Director and actor Romano Nikolić opens the year 2022 with his author’s play The Tempest, which dissolves the theme of refugees and European and global responsibility for lost and/or threatened lives, as well as for the injustice that is renewed every day in our immediate vicinity, and which we so often refuse to see. The storm continues on the uncompromising and socially engaged aesthetics and ethics of UO Arterarij, which continuously opens the neuralgic points of the national and global community, resisting discriminatory violence and threats to human rights, i.e. endangering the freedoms of a stigmatized individual or the entire community. Nikolić’s artistic imprint in Bura continues and develops with playwright Dorota Šušak and performers Fran Mašković, Ivo Kraljević, Luka Knez and Semih Adigüzel, who brings a documentary and activist experience of his own struggle of life in exile.
In September 2015, a photo of the drowned three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, whose body was found on the Mediterranean coast near Bodrum, went viral. Media attention focused on this case was often titled “Humanity (Europe)
washed ashore”, thus denouncing the most severe consequences of the already devastating European moral crisis. The refugee experience is an authentic struggle in life’s necessity, the outcome of which does not and cannot have a simplified common denominator, but draws us into the imaginary of parallel
potential that reality sometimes threatens and sometimes surpasses. Almost seven years later, the author’s team of the play Bura deals with personal undulations, bonds, (in)freedoms and unrest provoked in us by confronting people who are on our continental, maritime and emotional borders every day, and puts us in the position of responsible witnesses who have the power to become protagonists, even when they refuse to do so.
The project was co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the City of Zagreb and the Fund for Active Citizenship.
The performance BURA is an activity within the project 4O: Discovery, awareness, empowerment and organization for human rights, which is supported through the EEA financial mechanism with funds from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway within the Fund for Active Citizenship.
Project 4O: Discovery, Awareness, Empowerment and Organization for Human Rights is jointly implemented by the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, Civil Rights Project Sisak, European Home Vukovar, Status M and ARTERARIJ