Green, Green Grass of Home

Video installation, 2002. 18 min.

Home inhabits us as much as we inhabit it. We identify ourselves to places and these punctuate our lives. With their lost, decided or forced, we lose what we lived in them. Mental maps are used in various fields such as geography or psychology to understand how someone projects itself in a certain space.

This work in collaboration with Maja Bajevic shows Maja in a green field while describing her apartment in Sarajevo in which her grandparents and after them she herself lived before the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Since then people occupy the apartment and still refuse to leave it . The attempts to get this apartment back have remained unfruitful up to now, even though "official laws" exist for the restitution of the apartments occupied during the war. Maja hadn't been in her apartment for more than 10 years at the time of this project, but in her filmed description she tries to remember it with great details, and she moves in the field as she would walk in it: she goes from one room to the other, describing it and telling anecdotes. From this description I drew a plan of this apartment that I had never seen.

Nous habitons des lieux tout autant que ceux-ci nous habitent. Nous nous identifions à ces lieux, et leur mémoire ponctue notre vie. Avec leur perte, qu'elle soit volontaire ou forcée, se perd tout ce qu'on y a vécu. Le plan mental est utilisé dans diverses disciplines, tel que la géographie et la psychologie pour tenter d'établir comment un sujet se projette dans un espace donné.

Scénario et réalisation: Emanuel Licha et Maja Bajevic