skupna izložba / SHUT UP, PLEASE!

The Oxford Dictionary proclaimed the “post-truth” complex to be the International Word of the Year in 2016. The word could be translated as “after- truth”, with that “post” or “after” denoting not the time that comes after something, but the termination of the validity of a concept, in this case the “truth”. Australian Macquarie Dictionary proclaimed “fake news” as the Word of the Year, mostly thanks to the flood of false news in America during the presidential elections. At the same time, the phrase “alternative truth” was most widely used by Donald Trump and his associates. All of these phrases suggest the arrival of a “post-factual” time in which the truth and facts are succumbing to emotions, beliefs, and rhetorical creations in order to achieve various goals. It is as if the signifier and the signified are divided, and if it is forever – we will see. And as if rhetoric does not need reality any more as its confirmation, or even as its fulfillment: instead, it is a reflection that only reminds us that there once existed a truth and reality that were independent, groundbreaking and verifiable reference points. Thus, the time of “alternative truth” is no longer a time in which we can rely on the difference between truth and lies. The philosophical announcement of what is now exploding, is found in the work of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard with his thesis on hyper reality, simulacrum and simulation, and this is (to put it more simply) about a thesis that media reality has replaced that “real reality”. Also, new media and technologies have enabled almost everybody on Earth to show their truth, which may have resulted in more people not being heard from the resulting noise. The same fact is accompanied by information on the growing control and manipulation we are subjected to, because the rulers and potentates were never interested in being able to hear and live the true alternative in the public space. It can be said that today we are moving between two poles: the deafening noise we produce by shouting out our own truth, and the silence of the censorship produced by those in power, in order to mute a good voice. Rhetoric and reality, chatter and censorship, truth and lie – language as a place in which differences and similarities are realized. Language as a meeting place for man and man, man and society, man and nature … Perhaps this is a good time for the following Almissa in Omiš to take place with the headline “Shut up, please!”.