Print and digital material for the theater play “The Lamb, The Hen, The Eagle”
Play Directors: Anica Tomić, Selma Spahić and Ana Tomović
Creative Director: Bojan Mustur
Graphic Design: Bojan Mustur
Photography: Velija Hasanbegović
Production: Public Institution MES – International Theater Festival – Scene MESS
Sarajevo, 2014

Remembering is a life which is always created by human communities, it is in a state of constant flux just like the art based on emotions and magic. Art opens up dialectic memory, enables a critical rethink of the expression “It happened” – this terrifying historical statement often used to cover up hatred, struggle and human misery. Therefore, man is first and foremost a historical human being who makes his own past his obligation, using it to define himself and discover his present. That is why We all have a past, but we give ourselves history. Through this mutual theatrical undertaking of Sarajevo, Zagreb and Belgrade we try to shed an artistic light of cognition on what we once were, but also on what we want to become in the future. We want to explain history to ourselves, enter the labyrinths of remembering which is by its very nature collective, plural, individualized and divided in a variety of ways. The art of memory embeds itself in the image, the object, a detail of the act, it becomes intertwined in the relation between people and space, it has a right to discontinuities, distortions and emotions – therefore it is always suspicious towards history.

Theatre does not memorialize memories, it does not turn them into stone and monuments, and it does not create institutional and official narratives that become points of unanimity and single-mindedness of the militant convictions of “learned truths”. Fully aware of the place and time in which they live, directors Tomić, Tomović and Spahić, together with their creative teams, want to present the audience with a story dispersed in the breadth of various interpretations, but also concentrated in the personal relation to one’s own past. In a strange manner, the creative alchemy of theatre converts historical investigation into a repository of secrets of the present which enable a break-through into the future of memory. Our topic “A Century of a Family” reflects the tight, intimate and personal relationship which marks, in this symbolic year of an “explosion of memories” of the First World War, a change in perception that gives history its sense and its life, thereby preventing it from turning into “a surplus” encumbering generations, and turning it instead into a space for understanding one’s own past.

Ahead of the production team, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all artists, numerous associates, our financiers European Union (Programme Sarajevo 2014) and Sarajevo Canton, as well as to the Ministry of Civil Affairs of BiH, Foundation for Music, Stage and Fine Arts Sarajevo and Ministry of Culture and Information – the Republic of Serbia for post-project running of the Trilogy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and region, for helping us stage the biggest and the most demanding theatrical project in the Balkans.

Dino Mustafić