Performer and author Marko Milić is researching how traumatic events shape our capability to observe the world around us. How the horrific experiences cause us to become hopelessly stuck in the past and what happens in our minds and brains that keeps us frozen, trapped in a place we desperately wish to escape? As one part of the research connected with his performance LUMI, Marko Milić made several drawings inspired by the Rorschach test, that serves as a catalysts to our tendency to superimpose our traumas on everything we see.
»We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples – almost a third, as it turns out – engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe heavens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, than, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge?« – Bessel van der Kolk: The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2015