It was February, and I had just checked my inbox before heading to Prague for a few days. I received an email from the Protok Collective in Banja Luka, inviting proposals for the project 'INVENT TURA | Mapping Histories and Territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina.' The project was formulated and curated by two German curators currently living and working in Bosnia this year.
During my enjoyable time in Prague and on my trip back to Brno, I began contemplating potential contributions to INVENT TURA. I pondered what mapping histories and geography meant to me, who was involved, and their approach. Why did these two curators adopt such a stereotyped approach? It seemed like just another tedious repetition, a routine for creating a socially based art project centered on Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As I thought about these aspects and observed the landscape through the bus windows, I questioned myself: What am I doing now? Is it a form of mapping territories and histories of a particular space? Are we all active archives, and how do we engage in this process? I started to reflect on my thoughts while moving through space and how space moved through me.
A strong intuition led me to decide to carry out the work in Bosnia, during one of my customary trips between Prijedor and Banja Luka. In the project application, I plan to describe how the author, through cognitive reflections on available images of a space, questions the method of encoding the past within the subject. I will consider the diverse implications that the subject holds at the moment of receiving images or information, recognizing it as a crucial factor in the mental mapping of the space and its history.
I've chosen to present the work in the form of subtitles—textually, as part of a performance after recording my trip with the camera. I will sit in front of the computer, playing and pausing the recorded material, and writing my reflections. Just once, honestly and without any future corrections, without any ethical filter.
IN THAT MOMENT, I BEGAN TO FEAR WHAT MY THOUGHTS WILL BE ABOUT.
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The work is a part of 'Critical Intimism,' a methodology that explores personal-social readings, juxtaposing contemplation (monologue) with specific living circumstances captured through video or photography.
The video-essay was created in 2011 and has been showcased multiple times as a video installation featuring plastic 'bus-like' chairs, as seen during the Crazycurators Biennale in Bratislava. In its final form, the work was concluded in 2023, with a real bus being sliced for the purpose of a video installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Banja Luka, produced in collaboration with the VizArt Association.
