A few years ago, I met the artist and filmmaker Morten Traavik at a literary festival in Norway. Traavik is most famous for his documentary Liberation Day, an account of a concert performed in North Korea by Laibach, a band from the former Yugoslavia with a penchant for totalitarian aesthetics. This was the culmination of a series of increasingly ambitious and absurd artistic events that Traavik had organized in North Korea, and is a highly entertaining and insightful film which you should watch if you have not done so already. In our conversation we talk about art and totalitarianism, the importance of “play between the trenches” and more. Enjoy!
Morten Traavik official site.
Liberation Day film on Vimeo.
Liberation Day trailer.
DK: Hello and welcome to the Thus Speak Daniel Kalder podcast. Today I'm delighted to be in conversation with Morten Traavik, artist, filmmaker, theater director, provocateur, and (perhaps) trickster from Norway whose most famous project is probably Liberation Day, a film about the first concert by a Western rock band in North Korea, but who has done many other interesting things over the course of his career, which we shall also discuss. Thank you for coming on, Morten.
MT: Thank you, Daniel. Happy to be here and thank you for the great introduction.
DK: You're welcome. So we met a couple of years ago and we just have a bit of a chat about some of the interesting things you've done. So first of all, I think I first heard about you when the film Liberation Day came out, which was about a concert by Laibach, a quite famous underground industrial band from Slovenia or former Yugoslavia.
MT: That's right. Well, it was Yugoslavia when they started back in 1980 actually. So it's quite incredible how long they've been going.
DK: Yeah, and I think it's an important point that they were from Yugoslavia. They were themselves from a police state and a dictatorship.
MT: Absolutely.
DK: But it was quite a long road that led you to that film. You were in North Korea many, many times before that, I believe. Can you tell me how you got started working in North Korea? What was your first project there and how did that come about?
MT: Sure. But first maybe it's worth mentioning that around that time… when was it that Dictator Literature came out? Was that 2018?
DK: Yes, 2018.
MT: That was definitely one of my top three reading highlights that year, and the year after, and the year after that. So you remember, I decided just to shoot you an email to give you a well-deserved shout out for that incredible Herculean undertaking that you had taken upon yourself. And then you answered that you were familiar with me and my work through the Liberation Day movie, and I was kind of boosted by that. So we come from a place of mutual recognition, one could say. And my first visit to North Korea was back in 2008. And that was kind of an adventure in itself because at that time, the so-called “International Counselor” of this weird friendship organization called the Korean Friendship Association with which I believe you are familiar, it's led by a uniformed Spaniard with strong authoritarian fetishist tendencies, Alejandro Cao de Benós.
And it's got these small, you could say, offices in different countries in Europe. And the Norwegian office was led by a guy who was a friend of a friend, and he kind of advertised that he was arranging tours to North Korea through this friendship association. So I managed to get a seat on one of these tours, which was definitely not your average charter trip. It was both an unusual destination, but definitely also an unusual group of people because those people were, you could say, the Dusseldorf office of the German-Korean Friendship Association sub-chapter of Alejandro's Korean Friendship Association. And these offices are basically just a guy and his dog, but in good socialist communist tradition they always have these very fancy monikers like “international counselor” or “vice president of foreign relations” and so on. And I was on a trip with a bunch of these guys for two weeks in North Korea and I had a kind of epiphany. This was back in 2008 and that was, if I'm not mistaken, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea. So there was a huge military parade on Kim Il-sung Square, which is the most important square in the whole country, in downtown Pyongyang. And you cannot not be impressed by the precision and the goose stepping and the 500,000 people in perfect synchronized harmony becoming human pixels in this huge placard-held slogans and so on.
But then the next day we took one of the Japanese-made minibuses that ferried us everywhere because we were not allowed to go anywhere on our own, obviously, which took us out of town. And, literally, a 15-minute drive from this huge spectacle of militant opulence people are doing their laundry in half dried out riverbeds in March. That discrepancy told me something: not only is this a Third World country that's extremely good at putting on appearances, but also that there's no way that this country can be a danger to that many people except its own population. So that made me curious because there was this huge gap between the press, the headlines, the very freak show-ish news that we tend to get from North Korea and the very mundane dusty ill-kept crumbling reality on the ground. So that was kind of the first impulse that there is always a huge gray area between what we think we know and what reality is really like.
DK: It's interesting that you said it was a “friendship society” that took you there. There's a book by Anthony Daniels, he went to North Korea maybe the late 1980s and
MT: Yes— The Wilder Shores of Marx
DK: Yeah, something like that. I think it's got two titles—
MT: It's brilliant. I love it.
DK: It’s a fantastic book. And he talks a lot about the people on these tour buses from various friendship societies, but even though communism was quite dilapidated by 1988, there were still believers. They didn't know it was all about to collapse. It didn't look good, but you could still theoretically understand to some extent that there might still be friendship societies. But I think that to be running one in 2008 is another level of commitment to illusion. I'm just curious about those people. Did you talk with those folk at all? Was it worth talking to them? When they saw this dilapidated landscape, or people washing their clothes in the dried up muddy riverbed, did they just screen it out? Did they not care? Or was it because evil American imperialism was doing this to them?
MT: Well, that's also the psychology of idealism. I don't even know if idealism was the thing that drove these guys, because as you say, in 2008, the show had become so run down that to be an ideologically pure friend of North Korea… I don't think you meet that many true idealists even inside North Korea these days.
So the whole Juche ideology, Kim Il-sung’s homemade ideology of self-determination and self-sufficiency and so on, it's never been that believable. And each year it becomes even less believable. But they are definitely going through the motions and playing the game once every third year, which is when they have saved the money to go to Pyongyang and get, I don't know, a third class bronze medal for international friendship and some diploma with a North Korean stamp on it and feel slightly important for two weeks.
So there is kind of an exchange here, but when they see the dried out river beds and the dry fields and the whole very unavoidable conclusion that this is nothing like on the propaganda posters, there is one very easy explanation and that that it's because of the US and it's because of the sanctions. And if the whole Roman empire was not surrounding us, then our brave Asterix the Gaul, the last outpost of straight upstanding socialism would be like it is on the propaganda posters with yellow harvest fields and blue skies and booming industry and so on. So you can always blame somebody else, which I believe also is a very recognizable thought pattern. And in today's discourse also in many ways, it's always somebody else's fault.
DK: I think that's absolutely correct. And you just reminded me as you were talking—to change topic for a second—that when I was in Turkmenistan, I picked up a copy of The Ruhnama…
MT: I'm envious of that.
DK: It was an atrocious book, but there was this guy in Wisconsin, I think he was called “Steve from Wisconsin”, and he ran a blog called something like Reflections on the Ruhnama. And every couple of days he would publish an extract from the Ruhnama. You may be jealous of me, but I was jealous of him. He had Ruhnama volume two as well as volume one.
MT: Respect.
DK: He was hardcore. And he would say, “It's just outrageous that people misrepresent this country. Listen to the wisdom coming out of this book!” And it was strange because with a friendship society, there are the words “friendship” and “society” in it, so it presupposes that there are at least a couple of people sharing this delusion. But I got the impression that Steve from Wisconsin was a one-man band who was just blasting out this thing. And I followed that blog for a couple of years. And after Turkmenbashi died, he kept going. It was like he was flying the flag and he was upset that they were starting to deconstruct the personality cult.
MT: It became even more important for him to go on after the great leader died, I guess.
DK: Exactly. But anyway, what was the first project you did? Was it the a-ha thing or did that come later?
The “a-ha thing”
MT: That was the first project that was public. But the first real, “implemented” big event was the Norwegian national holiday festival on May 17th, which is Norwegian Constitution Day. In Norway, that is the biggest celebration of the year. Everybody goes outside, we put on our national costumes, we wave Norwegian flags, and we march through town. It's like a really, really cute and feel-good version of a military parade without the guns. I don't know if you've ever been…
DK: I’ve only been to Odda for that literary festival.
MT: Oh, you've only been in the dark fjords in October when it’s pouring rain.
DK: Yeah.
