Evoking Bruegel's social landscapes, Gjorgje Jovanovik 's Silent Night unveils the ugly, backward feelings as indexes of social trauma, an insidious trauma and hidden daily suffering of bodies deprived of the potential for interaction, relation and transformation. The serene, withdrawn, melancholic and silent atmosphere in Jovanovi k 's work overwhelms the intensive, dense social space. In the darkestshadows amongst the social exchange of the numerous social actors in thedaily routine, lurk the hidden, excluded from the dominant representations, gesturesof violence and suffering. They present the personalization of social violenceand the intimate side of communal violence. By placing the images of violenceand suffering in the inconspicuous curves of the city life, Jovanovik portrays the invisible forces of the material environment and surrounding like scripts legible in the affects which have the power to be a symptom and diagnose the historical effects of power and inequality on bodies. The recipient is invited to participate in the work itself, instead of simply standing as an objective spectator. He/she approaches through the social landscape, strolls through the city. However, this stroll demands particular attention, an exceptional focus possible only when the borders of our daily perception are displaced. Similar to Bruegel's images, the violence of Silent Night is hidden in the seemingly small and dark urban corners, on the other side of the `light of day.` The urban map of sexual and gender violence thus overlaps and relates with the map of the heteronormative neutral daily life. The manifestation of the banal daily life becomes a source for perceiving the suffering and backward feelings that ensure the neutrality and uninterrupted flow of this daily life. Violence remains a stain on the habituated perception of the heterosexual street. The archive of backward feelings, thus, becomes an archive of the sensorial experiences manifesting the zeitgeistxvii. They diagnose the multiple ways in which a body has been blocked and constrained with the decrease of its capacity to enter relations and build worlds that are open assemblages with other bodies.

Thus, Jovanovik restores melancholy to the city, hence, the constitutive violence of the city as well. Queer melancholy haunts the city. Melancholy that must be erased from the frame, in order to enable the continual flow of banality and uninterrupted future progress that reproduces the structures of heterodoxy. As Heather Love writes in the text published in the catalogue, „it is the damaging aspects of the past that tend to stay with us, and the desire to forget mayb itself be a symptom of haunting. The dead can bury the dead all day long and still not be done.” Melancholy hovering in the affective in-between space (created through the setting of relations among the three-dimensional figures set in space, images of violence, bowed heads, gloomy faces, a dimmed ray of light in the surrounding dark), in Jovanovi k 's work ensures visibility for the problems and difficulties of queers, i.e. it inscribes passive states as an index of affliction, a result of „a general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as such.“ Melancholic tone in solution, lurking around the gestures of the daily socio-historical life, in Jovanovik 's work becomes a “structure of feeling” that reflects the social experiences which “although they are emergent or preemergent, they do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and onaction,“or the social experiences and the consequent affective tone in the life of minoritarian subjects and social actors.

Slavco Dimitrov