Coming Home to a Foreign Place: Searching through the Camera Lens for Geographical Identity
A ray of hope also glimmers on the celluloid of the single-use cameras (Photo: Dorentina Zeneli)
15 August 2009
It’s supposed to be their homeland, yet it’s nothing but the country of their parents who once fled from it – before the civil war. Still, many of the returning young ones have no other choice than to grapple with their new/old homeland. A multimedia special about 14 people searching for identities.
“Balkan” – last summer in German clubs, that sometimes meant a cross of brassy eastern European folklore and western dance rhythms that accompanied partygoers’ all-nighters. Some of the dance-crazed youths whose parents brought “Disko Bucovina” along to their asylum from the chaos of war and dissolution of the Yugoslavian constituent states, now know the peninsula in the Adriatic as their new old home. In an exhibition produced by the Goethe-Institut Belgrade, 14 of the young repatriates offer us a look at their ambivalent Look Back Ahead.
Click on the screenshot to enter the multimedia special
For many of the would-be “home comers” of the generation of sons and daughters, the feeling of being caught in the middle is the lynchpin of their lives: with the front door behind them and after-thirst ahead, the young people are in the dichotomy of the loss of their familiar surroundings and a new beginning in their parents’ country of origin.
The exhibited images reveal life’s realities after expiration of a temporary residence permit. In the photos we frequently recognize two hearts beating within one breast. Although they were merely tolerated in Germany and only delayed their return to the now pacified, yet bullet-holed mother country, many of them felt at home here.
“Home ist nunmal, where your heart is,” sings the Hamburg band Kettcar. It is not only where you were born. Next to Bujanovac’s donkey carts and well holes, a shiny car body and memory often appear as relicts from a far, unfamiliar time. The journey back is far from over.
Yet a ray of hope also glimmers on the celluloid of the single-use cameras: the laughter of children who could give the wounded multi-ethnic state a new countenance, blue skies and flowers on a whitewashed balcony, a carefree girl romping in an inflatable backyard swimming pool. Nearly twenty years after the beginning of the conflict, these treasures on glossy paper support the latest figures in the UNHCR report, which sees a convalescence of the economy and socio-culture. .
