Paula Petricevic about "History That No More Exist" on Radio Kotor

Taken from the web site http://radiokotor.com/ . " Two Minutes " - is the name of the new section of Radio Kotor which is being broadcasted every Monday at 9:30 and 15:00h. After Sasa Dender, Vlasta Mandic and Jovica Martinovic, today Kotor citizens addressed philosopher Paula Petricevic, activists of "Anima" and column writter in "Vijesti".

Dear inhabitants of Kotor,

These days in our city is being held a very interesting exhibition "History That No More Exist". Probably most of you are familiar with this event, which actually represents part of a larger research of two NGOs "Expeditio" and "Anima" which is making women's map of Boka Kotorska. Briefly, we wanted to answer a simple question: "Where are the women in our history?" In the beginning, the study was designed as a mapping of Boka Kotorska rebel - women in the period between the two revolutions - that one in France and in October. The idea was to find information about women who have, in many ways, revolutionized their environment, bravely stepping out from given gender and other roles, rules and expectations, expanding, often at the cost of her own life, field of won freedoms.

However, history that no more exist does not mean that there is no past, and this requires double task: the first is certainly more serious study of women in the history of the Boka Kotorska, which is in progress and is subject to the doctoral thesis of one of the researcher in the project, and the other, not less important, certainly is the reevaluation of the private sphere as less valuable, repetitive and historically irrelevant. Therefore, it is valuable to see, from the still vivid personal memories of today's women and men, how many different, wonderful, terrible and heroic stories are hidden, and how important it is to preserve them from oblivion and rotting in the trunk of privacy in which they are, silently, from generation to generation, deposited one on top of another in a long and continuous silence. This exhibition gives us, as well, the unexpected joy that at the Kotor squares, years or decades after they left us, we meet again our dear and important women laughing. The sad fact is that at least one quarter of panels had disappeared, and whatever the reason, by the hands of those who loved them, or others, these heroines of our small and the only lifes, are scattered from the squares and again returned to the four walls - almost impenetrable coordinates of the privacy that women still have difficult to overcome. With that thought I leave you until the next hearing.

Paula Petricevic