go and see Yugoslavia for herself, what she finds does not correspond to the idealized image of Tito’s Yugoslavia her family painted. Among other things, she discovers that she does not know the official Slovenian language, but rather a peripheral dialect that her parents spoke.

Dietzel also shared some details on her working method and on the reasoning behind some of her stylistic choices, such as the decision to depict her characters as anthropomorphic cats, as well as some stories behind the photographic study of Nova Gorica on which her drawings were based.