THEY PENETRATED TO THE BOWELS OF EARTH AND DUG UP WEALTH. BAD CAUSE OF ALL OUR ILLS.

Consisting of 4 separate works, I was interested in what dialogue would occur when they were placed together. Inanimate objects organize the temporality of the animate world. Zastava is the word for “flag” in Serbo-Croatian (and Bosnian) but a Zastava M76 is a model of a sniper rife, used by the opposing armies during the Yugoslav wars. What does struggle look like? What about stillness? I had been thinking a lot about nationalism, genocide, narcissism, digital and natural communication.

I wanted to tackle my hesitation of using images within my work. “Image” comes from *aim-, the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to copy.”

Using the TC2 digital Jacquard loom, I wove the widely circulated image of the two deceased lovers, Admira Ismić and Boško Brkić, from the Siege of Sarajevo in 1993. They became known as Sarajevo’s Romeo and Juliet. The slow process and formation of the image and detailing of the landscape and the deceased’s clothes gave me chills as I worked further on the image, throw by throw. The image is inverted on the backside. As a flag, its function decries nationalism and war.

Using the robot arm, I replicated archival images of a roped-off grave, stray dogs in the city hall of Derventa, an anti-hail system (popular science in the East, shooting explosives into the sky), and an explosion in Zenica from WWII.

The choreographed light, scripted and translating, glitching out, is bagged in light muslin. It’s hurt—the moving head actually a damaged light pulled from Boston’s oldest gay club. Its red eye quivering, glancing at the flag that is lit up by the daffodil-gelled spotlight on a barricade. It mimics the bodies— also on the floor.

I want to embody presence with or without a viewer. The performance objects continue to perform. The symbols take on their own force, developing a non-place within the art space. A non-place is the displaced space/time of a culture. Space that cannot be defined as relational or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. Supermodernity (the overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, and the individualization of references define this age, according to Marc Augé) creates these places, which become places of memory. A non-place is not completed, just as the non-durational does not have a defined beginning or end. This installation is a real measure of our time. I can’t stop thinking about Fascism being described as technological warfare as art.

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