July 32 (2019 - 2020)

This work explores the fragile connection between memory and place, following a journey to retrace family roots in former Yugoslavia. By confronting the contrast between remembered landscapes and present realities, it reflects on displacement, personal history, and the passage of time. Moving through sites reduced to ruins, forests, or meadows, July 32 exists in the liminal space between memory and oblivion, questioning how places persist in the mind long after they have disappeared.

While growing up, I listened to the stories of my grandparents about the places where they were born and from which they came to Novi Sad. As an adult, I always wanted to see those places to somehow demythologize them, because as a child I imagined them as surreal, almost magical. During 2019 and 2020, I visited the places where they were born, which are located in four different parts of the former Yugoslavia - Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo. After being abandoned for various reasons, the houses where they grew up were left to time and oblivion. Some remained in their places, some were replaced by others - foreign and newer ones, and those that collapsed simply disappeared. The places where those former homes were are now meadows and forests, which is why it was very difficult to precisely locate them.

The only directions to their birth houses were those my grandparents wrote based solely on their memories. Upon my arrival at their places of departure, the discontinuity between the real state of the place and the one that lives in their memory was apparent. Thus, I found myself in a space that exists on the edge of memory and oblivion.