Sonata for Friar Satan

2019
Audio installation
various dimensions

CURATOR
Davorka Perić

EXHIBITION
Refreshing Memory, When the Monuments Come Alive, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, Croatia, 2019.

PHOTO
Marko Ercegović

VIDEO
Nataša Puškar

The audio installation "Sonata for Friar Satan" consists of a self-playing violin.

One of the main elements of the sonata structure is the repetition of the main theme in various forms and its elaboration in variations.

Dragutin Škrgatić, a witness at the trial of Dinko Šakić, the commander in chief of the Jasenovac concentration camp, said that on one occasion a group of Roma played music in front of a canteen where a group of Ustasha was sitting. At one point, commander Miroslav Filipović Majstorović got up, approached the musicians and shot one of them in the head. According to the other witness, the first image he saw upon arriving at the Jasenovac concentration camp was a large pile of violins taken from the Roma before the liquidation.

Commander Majstorović was given the nickname Friar Satan by the prisoners because before the war he was a member of the Catholic Franciscan order, from which he was expelled for joining the Ustasha, Croatian collaborators of the Nazis in World War II.

More than 80,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, Croatian anti-fascists and others were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp, which was organized and led by Croatian collaborators of the Nazis, known as Ustashe.