قطعاتی از هنر در محل کار: هنر درمانی در یوگسلاوی سابق

That which is not expressed Will be forgotten That which has been forgotten Will happen again —Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1978) The words of this poem resonate with our work in the former Yugoslavia where war spanned 4 years, and are particularly pertinent in a war described by Ed Vulliamy (1994) as “dominated by history,” where the past eclipses the present struggle and history dominates every interview. In presenting fragments of art at work, it has become essential to consider this backdrop. The years 1992 to 1995 saw the destruction of Yugoslavia as a European country. The war arose out of the process of change in modern Europe: a change in the balance of power and a move from communism to democratization. The central conflict which destabilized Yugoslavia was between, on the one hand, the desire to create and consolidate (in the case of Serbia) a state in which one national group was dominant, and on the other, the perceived or demonstrable vulnerability of minority populations in these projected states. (Glenny, 1993, p. 235) Glenny’s words describe a complex and multi-faceted conflict and provide a clue as to why there has been a general confusion in people’s minds as to what was actually happening in this European country. Understanding this war as either a civil conflict characterized by chronic strife, high personal involvement, poor definition of the threat and political, social and economic oppression or as conventional warfare where the enemy (threat) is clearly defined (conflict between nations carried out by force) is important in attempting to decipher the external elements that have psychologically influenced the individuals (both children and adults) with whom we worked. The overlapping of the collective and the individual where the political becomes the personal is pertinent from whichever angle this war is considered. Derek Summerfield (1995) has attempted to understand trauma in the context of political conflict generally. His thoughts are relevant to this particular context: that it is the social fabric itself which is the central target “and in its damaged state remains the context in which large numbers of people must manage their distress and cope with their fractured lives” (Summerfield, 1995, p. 356). The process of arrest, torture, release, flight and exile involves trauma at many levels. In so far as humans are social beings, this trauma can be understood, not only as an assault on the individual person, but as an assault on the links and communications between people and the patterns of relationships through which people define themselves and give meaning to their lives. Psychologists have tried to understand the psychological effects of the war on children in Bosnia. Those working for UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), for example, collected the following data by sampling 1,505 school-aged children in Sarajevo in June and July 1993 as part of UNICEF’s War Trauma Screening programme: • 23% of children have been forced to leave their own town or village during the war • 7% of children reported that family members have been wounded or killed during the war • 46% have seen dead bodies • 79% have been in a situation during the war in which they thought they would be killed • 97% have experienced shelling very near by • 96% have had their homes attacked or shelled • 55% have been shot at by snipers • 11% have experienced serious food and water shortage.

The therapist is not there to provide reassurance or to give hope. There is nothing to hope for, nothing to hold onto; the therapist must be able to descend into that nothingness without holding on even to ‘therapy’ or ‘art’. It is a matter of survival: when all illusions are gone what is there to live for? The therapist is the one who is willing to ask that question with the client, to be there while the other struggles to answer it, to witness the struggle, and to receive the words and the images which express it. (Levine, 1992, p. 113) We found at both Hrastnik and Prvic an extreme situation in which art played a role as a subtle intervention. The pervading sense of emptiness which existed particularly at Prvic was extremely difficult to work and live with and yet it became increasingly clear to us that the art sessions could not and should not attempt to fill this, despite the constant discomfort we experienced at not being good enough or offering enough. In both places, the art sessions, nevertheless, attempted to provide a space in which a seed could be planted which would have a life after we left, and upon which each individual could build.