The lecture-performance ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE DEAD is based on the namesake novella by the world-famous author Danilo Kiš. It was performed almost as a private act in the Jewish Community in Zagreb in 2004. Living plants situated on chairs among the viewers witnessed an intimate lecture that made the question of real and fantastic inconsequential.
The performance ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE DEAD dealt predominantly with the power of a narrated text, questioning and unraveling the barriers between fiction and reality. The narrator, Sanja Mitrović, was a guide through a labyrinth of names, places, events, images, smells, sounds, conditions, feelings and thoughts. She was the medium, through which the story opened, branched out, spread and trickled over; the channel through which various identities, various levels of existing and non-existing pasts flow.
In a time of hiperreality and the all-encompassing dominance of image, MONTAЖ$TROJ invoked an archaic, but still universal style of narration as a radical performance which defies the commoditized spectacle with its soberness and modesty. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE DEAD and its "brutal honesty" is the true beginning of MONTAЖ$TROJ’s (pseudo)documentary approach to the theater..
