The burning and destruction of books has a long history. Fanatics and saviours, prophets and rulers, those who believed that theirs was the only truth, haters of both their own and other people’s culture, all have often resorted to book burning in order to achieve purity, emptiness or the absolute. The most recent examples took place in the 1990s : in Croatia, books written in the Cyrillic script or in a South Slavic language which was not Croatian were thrown out of public and school libraries, and in Sarajevo, the army of Bosnian Serbs used phosphorus bombs to burn down the old City Hall with three million books and other precious documents. The most notorious example is the Nazi book burning but the practice has not been alien to other ideologies and religions. Even the Jews, known as the People of the Book, occasionally turned to libricide. Reb Nachman of Bratslav said that to burn a book is to shine a light on the world.

Books burn occasionally in the Balkans but more often they remain unread and, therefore, in the dark. One of the most unread books in these parts is Konstantinovic’s scathing analysis of parochial mentality, The Philosophy of Parochialism. I dedicated my performance to its author, Radomir Konstantinovic, a resident of Belgrade who died one month before the performance, and to my friend Piter, of whose tragic death I learned while I was in Belgrade.

I stepped out in front of the dimly lit Youth Centre in Belgrade holding a copy of Konstantinovic’s Philosophy in my hand. I proceeded with burning one page after the other using the light of the fire to read from the book until it burnt completely.

The act of parallel book burning and reading has several symbolic layers. The book burning is a destruction which produces the light Reb Nahman referred to. I see in this kind of light the moment which precedes the darkness which I tried to oppose by reading.  This was both an act of violence and an act of love because I wanted to dispel the obscurity which still shrouds The Philosophy of Parochialism and books in general in this part of the world. The fact that the performance was dedicated to two lives that disappeared into the dark is not without significance either.

In the Gallery Nova, during the performance at the "Written Off" exhibition, I read the poetry of Branko Miljković, who died tragically in Zagreb in 1961.

In the Gallery Michaela Stock in Vienna, I lit and read the play "Heroes Square" (Heldenplatz) by Thomas Bernhard. On Heroes' Square (Heldenplatz) on March 15, 1938 Hitler declared the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich.