Archived: Nothing is good

O. Lozica: GOOD IS NOTHING Director: Olja Lozica Dramaturgy: Olja Lozica and Luka Bosanac Set designer: Stefano Katunar Assistant set designer: Aleksandra Ana Buković Costume designer: Barbara Bourek Author's music and selection of music: Aaron Aleksej Ljevaković Assistant director: Luka Danace , Romano Nikolić, Andrea Špindel and Aron Aleksej Ljevaković

When we are asked how we are, we are often expected to answer that we are fine. The question 'how are you?' it makes sense, therefore, insofar as it implies an answer in advance, an answer that suggests that we are good. How are you? – I'm fine. How is it? – Ha, nothing, it's good. Such a question, with implicit feedback, is symptomatic of the modern pace of life. For simply, how can anyone have time to reflect on the world around him and on his position in it, if he is committed to the obligations of everyday life and survival. The idle mind of the devil is a garden, some say. If we are not good, it is inappropriate, we do not behave according to the desired cultural pattern. Specifically, we do not give the answer that is expected of us. That in itself is an excess. And we can be excommunicated from the community. How are you? – I'm not ok. – So how are you not well? And then, if the reasons aren’t ‘big’ enough, ‘tragic’ enough, to justify enough that we’re not well, we face the conviction that our problems don’t exist, that we are bothered by things we can’t influence (because ‘things are just the way they are are '), that we all face the same traps. In other words, there is a generalization of our condition, our problems, feelings, and fears, without thinking of the possibility that it may be a serious health disorder.

Dealing with the topic of depression was so challenging because mental disorders, unlike illness, do not have clear anatomical indicators, and this play did not seek to approach depression from a medical-classification perspective. In this play, Olja Lozica and co-workers problematize depression precisely from the aspect of the inability to recognize its symptoms and its causes. On the contrary, this play speaks of depression, emphasizing the dynamic and unbreakable relationship between the individual and his environment, without mentioning depression in a single sentence. Well, nothing addresses a specific segment of everyday life and society that we can then classify as a sure source of depression. Exactly the opposite. The prism through which depression was viewed as a health disorder in this play is its ‘nonspecificity’ as a specificity. And such poetics is intended to suggest that depression itself enters people's lives noticeably but in disguise. To feel it, but not to recognize it.

By emphasizing the mentioned relationship between the individual and the environment, Olja Lozica manages to point out without explicitly pointing the finger at the 'culprits' that the very modernity we live in is a network of different social forces that affect the individual. That the complexity of the modern world is often frightening because it does not offer instructions on how to deal with it. And the individual at the crossroads of personal and political-economic, if he does not know how to swim decisively, begins to sink deep, deep, until the one next to him decides to pull him back and help him return to the motherland of society.

Luka Bosanac