COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

Az Inconnu csoport az 1956-os forradalom 30. évfordulójára nemzetközi képzőművészeti pályazatot hirdetett meg, melynek célja „A harcoló város/The Fighting City, 1986” című kiállítás létrehozása volt. A csoporthoz kötődő „Frederich” nevű titkos megbízott kiléte nem ismert, de ő volt az a személy, aki fotósorozatot készített a beérkezett alkotásokról és 1987 januárjában azokat átadta tartó tisztjének. Ezáltal a néhány héten belül elkobzott és megsemmisített kiállítási anyag fényképmásolatai – egyes eredeti alkotásokról egyetlen forrásként –fennmaradtak a politikai rendőrség fotódokumentációjában.

Mario Fabekovac was born in Zagreb in 1975 and has lived all his life in Samobor. In 2001, he graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. Since 2003, he has been employed as an archivist at the Croatian State Archives (Political Parties and Associations Division of the CSA’s Department for the Preservation and Arrangement of Archival Records), where he is currently an archivist-specialist. In 2008 he arranged and incorporated the newly found material of the Matica hrvatska Collection.

The concept of cultural opposition was not known to him before the COURAGE project, but he assumes that it refers to "the action of people in the field of culture who through their basic activity and in their own way expressed some negative or critical attitudes towards the authorities or the complete socialist system" (Interview with Fabekovac, Mario). In that sense, he also sees the influence of intellectuals within Matica hrvatska.

Because of his popularity among the youth, he was not promoted to a parish priest but remained only an administrator of the parish of Vinné near the town of Michalovce. From 1980 to 1989, he was an administrator in Hýľov in the Košice-okolie District. In 1980, along with priest Július Chalupa, Anton Fabian established a recording studio in Hýľov where they used to record and distribute gospel albums. After 1989, he continued his studies in Lublin and Rome.

Following graduation from studies in the field of electronic data analysis, Jan Faktor worked as a programmer in Prague. Together with his wife, he moved to East Berlin in 1978 for personal reasons and found employment as a locksmith and kindergarten teacher, but also engaged heavily in the independent literary scene. Through his numerous experimental texts, Faktor enriched the group of authors belonging to the “Prenzlauer-Berg-Connection”.

Although the German language was foreign to him, he gradually gained his own perspective on its usage and challenged its artistic and political conventions as well as those of the independent literary scene. In 1983, he published his four part “Manifest of Trivial Poetry” (Manifest der Trivialpoesie) and one year later, together with Papenfuß and Stefan Döring, another manifest  “Zoro in Skorne”. He became a regular at apartment, studio and courtyard readings and he released his writings in Samizdat form.

Jan Faktor's texts often parodied techniques which are utilized linguistically to enhance meaning. These include repetition (for emphasis) and the usage of comparatives. Faktor's techniques are on display in his 23-page long poem "George's Worries about the Future" ("Georgs Sorgen um die Zukunft") from the volume "George's Attempts at a Poem and Other Positive Texts from the Poet's Garden of Horror" („Georgs Versuche an einem Gedicht und andere positive Texte aus dem Dichtergarten des Grauens“). Through the inclusion of meaningless albeit grammatically correct suprelatives ("the eight-hour working day becomes more eight hourly", etc.), the nonsense of the ideologically motivated and delusional degrees of comparison present in the official language of the GDR are laid bare. In other poems, the author constructs sentences without regard to German conventions for doing so thereby producing comical results.

In 1989, he became a member of the New Forum (Neuen Forum) and later an employee of the first GDR Civil Rights Movement weekly, The Others (Die Andere). Since the 1990s, Faktor has reflected retrospectively on the character of the independent literary scene of the GDR on multiple occasions in his own writings as well as in interviews.