ON THE FAIR(Y) PROGRAMME UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL (A NONOBJECTIVE VIEW)
When catalogue editor Miodrag Kalčić suggested I should write in the introduction about the programme of this year’s Book Fair(y), I felt relieved knowing that I would not be writing on the Fair(y)’s birthday. My long-time collaborator knows I am often an unreliable witness, even though I am the only one left of that strange crew from 1995 that established the Fair(y), a witness stretched between reality and imagination, extremely prone to fabricate the facts to make a ‘good story’. The Fair(y) is still my own private fairy tale of sorts (and sometimes my own private horror movie), and privacy, I was taught, is inappropriate to mention in public. The relief was only short-lived, as I soon realised it is even more difficult to analyse the programme which I helped design, which is yet to happen, which I am trembling at, which always serves me the same fears and doubts: ‘Did we nail it? Did we overdo it?’
The path to this year’s programme was unusual: several time the concept crumbled, authors changed their dates on a daily basis, gave up (due to other duties) and returned, new topics and new focuses were rapidly created, a total chaos loomed and then, as it often happens at this Fair(y), somehow everything came together, got a sense and an extraordinary structure. We do strive to extraordinariness, but it only comes when we are not trying to attain it, only when we find ourselves in a dead end, only when we are forced to look for impossible solutions. Mauricio Ferlin, one of the most experienced and surely the most creative member of the Fair(y) crew kept repeating: ‘You’re rushing with the topic analysis, that’s why everything is upside down. We are people of the moment – in a year a topic becomes too familiar to us, already seen, boring, therefore we need to twist it and present it differently.’ Judging by this year’s Fair(y), Mauricio might be right. The topic of this year’s Book Fair(y), ‘1914’, was agreed on two years ago. If we had had any idea as to what would be happening in 2014, the anniversary of the Great War, we would have probably given up immediately. Completely naively, we never once thought this year might generate (with much welcomed exceptions) a series of commemorations, (inappropriate) celebrations, political and politico nonsense, celebrity and pseudo-cultural-tourist activities. This programme is an attempt at detaching ourselves from the said, an attempt at connecting 1914 with the present, especially the literary and cultural present, an attempt at viewing the beginning of the Great War through the optics of today. Have we succeeded, I do not know, but we have certainly tried when we were designing the programmes The World of Yesterday, Kakanien, Herrenhof Café…
The programme also includes a homage to Pula, which lived to see its urban peak in 1914. The very fact that Pula was the Empire’s largest naval port placed our city in the context of the topic. However, we were interested in the Pula of today, which contains shreds of former urbanity, which has been systematically ruined for the last hundred years, but which still today feels the beat of peculiar creativity and abounds in extraordinary and authentic individuals. The programme Pula Is Crowded is the one I fear most. Have we delved deep enough into the essence of Pula, incomprehensible even to us? Are we too sentimental, too emotional, or too detached (so typical of Pula) out of fear?
The comic book this year holds the central position on the shelves and in the programme, and it will speak not only of the First World War, but also of the entire 20th century. The comic book also reigns outside the ‘Fair(y)’s walls’ – in its special street we named Comic Book Street / Via dei fumetti / Strip Strasse. Comic Book Street will live 24/7 during the Fair(y) and will be equipped with everything a city street should have: a reading room, a gallery, musicians, a pub, a winery and a bookstore. All inspired by comic books. This programme was the last to arrive and finally took most space. We simply could not resist our ‘donquixotian’ Vladimir Šagadin, Marko Šunjić and Vjeran Juhas, and neither the fact that the comic book in Croatia is completely marginalised. If you mention the Fair(y) crew that something is on the margins or systematically marginalised, the interest magically rises, suddenly nothing is difficult and a special spark flies. This special spark this year belongs to comic books.
The Fair(y)’s regional focus is evident from the programme Young Bosnia in Exile, which presents young contemporary Bosnian writers living in exile. We have not even tried to avoid references to Sarajevo and the Sarajevo assassination, but our programme will focus mostly on the contemporary echoes of Sarajevo and Bosnia in literature. Only when we finished the programme it dawned on me that regional authors are present in all the segments of the focus and topic, and the Authors from the Neighbourhood, the programme they participated in for years, has disappeared. Quite spontaneously a more powerful platform came out of nowhere. It is well known that Pula’s audience with special attention follows and responds to authors from the region and I simply know at least one of them will this year see both a sigh and a long spontaneous applause.
