Ancona / Skopje Expedition

embroidery documenting the expedition from Ancona to Skopje (part of Embroided Diaries 2007 Series)

1 _ ZBIRLJVOST / ~AGGIUNGITUDINE
2 _ BEZDANOST / ~OSCURITUDINE
3 _ CARSITUDINE
4 _ BRATSVTLJIVOST / ~HERMANITUDINE
5 _ IDENTITISMO

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1 _ ZBIRLJVOST ~ (it.) AGGIUNGITUDINE Everything sums and nothing subtracts. Capacity to add and never take out. Environment where coexists very different things or reasons not necessarily coherent between them. Could be relative to transitional period when the direction of this transition is yet not well known. All the different things exist in the same level and have same importance. Examples: Arriving to Herceg Novi and walking around with our backpacks in search for place to rent with out big success we are stopped by a middle age woman who offers us a room to rent. 30 euros - she says - the room has three beds and its more expensive just for one night. As we accept in a while we are following her and her husband down the street to their flat. Flat is placed in 70ies modernist residential building, nice measurements with lots of stairways and garden full of shadows from Mediterranean vegetation. On the doorstep we take out the shoes following our hosts. - No, no you don’t have to - they say. In next second a young woman with a towel turban on her head run in to us getting out from the shower next to the entrance. Woman shows us our room where big matrimonial bed and conditioned sofa are leaving very little floor space for walking. She also explains that the door on the other end of the room takes to another room where sleeps another young fellow – he comes back late in the night after work but you want notice anything, she explains. We are offered a coffee on the terrace. Going there we are passing trough the living room where there are three sofas and I am imagining in which way they are converting in to beds to fit in the space during the night. On the tiny terrace also appear four more girls more and a young man. Coffee arrives, and Alessandro says – Wow, this is so good, last time I had this kind of coffee in Sarajevo five years ago – Ah, so you like Turkish coffee? Asks the woman, that leaves me something more relaxed as she used the term Turkish*. We are also offered with domestic schnapps, rakija. It comes from the young man sitting next to me. Rakija is of very bad quality, so called brlja and after a first sip I am starting to feel headache. In conversation we find out that the young man is a truck driver; that young nice looking women comes from different cities around Belgrade and are studding together political sciences on Belgrade faculty and that our hosts are refugees from Bosnian war and that they have two sons they want to merry. While we are preparing to get out for a dinner arrives a young couple enters the living room, he all the time busy with his cell phone and she waiting on sofa with crossed high-heels and lots of glitter on accessories. We are counting 12 persons in total in that small flat. Image: A stand in the Skopje market offering wide survey of DVDs with very diverse contents: Legend about Tito, Milosevic - Hitler, Serbian Paramilitary Guard (Arkan on the covers), Massacres in Irak (with Bin Laden), Resistance of Bosnia was heard up to the sky, JSO (Special Operation Unit of Serbia) without a mask, Truth about Aracinovo (Ethnic cleansing of Macedonians by Albanians), Tsunami, Ora I Coceci (Macedonian folklore music), Superman, Police Station, Detonator, etc 2 _ BEZDANOST ~ (it.) OSCURITUDINE bez dana (srb.) ~ without a day or daylight bezdan - common name for the tap or a fountain in the villages of Serbia, Bosnia, etc. Probably referees to the digging of very deep holes or wells in interior of the ground to get fresh and potable subterranean waters. Ability to get to the deepest part that is the common place, the constant, and part that never changes. Place not touched by the daylight, the most profound, place of maximal density. opposite to zbirljivost Examples: A tunnel trespassing Montenegrian Mountains Part of the human being that is same for everybody Dark interior of the cypress tree Descending man 3 _ CARSITUDINE Comes from the propriety of the river to disappear underground and resurge on the surface at some other geographical point. ~ (it.) carsare; (serb.) ~ reka ponornica. While subterranean it still exists but it’s not visible, it does not count. Ability of something to become inactive (freeze, hibernate) during some longer or shorter period and to resurge after and continue its evolution as nothing had happened in the meanwhile. Imposition of the relations to the facts. Ability to flow the narration in non-chronological order. Examples: meeting up with a childhood friend from skiing after 20 years. We just left the bus-.station in Herceg Novi passing hundreds of stairs to get to the city center where should be tourist information centers that could provide us with some information about the accommodation for this night. Alessandro was telling me that there is one agency 20m in the front, but my attention was directed towards a young woman standing across the street in swimming suite and a scarf obviously on her way to the beach. She was standing and looking at me. Her expression was remitting me to the long, long time ago… But this was not possible in this precise moment of rushing to find the shelter for tonight. In the moment she moves her look in to other direction and I do the same trying to follow what Alessandro is saying. But than just to satisfy curiosity I turn back again and mine eyes cross again with the girl’s one. Now there was no doubt, and I hear her calling me by name – Vahida! – I answer immediately - Tanja! - You haven't changed anything! – I introduce her to Alessandro - This is a friend of mine Tanja, with whom we spend days learning to ski when she was 9 and me 7 years old. You haven't changed eider! We stayed for a while on the street chatting and said to call each other latter to go out for a drink or so. Image:Disco Club Teutina Spilja – some places have an ability to transport to another times. Images:(left) monument for the victims of Goli Otok, 1991, Podgorica; (right) street of the victims of Goli Otok, Podgorica – after 50 years the victims of Goli Otok recive recognition as innocent sufferers Examples: official versions of national histories of ex-Yugoslav countries After the brake of Yugoslavia and constituting of nation-states a task of rewriting of official versions of history texts brought the historians to the year of 1918 just before proclaiming the first Yugoslav federation (SHS, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians) retaking the point of view where development of national sense was interrupted by the decades of communist ideologies where national histories and identities have been suppressed. Engineering of national identity as a political plan and strategy takes place instead of citizenship identity that was prioritized until that moment. 4 _ BRATSTVLJIVOST - fraternitudine Ability to give maximal confidence to the other; proclaim brotherhood with another person not family related of different tribe, culture, nation or race. Also: profiling identities and distinctions in characters inside the same or similar. For example: father has five children. Among brothers as much similar they are, they would like to differ between themselves, to build their own particular identities. They all speak the same language, but they say - My language now will be called Montenegrian, mine Serbian, mine Croat, mine Bosnian... Image: cash-machine screen in Podgorica; After the separation 4 former regions of Yugoslavia that used to speak the same language officially called Serbo-Croat denominate their languages as: Serbian, Croat, Bosnian and Montenegrian, now four ‘different’ languages. 5 _ IDENTITISMO Sickness that demonstrates as affective search for and over-expression of identities - Collective identity engineering exercised by the state - In the case of crisis and loss of collective identity - identity lifting Exaggeratedly searched identity on individual plan Image: Simple geometrical objects as cross and open circle could obtain a very different meanings and create strong identification among different social groups. Image:Karadjordje's monument in Podgorica and Skenderbeg's monument in Skopje.

handworks

14/05/2008