Pinksummer is pleased to present

Bojan Šarčević

What remains is the threat

Opening 02.10.26 | 6 pm

Pinksummer | Palazzo Ducale, Genoa

“Dear Antonella,

Thank you for all these questions. They are really interesting, and they made me think again about many things around this work. You are touching on quite different aspects of violence, and I’m not sure I can answer all of them in an erudite or theoretical way. I can probably speak more simply from where the work came from and from my own experience.

You are right to make the connection with Vieille Lâcheté, the exhibition we did together a few years ago. That exhibition was dealing with monstrosity, and I see What remains is the threat very much as a continuation of it. Maybe my concerns have just become more specific. After monstrosity, somehow, comes violence. And then trauma, anxiety, fear, and the question of how these things become embedded in our bodies, in our upbringing, and finally in the ordinary structures of our lives.

I think what interests me now is precisely that violence is not exceptional. Of course there is spectacular violence—war, murder, massacre—but there is also this much quieter violence that is constantly around us and that we hardly recognize anymore. It is institutional, economic, political, psychological. It becomes part of how society functions.

Maybe this is why the idea of the banality of evil remains so powerful to me. Ratko Mladić is obviously an extreme example, but what is frightening is not only the individual who commits these acts. It is everything around him that makes them possible: the people who accept them, rationalize them, administer them, or simply continue with their lives while they are happening.

And perhaps this is even more strange today because we have this constant proximity to violence. We carry it around on our screens. We can watch images of a war or a destroyed city and, literally a few seconds later, look at a restaurant, an exhibition, a pair of shoes, somebody’s holiday. There is almost no transition anymore. These completely different realities coexist on the same surface.

I find this very disturbing. Not because I think people are indifferent or somehow morally worse than before. I think there is simply a limit to what one can absorb. You cannot live permanently with the full awareness of all the violence taking place in the world. It would be unbearable. So we normalize it. We integrate it. We find ways of continuing.

And this is maybe where the works come from. The violence in them does not really arrive as an explosion. It has already happened, or perhaps it is still happening, but somewhere inside the structure. The folded metal, the empty leather jackets, the medieval scenes of devouring, the snakes—they are not illustrating violence. They are more like things that have absorbed it.

The medieval reliefs interested me for exactly this reason. These images of bodies being devoured look monstrous to us now, but they were also instruments of moral organization. They showed what happens to those who fall outside a certain order. In this sense the monster is already administrative. It tells you where you belong and what happens if you don’t.

And perhaps our own systems are not so different. They are simply much more polished.

This also makes it difficult for me to believe that violence belongs to some primitive past that civilization is gradually leaving behind. I’m not sure I have a Hobbesian view of humanity, and I don’t necessarily believe that people are fundamentally violent. But I do think violence has been present throughout human civilization and that it has an extraordinary capacity to adapt. It changes language, appearance and technology. Sometimes it becomes less visible precisely because it has become more integrated.

Even something as ordinary as the phone in our hands connects us to extraction of resources somewhere else, to labor conditions we don’t see, perhaps even to conflicts taking place thousands of kilometres away. So the difficulty is that we are not outside these structures. Our own comfort participates in them. Culture participates in them too. I certainly do.

This awareness has become much stronger for me in the last years. Ecologically, financially, politically, everything feels somehow heightened. Maybe when I was younger I still had this rather naive idea that certain forms of violence belonged to history. Which is strange, because I actually experienced war and displacement myself. But perhaps precisely because of that, for a long time I needed to imagine it as something that had happened, something one could leave behind.

Now I’m less sure.

Your last question touches this most directly for me. How does the person next door suddenly become the enemy? How does a colleague, neighbour or friend become somebody who has to disappear in order for an identity to survive? I saw something of this kind happening in Yugoslavia. I still don’t really understand it. What frightens me is how quickly identities that seemed relatively fluid can become rigid when they are organized through fear. Once people are convinced that their existence depends on the exclusion of somebody else, violence can suddenly appear not only acceptable but necessary.

And this is why I don’t really know whether conflict itself is the origin of violence. Conflict can also be productive. Difference can be productive. Perhaps violence begins when conflict can no longer tolerate complexity—when the other has to become completely other, when ambiguity becomes unbearable, when somebody has to be reduced to a category before they can be excluded or destroyed.

So yes, in that sense violence might be a shortcut. It eliminates complexity.

But I hesitate to make a general theory out of any of this. I don’t have answers to these questions, and I don’t think the exhibition proposes any. The works came more as a reaction, something that accumulated for a long time and then coagulated at a certain moment into an urgent matter.