MT: That's Norway too. But May 17th is a very, very significant day. A cornerstone, I would say, of Norwegian identity. So having succeeded to work around Alejandro Cao de Benós and the Korean Friendship Association who were very, very possessive gatekeepers, you could say to North Korea — I mean Alejandro, that was his claim to fame for many years, to be the special representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and go on the BBC and CNN and pose in his suit that was tailor made at the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang, which has a tailor where you can get basically anything you want made, such as Kim Il-sung suits. So Alejandro had his special North Korean army uniform tailored for him there. So he has been on television, promoting and parroting the party line for years. And then people like me started coming who could offer the North Koreans perhaps more meaningful cultural exchanges than just a handful of—I'm looking for the right word— eccentrics and their pocket money a couple of times a year. So I managed to have some separate meetings with the so-called Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which is a North Korean state organization supervising cultural exchange. And I invited two representatives from there to Norway to the big cultural festival in the Norwegian far north in 2011.
And they were quite impressed, not least because I had the Norwegian queen as my, what do you call it? The one who sits across you on the table when there is this state dinner? You have your table lady? No, what's it called?
DK: I'm not sure, but I know what you mean.
MT: She was my lady for the evening to a dinner where I also invited the North Koreans, and you would think that they would be anti-monarchists, but on the other hand, they're absolutely not. They are definitely monarchists, it's just that they call it something else where they come from. So that made us, me and them, start thinking about what we could do in return back in Pyongyang. And that's when I decided let's try to do a Norwegian cultural festival on May 17th.
So I brought a group of musicians, actors, visual artists with me to Pyongyang, and we had our national costumes, and we did an exhibition, a concert with Norwegian everything from traditional to pop rock music in one of the big concert halls of Pyongyang and we had our national costumes, and we duly made probably the world's smallest, but not the quietest, Norwegian celebration march across Kim Il-sung Square.
We brought a form of— and I think this has been key to most of my North Korean projects—that I offer something that is exotic and strange to them, but not alien, not unrecognizable. So when we come and celebrate the Norwegian king in our national costumes and with our national music, they understand this because this is what they do all year, basically. But it also created quite a stir back in Norway, not only because we managed to get inside, allegedly, the most isolated and mysterious place on earth, but also that we kind of promoted Norwegian values inside it. And that was a big surprise to many, I think, that the North Koreans let us so unashamedly promote another country's values and nationalism. But I think also because Norway, we are so small and cute, if, I don't know if we had been German, that we could have gotten away with it in the same way.
DK: So what do you think was in it for the North Koreans? Were they just interested that somebody was willing to come, that they were no longer pariahs? Was it that they could show this to their people? “Look, we're not isolated, here are Norwegians. They also have parades.”
MT: Well, I think as in any system, and especially in any monolithic state system such as North Korea, and also Russia for that matter these days, or the Soviet Union or any authoritarian society, to get anywhere you need to be ambitious. But in some places you will also find people who have a certain genuine interest in what they do, not only opportunists or careerists or concrete heads. So I was lucky and also not to be too modest about it, after having worked with theater and artistic projects and all kinds of social artistic interventions for some years, I do have a certain gut feeling about people. So that gut feeling together with some luck took me in the direction of some people within the North Korean cultural authorities that were genuinely fun guys to be with, who had a sense of humor, who had been outside North Korea, who knew that what the world was like outside, who also came to Norway on several locations and who understood, I think, that culture might be one of the few arenas left where you can actually have a look at each other and play together “between the trenches” in a way.
I do believe that those few people who I also befriended, that we really managed through working together on these more and more ambitious and even absurd projects, culminating with the Laibach concert in 2015, that we developed a very strong bond of trust between us. But as you say, there was also something in it for them because not only did I bring more or less delectable foreign artists to Korea, I also brought out North Korean artists to Europe and to Norway through the same exchange projects that we conducted for all these years.
DK: I think the idea of “play between the trenches” is very interesting, of culture as this one remaining place where these kinds of things can happen. There's an ambiguity to some of it that enables this… I wouldn't say freedom, but something to slip through.
MT: Exactly, yes.
DK: What does this mean? Well, it's not really on the surface. It means one thing, but maybe that's not really what it means, there's something else going on. And so that first one you did, was it well received in Norway? You must've had a lot of backing from the Norwegian state to bring Norwegian artists over to stage a parade. Were they up for it?
