MY BEAUTIFUL WAR /ENGLISH/ Leo Katunarić Kadele 1991. – 2024. The state of permanent war passes without rebellion, as if the digital circulation of meaning suggests that we can do nothing. Through the artistic act of constantly questioning the ultimate fantasy of the existence of the self as a secret that needs to be solved, we also examine the society that is constituted by ideological liturgies. The project gathers the author's personal war memories, photos, videos, objects, etc. from the beginning of the nineties, and passes them through the modern filters of the Internet generation: Instagram posts, Tik Tok videos, Facebook memes, etc., which relativize the original seriousness of the situation. The project raises questions about the way we construct ourselves when we depend on forms of representation and public stagings. Ideologized patterns of the foundations of the social order become content for network stagings. STATEMENT LK2 This is indeed a repeat of a period that I remember well. Before the very beginning of the wars in the Balkans in 1991 (and then the Gulf and other wars), the trend of global mass media culture equally conveyed a sense of belonging to everyone in the world by seeing information about the events. What followed was the discovery of the simulacrum, a state in which the mass media manipulates facts to stage an event that is not taking place at all. But if it is mediated by the media, then it still takes place, even though it has no basis in reality. Reporting from the battlefield was used to introduce such a situation into the public discourse. The construction of hyperrealism, a reality more real than reality, is effective only if it manages to use emotional patterns, especially the suffering and suffering of the physical body, so something that can apparently be easily confirmed or refuted. Staging, copying and endless repetition abolished the need to check the original. It didn't even take a decade to get from the state of media simulacra to the global state of circulation of staged realities. Now digital culture circulates not only images but also meanings, without hierarchies. The state of war, not the war itself, dominates public discourse and increasingly occupies a place reserved for reflection on freedom. Why freedom at all? Pathetic repetition of passwords, how do we get rid of something? A radical artistic breakthrough into the public discourse was always more necessary in such times. Freedom is perhaps just doing everything we can to prevent the defeat of humanity from happening. Humanity will have to temporarily become the art of simulating a state in which we no longer exist, but it is not certain that we will not exist. After decades of traveling through places and people and politics and ideologies and religions and successes and failures, my artistic practice becomes an unstoppable circulation of jumps through time. It seems to me that I am only now connecting the events and objects scattered all over my past and future. And I constantly wonder if what resonates in my films, pictures, texts and performances is just a momentary staging of desires from all my times, or if all these little artistic cries are real, and I am just an operating system maintained by listening to them.