Nostalgic as we are, this year we remember the topics we covered in the previous year as well: The Other Coast / L’altra costa, The Black and White Seas and A Trip to Russia. However, these programmes are not only remembrances, ‘side line’ programmes. Somehow it came together, throughout the mess I mentioned, that these programmes would definitely turn out as the ones we call ‘the high points of the Fair(y)’, because they will present truly great authors: one of the most significant Italian and European writers Claudio Magris, famous Turkish historian İlber Ortaylı, and legendary Russian writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Regarding these programmes, I can only say we were lucky. Incredibly lucky.
What the audience usually never sees, but what I am particularly proud of are professional sections and workshops. Without our profession: editors, translators, librarians, festival organisers, publishers and their connections, there would be no good fair or literary festival, no good international relations we all strive to. Many years of work we invested to become ‘a part of the world’ are best seen in our fellowship programme Book Folks and the international conference Publishing – Trends and Contexts implemented in association with the Zadar and Osijek Universities. Librarians gather on Day Zero for the fourth year around and the programme is designed by the profession: the National and University Library Zagreb and University of Zadar, Department of Information Sciences. Of all the ‘invisible’ programmes, I would like to highlight the Split Arts Academy workshop under the title Reshape the City, focusing on Austrian-Hungarian architecture in Pula. I am interested to see how the students will reshape the central location of our Fair(y) in terms of content and architecture, built in 1913 as Marine-Kasino, the Austrian-Hungarian army’s house for officers. Will they turn us into a circus, a nursing home, a casino or what I hope for most – a palace of culture?
I do not like the standard English expression off programmes, because the things that are usually off in a programme tend to become its central part. You never know, perhaps the film festival at Valli Cinema might be the high point of the Fair(y), or one of the five exhibitions scheduled to open between 4 and 14 December.
Quite biasedly I point out the exhibitions of Pula-based authors Mauricio Ferlin and Igor Zirojević. Ferlin’s exhibition The Closed Sea (Climb Every Mountain) at Sveta srca will shed light on a forgotten moment in Pula, the unusual and for the 20th century significant life of our fellow citizen of long before, Georg von Trapp. Zirojević’s exhibition under the outstanding name of Interval City (inspired by Velikić’s essay on Pula) reads forgotten signs of the city into the photographs of Austrian-Hungarian villas.
There is so much I missed: from poetry slam evening to the ‘duel’ between Igor Mandić and Teofil Pančić, to launching new books by Ante Tomić, Milana Vuković Runjić, Josef Winkler, Mauro Covacich, Dževad Karahasan, to Nina Bunjevac’s exhibition and performance. A tribute to Danilo Kiš in Mark Thompson’s outstanding book, a roundtable dedicated to reading: Literature as Remembrance, Oksana Zabuzhko opening the Fair(y), Paolo Rumiz and Roberto Todero who will speak about 1914 in Italy, Twilight Reading with the marvellous Bosnian poets: Marko Vešović, Almin Kaplan and Asmir Kujović. Then there is Bora Ćosić on another of his visits and the bards who are here for the first time: Vjeran Zuppa, Predrag Finci, Branko Kukić, Svetislav Basara… This is only a small fraction of the programme which would require a special introduction.
Kiss me Yesterday, Debeli Precjednik, students and teachers at Pula’s Academy of Music, Petrushevskaya and her cabaret, Livio Morosin, Catch-Pop String-Strong and Pula’s famous DJ’s will put our book feast to music and the entire Fair(y) will dance to the rhythm of electro-swing, punk, world music, classical music, Russian romances, Italian canzones, and traditionally, revolutionary songs. The Fair(y) team cannot live without music (at the Fair or elsewhere), Pula’s audience shows its cheerleading passions only through music and the authors can only be drawn by the sounds of music from their extensive discussions at the bar. Therefore, without music Pula’s Fair(y) would perhaps not exist.
I have almost forgotten about Vojo and Breakfast with the Author. Vojo would never forgive me, and rightfully so, because without Vojo and the Breakfast Pula’s Fair(y) mornings would be just like the ones at other fairs: sleepy, bleak and sluggish. But Vojo always gently awakes us and creates a world stage from the small café table, making a conversation with a writer an unforgettable moment.
If this programme, which I was not able to analyse in entirety, acts as a breeding soil of unusual and memorable encounters between author and author, authors and audience, encounters still unpredictable but captivating (like previous years), the Fair(y) will fulfil its fundamental task of perseverance and idiosyncrasy: to be original and extraordinarily Pula-like.
Magdalena Vodopija
