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8372
8372
by
Alistair Maxwell
The room is pokey. It’s dark and painted black. Light peeps in through the scratches in the windows like bullet-holes. There are a few rows of chairs and miscellaneous bean bags. The place is not cluttered but unstructured, almost spontaneous. In the middle of the performing space are a few school tables pushed together and three school chairs. The performer Benjamin Zajc brings over a lamp and turns it on – it is the only source of light in the humid room. Over the next two hours, with this barely lit and uncomfortable room as the backdrop, we’re invited to contemplate the every-day feeling of loss that accompanies genocide.
8372 was originally conceived as a symbolic companion piece to Bosnian-born artist Aida Šehović’s ŠTO TE NEMA (Where have you been?). In Šehović’s piece she pours and places up to 8,372 cups of coffee to commemorate each of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. The concept revolved around a conversation she had with a woman who had lost her husband. The woman told Šehović that the moments she missed her husband the most were those when she realised that she had no one to share coffee with. And so, each cup of coffee came to symbolise an absent person.
Back in the warm, dark room Zajc places three heavy mortar and pestle sets during a slow ritualistic walk. Today we will be grinding coffee beans, around 8,372 of them, each bean representing a person. Over the course of two hours, Zajc sits grinding beans and members of the audiences are free to join him. Originally Zajc intended to donate these ground beans to brew the coffee in Šehović’s performances but owing to a global pandemic and consequent rescheduling of Zajc’s performance, 8372 has slowly morphed into its own distinct thought-provoking piece of performance art.
The ground beans have no clear destination. At no point are we told where exactly these ground beans are going to go. There are no cafetieres in sight, only a sack into which every full mortar is emptied. Given the darkness of the room, emptying the mortar feels more like binning the hard work than collecting the coffee grounds. More of a ritual cleansing than productive labour. After a while, the very acting of grinding the beans feels like something to do to merely to occupy the time -like making tea in a crisis- even the motion of using the mortar and pestle is physically very close to hand-wringing. Further questions are raised when one considers that if every bean is supposed to represent a person, how have we all been convinced to hide in a dark room grinding them up? Because of the calm authority Zajc has over the dark room? Because deep down we all like to feel helpful? Because we feel guilty for being unable to prevent tragedy and need menial tasks to exert control?
Instead of commemoration, the piece feels more like a study in complicity. The heat and dark of the room at times feels designed to make everyone tired, sluggish, passive enough to go along with anything. In a space where anyone could feasibly do anything, everyone is not only willing but keen to go along with the grinding of the 8,732. Generally, when an audience member empties their full mortar into the sack, they place the equipment back on the table and re-join the audience. The gap that is now left seems vast. The empty seat at the table feels full of ephemeral energy; people leap off their seats to take their place, to join the ritual, to try and help.
In desperate times everyone likes to help but most people don’t know how. Tweeting “thoughts and prayers” and making cups of tea are the tangible reactions to tragedies too big to process. In the dream-like space that Zajc has created, he is able to show how innate these instincts are, and how by simple suggestion, we are able to engineer these tragedies in the first place.
After all the beans have been ground, Zajc stands, thanks us for participating, and exits. So authoritative was his presence in this dark, silent and empty space that his absence feels massive. With him gone the audience is left truly alone, perhaps to consider the people who could not be here, perhaps the victims of the Srebrenica massacre, or perhaps even how such a scenario could have occurred. Or maybe just that we have all the tools to make coffee, but now no-one to share it with.