I think that the reception back in Norway was split between and along quite predictable political lines. That the right wing spectrum on the political scale were very indignant that anybody could collaborate in any way with the most evil regime in the world. And the more leftish part of the commentariat were more, how do you say? Carefully enthusiastic. It was kind of a classic hawks against peaceniks to simplify quite a bit kind of distinction in the debate at that point.
DK: I'm still thinking about that comment about this “play between the trenches”. I think it's a very interesting idea.
MT: Well, I'm sure you know this, but this expression comes from this, I don't know even if it's a legend or if it actually happened, but supposedly on the western front on Christmas day, was it 1917 or something, that there was a lull in the fighting or there was a temporary armistice and the Germans and the English soldiers came out and played football in no-man's land or something like that. Actually, I think Paul McCartney did a quite cheesy video…
DK: “Play the Pipes of Peace.”
MT: “Pipes of Peace”, that's right. Yeah, sorry for introducing that image.
DK: It was height of the Cold War, the Spies Like Us era when Paul was getting heavily into heartwarming political commentary.
MT: Yeah, you can always count on Paul.
DK: So the first mega project was this cultural exchange, but you did many other things. You went back and forth over 20 times, culminating with this giant concert, or maybe not a “giant” concert, but a very spectacular concert in its own way.
MT: It felt giant.
DK: You could feel that from the film, that this was a significant moment — Laibach performing The Sound of Music in Pyongyang. So explain a little bit about Laibach: who are they, why were they of interest you, and how did the concert come about?
MT: I'll try to compress it into some digestible format. Laibach, as you touched upon initially, were founded in then-Yugoslavia in 1980, the same year that Tito, the strong man who basically founded and built Yugoslavia, died. And that was the start of the process that would lead to the collapse and civil war in Yugoslavia. When the strong man died, then things fall apart, the center cannot hold. And I think what inspired me most about Laibach, partly I liked the music part of what they did because Laibach was not only a band, they were also a part of a greater collective of artists calling themselves Neue Slowenische Kunst who appropriated a lot of the aesthetics from both fascism, communism, all these heroic aesthetics of propaganda posters— happy workers, brave partisan soldiers, not only visually in their art and visual material but also in their music.
They have been defined as both an industrial inspired band, which is partly true, but also as a martial band because they use a lot of military soundscapes like marches and Wagnerian I would even say in their best moments. They are very, very unashamedly flirting with totalitarian aesthetics and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who is also Slovenian and who is a contemporary of Laibach and has even defended them publicly against accusations of real fascism through the years, he's elaborated quite a bit on Laibach’s tactics of over-identification, that they are criticizing or ridiculing, but not only ridiculing, they're kind of celebrating and ridiculing totalitarianism at the same time. And that allows me, or us as their followers or listeners or the fans to release our inner fascists from time to time, to march a little bit to their music. But at the same time, it is a game. We are not fascists, but we have, as I believe most people have, we have an urge to dominate or to be dominated. And music like Laibach’s, not only music, but the whole Laibach aesthetic kind of liberates us who are honest enough to play with our inner Sturmbannfuhrer from time to time.
DK: And it also contains a great deal of absurdity in these incredibly pompous cover versions of “Life Is Life,” for example, which becomes “Leben heißt Leben” or the Queen song “One Vision” which is “Geburt einer Nation.”
MT: Absolutely.
DK: One of the first times I encountered Laibach music was in Moscow, when I went into the Soyuz record shop on the Arbat. I didn't know what it was, but it captured the ambiguity I think quite well. I heard this “Leben heißt Leben” and it took me a while to realize that it was “Life is Life.” And the shop assistant, this Russian guy, was goosestepping around the shop while I was browsing in the CDs. It was extremely strange. He was in his own world, and he was quietly mouthing the lyrics to himself. And I thought, “I think this is a joke, man.” But it wasn't clear: was he joking? Was he not joking? Did he understand what was going on or was he just enjoying the liberation of his inner totalitarian or…
MT: Goose stepper.
DK: His inner goose stepper? It was a very strange experience. But I felt that it showed you the music working, because it was this extremely arch joke in this extremely totalitarian style. And I was looking at this kid goose step and I was uncertain what was going on. So there was this ambiguity, which I think is also key to their long success and how they could slip into North Korea, because of this ambiguity and recognizable aesthetic.
