Doplgenger * is an artist duo Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran, film/video artists from Belgrade (ex-Yugoslavia). The work of Doplgenger deals with relation between art and politics through exploring the regimes of moving images and modes of its reception. They deconstruct the film’s medium, language, structure and notions of text in order to discover the ways in which art/moving images participate in creating political reality.

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* It is Serbian transcription for Doppelgänger, the German word, which is the usual literary term for common phenomenon of double and which literally means “double-goer”. It was brought into the literary tradition by the novelist Jean Paul (Richter), who defined it in 1796.

The “value” of the double has seemed to reside in its resistance to definition, in its “escapist” qualities, in the possibility it offers to the individual to imagine his/her self and reproduce himself in endless ways. Döppelganger articulates the experience of self-division, externalization of part of the self, makes one feels as him/herself and the other at the same time, it is “a replica of one’s own unknown face.”

Doppelgänger is a stranger, a foreigner, an outsider, a social deviant, anyone whose origins are unknown or who has extraordinary powers, tends to be set apart as evil. The double is defined as evil precisely because of its difference and a possible disturbance to the familiar and the known. It defines space outside the dominant value system. It is in this way that the double traces the unsaid and unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, made “absent”. It threatens to dissolve dominant structures, it points to or suggests the basis upon which the cultural order rests – the unified individual. The “other” has been categorized as a negative black area  – as evil, demonic, barbaric – until it is recognized as the unseen of culture.