BALKAN SUITE Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, 2006-2008

Balkan Suite is a project developed together with Giulia Fiocca, with support of the Visual Arts Olot City Scholarship. Since our participation in the Lost Highway Expedition, an event that crossed the republics of former Yugoslavia, our interest on the political footprints left on the Western Balkan territory did not disappear. The first part of the project consisted of a photographic essay on the tensions experienced while traveling the landscape: on one hand, the speed and effervescence of the self-built construction. On the other hand, the slowness with which the old infrastructure - hotels, cultural centers, railway stations - adapted to the new geopolitical context. A video on how this tension was lived by Aleksandar, a man we met in Belgrade, closed this part of the project.






The second part was the umbrella under which Balkan Suite was performed: just before the journey we met Miriam, a gipsy woman originally from Smederevo (Serbia) who had been living in Rome for 24 years. The geopolitical changes prevented her from crossing the borders of the Schengen zone, so she requested us to film her and to bring the video to her father, in Smederevo. Later, her father asked us to film him and to bring this new video to Rome.

Collective project: Giulia Fiocca + Laia Solé
Exhibited at Espai Zero1 (Olot, 2008)
Coordinator: David Santaeulària
Collaboration: Trajkovic family