Inverting Battlefields — for a borderless future

Collaboration — International investigation project. Developed between Nayarí Castillo, Xenos and KIÖR (Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Styria), with the support of BKA, österreischische Gesellschaft für politische Bildung, Land Steiermark and the City of Feldbach. Partner Institutions: ARTEBRE (SRB), Association Metamedia (HR), Creative Cluster Kombinat (HR), Historical Museum of BiH (BiH), KUD Obrat (SI), Memorial Center Lipa Remembers (HR), Public Room Sarajevo (BiH), Public Room Skopje (MKD) and Reagenz — Room for spatial experiments.

Each association of ex-Yugoslavia worked closely with an artist to develop a site-specific work for a battlefield. The historical former conflict zones, battlefields, and/or places of human misery chosen for this project shared a past subject to tragedies, trauma, massive displacement, and loss of stability. The selected sites represent Europe’s identity and the still unresolved tragedies of a centuries-long history of persecution, expulsion, massacres, wars, invaders, and occupations that continued into the twentieth century and which have affected the present and the future. The project seeks to redefine these symbolic places of shared history with their partial open wounds and transform them into hope positions. This positive re-evaluation takes the form of artistic site-specific public gestures for healing. Each of the gestures was then translated into Austria and applied to the reality of the city of Feldbach. Austrian artists were also invited to intertwine their views.

Position in Project: Curator, artist, coordinator of international relations for Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia. Coordinator of printed material.