How artists are using virtual reality to capture traces of Second World War crimes in Croatia – The Calvert Journal

Today, the stylised Stone Flower spomenik, designed by sculptor Bogdan Bogdanovi, stands at the former Jasenovac site. But Croatia retains a complicated relationship with the NDH and the Ustaa, with some government officials often trying to negate the countrys role in Second World War atrocities. The Slana camp remains mostly unknown to the majority of Croats. There is no memorial close to the cove, and a plaque commemorating the victims has been defaced or destroyed on three separate occasions.

The artists hope to use their exhibition to capture this erasure of memory and the barren landscape it left behind, although they stress that they do not consider themselves historians. We dont want to talk about the numbers [of victims], but rather the landscape which itself suggests erasure, trauma, that something horrible happened there, Konjikui says. He believes that the desolate landscape, in its own way, already commemorates the atrocities that took place at Slana. In one section of the exhibition, Konjikui and Petkovi present their film, The Cove. Rather than depicting the linear passage of time, the film instead jumps from day to day, season to season, until what appears to be an empty space is revealed as a scene of a crime. Atrocities etched themselves into the rocky landscape in the summer of 1941, and will remain for an eternity.

But with no physical memorial to commemorate Slana, the artists are building their own monument elsewhere: in the digital realm. The trio created a 3D reconstruction of the camp, which picks out digitally-rendered objects such as the watchtowers and barracks, transforming the entire space of Slana into a site of commemoration.

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How artists are using virtual reality to capture traces of Second World War crimes in Croatia - The Calvert Journal