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The program
"Serbia and Kosovo:Intercultural
Icebreakers" is aimed at young
people from Serbia and Kosovo who
are interested in art and activism.
Through the program, they are given
the opportunity and a free and
secure space to meet, collaborate
and develop common ideas that they
want to send a message about, their
own vision of the future
relationships of the two societies
and the citizens who live in them.
Young artists'
personal histories are inseparable
from their work, and they do not
escape. Through five years of
program implementation and more
organized events, seminars, art
colonies and exhibitions, it has
emerged that young people want the
platform to talk about their own
relationship to the past, present
and future.
The five-year
duration of the program also means
that it is attended by increasingly
younger people, whose memories are
different. Generations not born
during the armed conflicts that
occurred in 1998 and 1999 in Kosovo
are also slowly coming to the fore.
Some were quite small and have
little memory, but they are very
much alive.
Throughout the
workshops, the participants got to
know each other but also opened up
to each other and talked about their
personal stories. Some of them were
deeply personal and emotional, and
the experiences expressed through
them were traumatic. Some have used
these personal experiences to send a
message and conceptualize their
work.
The work that
named the final exhibition „Stories
from the Vacuum Cleaner", "Sloboda
700K" by artist Pajim Paša of Peja
is part of family history. The
artwork the artist borrowed from his
aunt for the purpose of the
exhibition provoked emotional
reactions, but the artist did not
want to talk about the history of
the object but what the object means
to society, noting that an ordinary
machine outlived the state and the
factory that produced it. That work
was interesting in its interaction
with his other two works that
represent his personal story.
Pajtim Paša
exhibited a photograph of his house
in Peja, which was set on fire
during the war and his grandparents
were killed. With that photo, he
exhibited his work, which he called
"Back at Home“ (“Ponovo kod kuće”),
describing that the painting was
created in May 1999 when he returned
to his burned-down house with his
family. Not knowing how to describe
it, he drew his feelings and
presented them to the audience.
The personal
experience of an artist in this way
presented is not only a potential
point of his transformation, growing
up and personality formation. In
this way, one person's experience
can also be one of the starting
points of transformation for anyone
who sees and thinks about this work.
"Serbia and Kosovo:Intercultural
Icebreakers" is precisely by opening
the space for this transformation
that contributes to the
reconciliation and normalization of
relations between the two societies.
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