In 2012, Luciana Kaplun, a former member of the artistic and the interventionist group Public Movement, participated in a group exhibition that was curated by Avi Pitchon at the Cultural Centre Tobačna 001. While the group’s activities are marked by the appropriation of the rituals and choreographies of the Israeli Army, the Zionist Movement, the state and popular legacy, her independent work pursues its own path of investigating models of collective memory and social identity through the prism of popular culture. 

In the project The Squad, Luciana Kaplun integrates elements of personal memory with the history of different but very similar countries: the twenty-one-year experience of living in the native land of the legendary Che Guevara is brought into an analogy with Israeli mythologisation of the heroism of guerrilla groups and subversive actions in ghettos, and culminates in the renewed interest in investigating partisanship, which has been experiencing a new upsurge in Slovenia over the recent years. The manifestations of partisanship among the youth that was born too late to be given an opportunity to directly identify with the partisans led the author to research the homage to one of the most spectacular battles of the World War II. in Yugoslavia, the film “Battle of Neretva”. As the bearer of an idealised aesthetic form legitimising the power of the ruling elite after the war, it served the artist as the starting point of re-enactment, while the differences between the two existing film versions provided her with the cause. For the screening (of shots cut out for the shorter English version) she engaged Memorial Company Under the Sun of Freedom. The resulting videos Audition and Script Reading do not seek the reasons for carrying the partisan spirit into the present. In the aforementioned videos, individuals assume their respective roles in relation to the film story and, indeed, renew the dialogues and reconstruct the scenes, but nevertheless remain stuck in the present, with their performance turning into a series of repetitive rhythmic acts that are becoming meaningless and speech morphing into a string of unrelated words. Kaplun, however, goes even further by also leaving bare all the used media and narrative structures of the film. 

Luciana Kaplun’s videos use re-enactment as a creative practice that not only offers room for new and unexpected social interactions, but also casts light on contexts contrary to those found in the original. In this regard, it can thus be seen as an indicator of the inability to realise ambitious and utopian political ideas. Whereas these are always doomed to failure, striving for ideals provides a unique epilogue to the participants’ experience and a note in their collective memory.