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Limits – 2014
Limits is a personal project that deals with places that have been off limits to me for as long as I can remember. On the border of Croatia and Bosnia, there is an area where there is nothing apart from the road and destroyed homes. These houses have been abandoned there for about 20 years now and nobody really lives near them anymore.
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When I was young, my family would drive past these homes to visit our grandparents and other rela- tives. The trip would always take almost half a day and I learnt how to spend a lot of time in a car. The landscapes changed as hours passed. An hour on the Austrian motorway, a bit more passing through the hills and fields of Slovenia, some hours through the plains of rural Croatia, and then a wild mixture of valleys, mountains, towns and abandoned villages in Bosnia.
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I don’t remember asking about the bombed homes, or being told what had happened there. It almost feels like I’ve always known and understood. I didn’t understand the deep and complex causes behind the events that had happened, but I understood that it was that way and it never felt unnatural, strange or foreign; just another part of my identity.
Nobody talked about them or even went there. There were no stops along those roads. (There was not really anything to stop at anyways.) The houses passed me by and it didn’t matter.
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When I was a bit older I understood the situation a bit better. I knew that those were houses of families that had lived there and that they had left. I could read the graffitis now, but I shyed away from reading them because it upset me. Now I know that some houses had „Serbian house“ written on them and were spared. But most houses have insults written on them or phone numbers that tell people passing by that the house is for sale. I imagined a family living somewhere else (maybe even Austria or Germany, like us) and selling property with a destroyed house on it. Who would want to buy such a house in such an area? It seemed ridiculous and I don’t think even one of those houses was ever sold.
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They are not proper houses anyways. They are broken walls who seem to be mourning their roofs and windows and doors. Some still have paint on them, others only exposed brick. The structure is almost always the same: Three floors, balconies, the same openings for doors and windows, the same type of roof. In most of them there are many plants growing, almost as if nature is taking back what is hers and warning us that everything we build and do is only temporary. I was told that there are no forest growing out of those ruins, but that those plants only grow from abandoned buildings. Sometimes the plants cover the damage on the walls and then you can’t see that there is a differnce between the hole a granade leaves and the holes a rifle leaves.
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I never liked looking at those houses. In some ways I have become numb and used to the aspects of war. Others still cut through me like the first time I experienced them. Those homes are somewhere inbetween.
I don’t cringe anymore when I read yet another phone number crudely sprayed onto a destroyed wall, but I still can’t go there. The history of the home is too vivid, even if I don’t know it. While they are all different destinies, in the end they’re all the same: a family that left the home they had build, voluntarily or by force. Maybe some left soon enough and got away safely, maybe some where hidden by their neighbours.
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There are many stories about the people of this country, but I never dare to ask further. That is the curse of an immigrant child: You can’t escape your history, past and heritage – and people in your new home love to remind you of that – but you weren’t there to experience things in your old home first-hand either. You aren’t included in conversations about the war, and it’s mostly better to not ask questions. Better because you don’t want to embarrass yourself by saying something insensitive or stupid, and better because you don’t want to bring up bad memories by further inquiring.
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When I went to take photos of these houses I wanted to capture the view of a child in the backseat of a car. Every once in a while some truck or car will pass by, but for the most part one is alone on the road. Sometimes I stepped out and crossed the street. But I’m not able to enter. I’m not even sure whether I’ll ever be able to or want to. People told me to stay away because there still might be landmines. Apart from that, there always seems to be some kind of invisible barrier keeping me from coming too close. Years ago the barrier was the car window, now it’s the knowledge that there’s no going back after such an experience and that I won’t able able to forget and shrug it off.
When I knew what I wanted to photograph I real- ized that the technique and medium didn’t matter. I decided to use an old Praktica MTL 3 that belonged to my grandfather and cheap monochrome film because I felt most comfortable with it. But in the end it doesn’t matter; no matter what tools I use, they can never fully unveil the whole story behind the final images.
All images were taken in the area between Bosanski Brod and Derventa.
