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The Court Jester of Apocalypse
Marko Košan

The ominous premonition of a bloody dawn in the heart of Europe blazed long before the millennial Apocalypse. After being stifled for decades by repressive ideology, the hate speech of national resentment – which persistently sharpened executioner's axes and slaughterer's knives in the Balkan mountains and on the southern slopes of the Great Plain – reawakened, after the death of the immortal President, and immoderately pumped the impure blood flowing in the veins of the forlorn masses, defrauded in corrupt social experiments and manipulated by the illusion of imaginary coexistence and unrealised social justice.

Visages of the incited masses deformed into grotesque masks and transformed into smirky, blunt sculls without flesh, or name … the war dogs smelled the stench of future burnings … an unavoidable sinking into the chaos of terror, horror and rape since the beginning of the 1980s, a swirl of irrational provocations and incidents, and an increasingly electrified atmosphere of distrust, suspicion and open threats, flared the nostrils of the horses mounted by the riders of the Apocalypse, who were prepared for the violent hunt … series of reported images of strikes, demonstrations and rallies encouraged anxiety and fear … the spotlights of world media attention gradually illuminated the stage of the disarrayed country, which used to be seen as a promised land and an oasis between worlds divided into blocks.

Reporters and photographers from all sides – at first only a few kibitzers, onlookers and ordinary correspondents, but gradually more and more frequently special journalists, free-lance adventurers, elegant 'trendies' and star opinion-makers – hustled for first-row seats to attend a spectacle beyond compare in Europe since the great World War … among them – but long before them all – was Futy: an immature teenager with a camera, who found himself, despite all the various security obstacles, in the middle of the procession at the Belgrade funeral of the great dictator, in whose sarcophagus were buried all the illusions of yesterday's counterpoised world – and thus opened a Pandora's box of the still-glowing embers of the smouldering baseness of devastating nationalisms and the stinging sparks of primitive, barbarian chauvinisms; a genial dilettante with semi-professional equipment, who restlessly pushed his head into the heart of every distressing whirlpool and smartly succeeded in opening even the most tightly-shut doors of sinister conspiracies; a self-made, spontaneously naive and imprudently daring collaborator with major European news agencies, who made his way into their midst merely through the utter boldness of his actions, while ignoring all the protocols and accreditations, and by the incredible and unique shots from Kosovo in the early '80s, from Belgrade and other Serbian towns at the time of Milošević's early campaigns and later when the hysterical idolatry of ultimate nationalistic icons completely blurred the glassy stares of bearded countenances and hairy heads covered with traditional šajkača caps, with feet in sandals and with fingers stretching to the triggers of their shiny Kalashnikovs; an intriguing manipulator of the scandalous story of the putative attempt on the life of the legendary head of the defenders of the besieged Osijek; a long-haired and fearless driver of his Sunbeam, which was riddled with bullets and with which he worked his way at break-neck speed through ambushes on Croatian and later Bosnian battlefields, armed only with his characteristic, uncontrolled laughter and his tele-photo lens; a restless, hyperactive and lonely tracker of sensations in the game of war as a surreal tour-de-force of a reality that is all too real to be comprehended as such in the endless, virtually ungraspable spiral of whirling insanity.

Every new day, which is actually night, is frozen in decomposed fragments of time … in the shattered mosaic of grey-green-brown images, pierced by the light of the directed gaze … with bloody capillaries in the retinae of sleepless nights … the eye that laughs … the camera records the unbearably thick air hovering above abandoned corn fields … to live through days and weeks, to eat and sleep with soldiers, to move with them across the territory … the absence of essential distance from the parties in combat could become fatal … a hazardous feeling that one is obviously part of the ominous clockwork of ruthless machinery … that one is part of 'them' … through the rambling backwoods … loud inhalations and exhalations … and then waiting and eavesdropping … connections, contacts … the military pass as Mephisto's passport through the chambers of Hell … the smell of stale gunpowder … the stench of sewers as a mindless promise at the entrance to Sarajevo … a challenge, a hint, an intuition of the ruin … a secret passage to the Goražde enclave.

And then – eclipse … (-) … a fading echo of the shot-through laughter … and then – silence … only a bouquet of photographic flashes, captured in the archives of Sigma, printed on the smooth, glossy paper of the most eminent magazines, out of order, without a system … snatching and overtaking a life that exploded like a huge adrenalin bomb and shadowed the sky, but managed to fight its way, in the form of a tiny ray, to the most solitary habitation on the globe, where humour is the most offensive abuse and a cynical smile is the gravest insult … a sublimated image of the world … an abyss … the horror of the precipice, in which one vaporises into stardust and eternally alloys with an unstable, ephemeral image on photographic paper … in cleavages of time between the deposits of indelible memory and the high tide of a more pleasant future.