Aphasia

In medical vocabulary ‘aphasia’ refers to the sufferer’s difficulty in finding words or losing the ability to speak. Tracing the line between Belgian colonialism, Austrian anti-Semitism and the war in Yugoslavia, Jelena Jureša focusses on the absurdity that arises from the collective silence, the compartmentalisation of historical events and the difficulty of speaking about a shared, troubled past. Strategically ignoring the crimes stemming from continuous and structural processes of dehumanisation remains a fundamental characteristic of Western societies.