As I traveled in the 90s from Norway to Ljubljana Slovenia, my hometown, I noticed at the airports ever more military personnel. They were both sexes in military uniforms with hand luggage, seemingly calm but tense, fast in movements and young. Their presence in the groups brought to the airports another atmosphere that evokes thinking about life and death reality as it’s not the case when at the airports are only civilian passengers.

It took me some time when I realized that Norway is a part of NATO & UN and that soldiers traveled to the Balkans that was at war. Once the flight was cancelled and we were stranded at the hotel in Copenhagen. There, I talked late into the night to a Danish military man that was appointed as an UN official to the Balkans. Pretty soon, I got to know that his previous job was a principal of the school and I realized that he knows little about the region where he was appointed to and that his main motif to join was of financial gain nature. It surprised me that he didn’t calculate in at all to his trade-off deal the possibility of risking his life. So I reckoned that most troops have financial interest to join any of these two war and peace institutions missions. In Ljubljana, I got to know about problematic presence of the UN troops in the war zones that included black market trading with weapons and drugs, sexual abuses, corruption, etc.

At the airports, arriving to the non-place transfer area, one is relieved to pass through the checkpoint and hasn’t many choices of how to spent time. You may shop, eat and drink, read, get busy with your IT gadgets, sleep or observe people. The latter has been always my preferred choice.

I got quite focused on these soldiers, especially on the women. My imagination was triggered and, I’ve been thinking; how well are they trained in survival techniques and equipped with skills to protect themselves from physical attacks and sexual abuse that might happen by their male colleagues or by the aggressors and, how would they survive as war prisoners? Only later on we got to know about the sexual abuses of the USA women soldiers by their male mates in the Iraq war. I heard no reports that the same happened in the UN or NATO troops. How come or, I missed something?

Further on, I reasoned that women soldiers have to react differently in war than men soldiers do. At the same time, the question was, is it so really?

In any case, I got caught on the slippery grounds, while testing my feminism against culturally embedded gender clichés reasoning.

A plethora of issues opened up such as: how gender manifests itself in the extreme situations, does participation of all genders contributes to more effective solving of conflicts in war or, this issue doesn’t play any role at all, what is identity made of really when it gets challenged in polarized confrontational situation and, is the state of war just emphasized peace and whatever happens there happens also in the peace time. Furthermore, Western culture promotes itself as most progressive one and promotes gender equality by accepting women as well to the military institution, while misogyny and violence against women has been rising in the West as globally.

Because these meditations didn’t get out of my head, I decided to do something with them. In 2001, I finally succeeded to get the real women soldiers and we shot the video in two sessions. They just came from the winter survival training. While they were changing clothes, I saw muscular and bruised bodies.

The parameters for the video were set: women wear their parade, rank presenting uniforms, they don’t communicate, are focused on themselves and are introvert in order to establish the atmosphere of anxiety, suspense and contingency. Whatever they do, they do it alone, they are in the latent state. The video camera is static, recording the women’s behavior at the “between-place” and in the “between-time”.

The architecture of the performance is an important part; it’s a public non-place with multifunctional potential.

Cafeteria at the Academy of Fine Art in Trondheim, Norway was recently built. I had been teaching there for 15 years. It was placed under the glass roof covered atrium of ex-industrial building that was built by Germans during the WWII. After the war, the company that had their business there merged with the Siemens AG Company and continued with their electrical equipment production in the building. Afterwards, they closed down the businesses and Fine Art Academy moved in.

German war projects architecture in the occupied Norway and especially in the Northern region still stands as a witness of an ambitious war machine. Also, the role of the Siemens AG Company that closely collaborated with the Nazi regime is a historical fact.

I felt that building and cafeteria due to their historical, aesthetical and genius loci characteristics are the perfect location to shoot the video.

Of course, I build the frame of the performance for the women with expectations to be broken.

I presumed that they would create small events and perform gestures that will transgress their institutional rank and disclose another identity, what exactly happened.

I was after de-masking in order to show another mask that was femininity.

With the video, I wanted to lead the viewer to the meditative state of mind, as I had been experiencing while observing the women soldiers at the airports.

Duba Sambolec, Ljubljana, 2015