MT: Absolutely. And this also, I mean, you are absolutely onto something and I think that any band that can get the record store personnel to goose step around the shop in front of any passing customer merits checking out, at least.
DK: It does.
MT: And that's also part of their genius, which was a huge turn on for me back in the day, is how they reveal and they bring out the totalitarian tendencies even in pop and rock music and pop and rock lyrics. If you listen to “One Vision” by Queen, which in Freddie Mercury's rendition is this kind of happy hippie-ish “Imagine” by John Lennon kind of celebration of let's all have a huge group hug and fight for justice kind of thing. But then in the Laibachian rendition, it becomes this kind of frightening Nurembergian.
DK: Yeah, it's completely different, and yet it's the same song.
MT: There is this quite obvious parallel between the worship of rock, gods rock stars and the worship of dictators or charismatic figures in religion or any kind of ideology.
DK: So how long did it take from the idea of taking them to North Korea to actually making it happen? There's a very interesting part at the start or in the film where Laibach are at some kind of banquet and a state official is reading a letter condemning them as a vile influence, and they just sit there. It was a very curious, “welcome to North Korea”.
MT: That was literally the opening, that was the first evening. We literally drove from the airport to that opening banquet to be roasted by that quite high up state official.
DK: It's a full denunciation for ideological crimes. So it's quite a welcome. It's interesting too from that question of ambiguity…. that nonetheless, despite all of these warning flags and signs within the regime, that maybe they want Laibach back here.
MT: Well, first I just want to elaborate a little bit on that divine scene that you just described, where we were treated to this very big, opulent welcome banquet. And Mr. Yu, who is also my good friend, had prepared this welcome speech, which in its way was trolling Laibach. He was playing with the language of power and turning the mirror against Laibach themselves.
Because what he had done was that he had gathered all the critical comments from people in the North Korean state apparatus that he had had to deal with after having invited them. And so all the resistance, all the accusations that he himself had had to wrestle with, he now turned them on and read it like a welcome speech to Laibach — which to me was totally genius. I was proud of him because he had somehow sensed very, very correctly and very clearly what the Laibach technique was about.
So it was definitely a prank from his side. He was not saying that, “Oh, I think you are horrible and you shouldn't be in here” because if he personally had thought that we wouldn't be there. But what he did was, after this long, accusatory and very condemning collection of criticism against inviting Laibach to North Korea, he rounded off by saying, “So without trust, without confidence, we could not have invited you here.” It was also psychologically very smart of him because after having scared the whole of Laibach entourage shitless, he then put into words the common bond or the common project that we were doing together based on trust and confidence, which was also quite beautiful actually.
DK: It's a fantastic moment. As you say, he turns the Laibachian method against them.
MT: And North Korean officials, I mean, what are the odds? And I think that also shows, I think you were also touching upon that, it isn't really….the ambiguity of Laibach, they are on one superficial level celebrating everything which is militaristic and strong and the language of power. That dimension was the entry ticket into North Korea because that was the obvious dimension that most North Korean audiences and I think most North Korean functionaries would notice. And that was what made it palatable to them. And of course, when Laibach perform “Life is Life” in English, though not in German, that would be a little bit too over the top, I think, for an anti-fascist, socialist dictatorship… still when those words were performed from the stage of the theater of the Ministry of the Interior of North Korea, they take on two, three, four new levels of significance. I would say.
DK: So they covered a lot of the songs from The Sound of Music.
MT: Yes. They also released an album of the whole Sound of Music musical, their covers, not so long after the North Korean concert. So this album called The Sound of Music is directly inspired by the whole North Korean adventure.
DK: I do enjoy that. Some of the songs are quite entertaining in the Laibach versions. But my understanding is that one of the few shared cultural experiences between North Koreans and Laibach was the Sound of Music. It was okay to watch in North Korea, and it was a film that Laibach had grown up watching in Yugoslavia. Is this roughly why it was selected, or was it proposed by Laibach and accepted by the North Koreans? How did that come about?
