Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you
Milica Rakić was born in 1972 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She has presented her work in 30 solo and more than 400 group exhibitions in the country and abroad (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, Mexico, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, USA). She is a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and Association of Fine Artists of Serbia, and holds independent artist status. In her work, she examines the way in which language and culture form personal identity.
Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you (2021)
Milica Rakić
Selected by Selected by Cultural Center of Belgrade, Serbia
Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you deals with historical facts and stories that, regardless of their local context, touch on issues such as women's rights, gender issues, participation and visibility of women in public life. Through the leftist-utopian narrative of women's emancipation, the artist develops her own model of criticism, pointing to revolutionary action and the creation of a new utopia, without which there is no art.
The film introduces the character of a heroine, fighter and activist, who personifies the character of the new woman, developed in the struggle. By combining feature and documentary film scenes, along with the off-screen narration, a narrative treats the national liberation struggle and the socialist revolution as something unfinished. The film by Milica Rakić is focused on the issue of female emancipation in post-war Yugoslavia, and on the critique of patriarchal coded interpretations - both in the historical and contemporary context. The observations of the artist's alter ego friend Rakič, which she performs in tandem with the art historian and performer Vladimir Bjeličić, are contrasted with archival materials related to the activities of the Anti-Fascist Women's Front.
Milica Rakić, 'Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you', 2021. Photo: Aleksandrija Ajduković. Courtesy and © the artist. Selected for AFI’24 by Cultural Center of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia.
Milica Rakić on making the work:
The once won women’s struggle for suffrage cannot be perceived outside the context of the most numerous socio-political organisation of the Women’s Antifascist Front. The presence of women in the People’s Liberation Struggle in Yugoslavia sparked the first radical revolution in the region. With their participation in the war, women ceased to be merely anonymous accessories, companions, fellow activists, associates and contemporaries of historical events, so before winning their suffrage or voice, in 1946 they entered the field of public action, acquiring responsibilities and positions that had not been available to women before. The found archival documentation of the Women’s Antifascist Front of Yugoslavia from 1947‒1949 testifies of women’s activity at the time.
These unauthorised records were written as field reports signed with Death to Fascism – Freedom to the People. This was a famous message or slogan in the era of socialist realism, where a difference was visible in the post-war emancipation of women represented as companions, victims or witnesses of historical events. The new ideology allowed women to transgress the defined divisions and limitations, but would soon relegate them to the old ways, though with a changed form and content of their freedom. Women have ruled the domain of the private, and men of the public agency, the fact that feminists were first to address with their slogan Private Is Public, stating that Capitalism had delegated the private sphere to women, and Socialism inherited this pattern. Though the fundamental aspects of Feminism are western, promotion of women’s rights is not an entirely western product, since it incorporates the struggle for a more equal position of women in one’s own society. The feminist emphasis on women’s writing, speech and agency is not popular even today, since the society has been adjusted to men’s art, where every overstepping of the expected boundaries reminds one of the communist past which is not only hard to take, but indeed must (not) be accepted. Majority of women/artists do not feel subjugated in the rule of the democratic patriarchy (they are not aware of their subjugation), even though the new politics and ideology impose their own rules, implying that Marxism and Feminism – as the foundational projects of the Modernist era that we live in – are out of fashion.