Monday, 22.06.2020.
Invisible maps of Loznica
The town of Loznica was on our map on 18 June 2020. The youth there had the opportunity to present the richness of cultural diversity through a dramatic performance, as well as the influence the ‘Viskoza’ factory had in this community.
While talking with their fellow citizens, former Viskoza workers, the young people had the opportunity to get acquainted with the intercultural heritage of Loznica and the people who throughout history brought a new cultural and social practice to the town and contributed to its development.
The performance, carried out on the Loznica promenade, thematised the identity (ies) of the workers of the ‘Viskoza’ factory – people from all parts of Yugoslavia, with different habits and customs, but the same problems, desires and hopes. A special focus was on the identity of women workers, women’s rights and the problem of the ‘double burden’: working in a factory together with household chores and caring for children. There were young people in the audience who heard about Viskoza only from their parents or grandparents, but also those who worked in the factory and who confirmed to us that we realistically reconstructed one day in the life of the factory.
However, the topic of the day was not only Viskoza, but also the history of the town and its immediate surroundings, the origin of the town’s name, the Nemanjić dynasty – Katalina and Stefan Dragutin as the founders of Tronoša, the Italian volunteers who died on the Drina in the Great War, Yahya bey Dukagjini (medieval Ottoman poet), Ethel Rose Bankart, a British woman who helped the Serbian army during the Great War, and then founded a sanatorium for war orphans in Banja Koviljača, the legendary local violinist Naif Amzić, and two fellow citizens/contemporaries who decided to move from afar to Loznica — a Kazakh woman, Alja Jović, who came to this area because of love and has lived there for 12 years with her husband and two children, and a Russian journalist Tatiana Rubykova, who chose Runjane to retire there, and has written two very popular guides in Russian about Serbia.
In the evening, the Dah Theater performed ‘The Invisible Town of Loznica’ which also focuses on the long history of Loznica, its surroundings and famous people.
The audience was also handed out the publication Invisible Maps, which contains the ‘Viskoza’ glossary that explains the terms related to the factory and the social system in which it operated, and factory ID cards were distributed, modeled on those used by workers for identification when entering the factory.