MT: Well, this is where this weird kind of magic or karmic dramaturgy comes into place. When it started becoming clear that this would actually be possible to do, and the North Koreans started asking what kind of songs would Laibach be bringing, this is when Ivan Novak, the ideologue or, you could say the brains behind most of what Laibach is up to proposed The Sound of Music because the aforementioned Slavoj Zizek has had this hang up on The Sound of Music for many, many years. And he has developed his own theories about what The Sound of Music is about. And in his usual prankster spirit Zizek proposes that the real heroes in The Sound of Music are actually the Germans because the whole Sound of Music story, for those who don't know it by heart, is that in Austria right before the invasion by Germany, there is this family of seven children and a widower in this Austrian castle who are in need of a nanny.
And Julie Andrews is playing this nun Maria, who is a rebellious nanny, and she becomes this breath of fresh air in this very stifling disciplinarian home of the Count Von Trapp, who is this strict widower father. But the whole circumstance is the impending invasion of or annexation of Austria by the Germans, and the Germans are the villains of the film, and the Von Trapp family becomes part of the secret resistance against the Germans. But Zizek turns this on its head and says that the Germans are actually the ones trying to bring culture and cosmopolitanism into this rural Austrian region, and that it is actually the Von Trapp family that can be viewed as some kind of hidden villains of the film.
So that's in the Laibachian spirit of inverting established truths and ambiguity. Then Laibach proposed covers from The Sound of Music. And then it turned out, as you say, that The Sound of Music is actually one of the few Western cultural exports that are actually well known in North Korea. And there, I don't think they have analyzed it from a Zizek point of view, I think it's more, it's the music and it's the superficial narrative of evil Germans and the heroic Von Trapp family resisting the Germans in this beautiful mountainous landscape of the Alps of Austria. And North Korea is also a very mountainous country. I mean, they have a mountain in their founding national mythology, Mount Paektu, which is this volcano or former volcano in the far north where supposedly Kim Il-sung, the founding father of the nation, his guerillas were resisting the Japanese occupants back in there. They had their guerilla bases on this mountain. So there are actually also these parallels when you notice them. And it turns out that The Sound of Music is even used in universities for learning spoken English.
DK: Really?
MT: They make people memorize the tunes because you can use the rhythm of the songs to memorize words and so on. And what I heard from a friend, an Australian friend who was working in a western-run touring company that organizes trips to North Korea, is that one of his North Korean colleagues, when he started singing one of the songs from The Sound of Music, just for fun, the North Korean guide put his hands over his ears and ran away demonstratively because he was so fed up with the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. So it turns out that actually you can weaponize it as well, to scare North Koreans.
DK: So one last question. I could keep going forever, but I think we have to draw things to a close at some point.
MT: Yeah, the first episode.
DK: We talked about this idea of “play between the trenches” and introducing ambiguity. [The authorities] wouldn't let Laibach perform “Let's go to Mount Paektu,” which is their own song about a sacred mountain. They couldn't introduce ambiguity around that. But still, this event occurred and it's a great film and I would encourage everybody listening to watch it, and I'll include a link afterwards, but what do you think was the legacy of the event inside North Korea? This introduction of Laibachian ambiguity? Or was it just a one-off event that was extremely cool? Or do you think it has some lingering reverberations afterwards?
MT: I think I'll take the easy way out, and quote the then Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai, when he supposedly was asked in the early seventies, what were his thoughts on the effects of the French Revolution, and he answered: “I think it's too early to say.”
DK: Right.
MT: What I am very happy about, apart from the basic fact of actually making it happen, is that for a short while we introduced ambiguity to North Korea and we introduced something that was beautiful and ugly at the same time, something that was familiar and deeply alien at the same time. And ambiguity is a state of mind that most people, be that in North Korea or anywhere else, tend to shy away from
DK: Absolutely.
MT: So weirdos like us, who cherish ambiguity, are few and far between, no matter where you are. This is also why I think that what you can do as a culture worker or as any kind of creative person is that you can introduce something to somebody, but you can never force it on them. You can show people something and then whether something takes root or if some seeds are sown, it's not actually up to you. So I think I'm absolutely sure that whenever the day comes that North Korea in its current form ceases to exist, or takes on another shape, or maybe opens up more, I'm absolutely confident that there will be people who will still remember the Laibach concert and who will be able to talk about it and to describe their feelings in a more complete way than what is currently recommendable, I would say.
Thank you for listening. Please like, share and subscribe & consider upgrading your description if you haven’t already done so. Regards, DK.