The sentence “We live among the remnants, not as survivors but as archivists of unspoken catastrophes” probably comes from this feeling. We are surrounded by the consequences of things we did not necessarily experience directly and yet somehow inherited. Buildings, objects, images, institutions, even gestures can carry histories that are no longer visible. We live inside these layers. The catastrophe does not disappear when the event is over. It changes form.

This is what I mean when I say that violence is a structure rather than an event. It persists and circulates. It becomes architecture, bureaucracy, image, habit, sometimes even beauty.

But I also don’t want to finish on the idea that everything is inevitably violent and there is no possibility of anything else. Interestingly, the works I’m beginning now are moving somewhere completely different. For the first time in a long while I’m working again with images, and I’ve become interested in the origin of life—how life appears, organizes itself and becomes increasingly complex.

Maybe this is simply my own way of moving away from this cycle. Or maybe after spending so much time thinking about destruction, I needed to think about what comes before it, or what might come after it.

o perhaps there is some hope in there after all. There has to be, somehow.

Bojan”

1. In your recent work, you look at violence as a continuum, as something structural: violence seems to be understood as extending far beyond the realm of exception, traceable in the darker areas of what Roberto Beneduce, in a compelling essay on the anthropology of violence, calls “the polished corridors of the humanitarian West,” drawing on the concepts of illness, deviance, and exclusion. Actual massacres, by contrast, take place in a shifting elsewhere. How would you define or classify violence, considering the plurality of its manifestations?

2. Do you think it is too naive to imagine a form of politics detached from power: one that is not founded by power and on power, but rather on the premise of equality among all beings, against the logic of the sovereignty of the modern state (Giorgio Agamben’s “destituent power”)? A politics free from colonial aggression and the urge for conflict? Is conflict the root of violence?

3. It seems that you have a pessimistic, Hobbesian view of human nature—homo homini lupus. Do you believe that violence is ontological and only destructive, or do you think that violence can be a regulated and ritualized aggression—what ethology might define “combativeness”—taking on benign characteristics and pointing toward the idea of cooperation in nature, both among humans and among other animal species?

4. Don’t you think that violence is some sort of shortcut that denies the complexity of conflict?

5. In 2013, the American psychologist Steven Pinker published a major study on the decline of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argues that the era we are living through is the most peaceful in human History. The works in What remains is the threat, first presented by BQ in Berlin and then by Pinksummer, have a medieval aura and evoke the subtle specter of a powerful form of violence, despite being contemporary in both their content and perhaps their technique. In the Middle Ages, those who did not know how to love and hate with all the passion possible were marginalized. What do you mean when you say, “We live among the remnants, not as survivors but as archivists of unspoken [unspeakable?] catastrophes”?

6. The philosopher, astrophysicist, and engineer Erich Jantsch argues in Design for Evolution that the universe is not a static machine but systematically self-organizes into new processes, inventing new levels of complexity; and that this is true of life, of the mind, and of societies. The concept of “gliding evolution” suggests that violence both archaicizes and modernizes itself in a provisional dance across space and time. Don’t you think that modern violence, predatory selfishness, and destructiveness have something to do with our inability to understand the layered nature of change, especially those technological in nature? The underage crime rate has never been higher. Is it possible for the human social system to attempt co-evolutionary trajectories in relation to the speed of technological development?

7. We have read that serial killers are disappearing. The decade spanning the late 1960s to the late 1980s was the golden age of this kind of criminal. They were initially called “monsters”, using language to create a radical otherness in relation to the concept of the human. In fact, some of them became celebrities of sorts, and in 1992 a sticker album devoted to serial killers, entitled Bloody Visions, was released. The emergence of criminal profiling, linking violence and perversion to society, together with DNA, mobile phones, security cameras—in short, traceability—has made it possible to predict future murders. Plus, nobody hitchhikes anymore.

   Bret Easton Ellis, in The Shards, argues that serial killers no longer exist because society has changed, and that today mass killings are the vogue in the West. Some criminologists argue that repeated killing belongs to the primordial mechanisms of human survival. Do you think that the maps are short of blind spots, or has this kind of crime simply become obsolete?

8. When we were together in Genoa, for your solo exhibition Vieille Lâcheté, which in any case seems strongly connected to What remains is the threat, you spoke to us for the first time about fleeing Belgrade when you were very young. General Ratko Mladić died a few days ago. Why do wars sometimes transform the person next door, a colleague, a spouse, or a friend into a stranger, a threat to be expelled or even eliminated? Why do we kill in an attempt to preserve our identity?