Infertile Grounds

Beskrivning

INFERTILE GROUNDS
2009-2012

The series of photographs Infertile Grounds deals with Croatian national identity related to places of historical or geostrategic importance. Landscapes in the photographs are marked by trauma, historical events and human experience.

Woods, fields and rivers are part of folk tales and myths but have also become part of rhetoric legitimizing political systems and ideologies. I was interested in places that political rhetoric had used copiously in inflammatory speeches during the 90s, places of institutionalised memory as well as those that had never been marked by a single memorial plaque. As after World War II, so after the war in the former Yugoslavia, the politics of memory labelled what needed remembering and suppressed what it was desirable to forget.

In the Infertile Grounds series, I endeavour to create a place of memory within the space of the photograph, an alternative memento that is not created by ideology but rather by the need to open up the space of remembrance for victims who are never going to acquire their own space in the official culture of memory.