The series is a very personal account of my travels through the Balkans, a visual archive of fleeting encounters and nostalgic metaphors. I refuse to take an objective stance or to tell a straight-forward story which would comply with the clichés related to the Balkans as a politically tumultuous region. Instead, I aim to capture simple almost banal everyday experiences in order to reflect on previously unobserved shades and values of this region in transition. I am constructing a kaleidoscope of everyday fragments which reverberate with childhood memories, histories of migration, different religious traditions or bear residues of the communist era. The emphasis is on registering the cultural density around objects and practices that evoke something which could be termed as cultural unconscious.
By collecting and montaging “impressionistic” records of various urban scenes, I am mapping this heterogeneous, multifaceted and complex region marked by an unstable balance between the old traditional values and modern Western influences. The selected everyday occurrences offer insight into larger social issues, as they are symbolically charged inscenations and ritualised collective constructions. The images have an almost idyllic, utopian value as they represent phenomena which are soon to disappear in the process of modernisation. Yet they are also invested with irony and humour as they testify to irruptions, oddities, and personal inventiveness as a response to the limitations of circumstances present in each particular case.
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