Unfolding Elsewheres
A quarter of the people who lived in Bosnia before the war (1992-1995) have now dispersed around the world. And everywhere Bosnians ask each other, “How did you get here?”
With this work, Velibor Božović oscillates between familiarity and alienation. It centres on interviews with people from the Bosnian diaspora, who fled the war in the 1990s. Each of these stories describes an entire history, complete networks of human lives and destinies. Worlds were broken down and (re-)created. At a time when rampant xenophobia and racism fall upon people just trying to survive, these stories of displacement, hope and courage of refugeed Bosnians take on a different connotation.
The conversations about this diaspora are intimate stories, which Božović presents in a fragmented technique that highlights the complexity of the process of remembrance. The ‘unstable’ text turned into images is combined with an almost abstract photograph depicting the speaker’s personal experience. The large photographs were taken on location during the interviews and place the refugees in the here and now.
’Unfolding Elsewheres’ was created in response to the growing hatred towards today’s refugees, from Syria, Afghanistan and other places. Božović wants to tell these stories because they testify to our humanity. He conducted the interviews with Bosnian refugees between 2016 and 2019, together with Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon.
This project was supported by the Canadian Council for the Arts.
