Through material traces, lived experiences, biographical narratives, and archival documents, the video essay reflects on the toxicity of ethno-nationalist systems and the urgency for non-identitarian practices. Bridging historical periods and geopolitical spaces, the project questions contemporary relationships to values, memories, and material objects inherited or left behind. Themes of expropriation (material heritage and cultural memory), restitution (citizenship and looted land), justice and reconciliation (the Holocaust and the Yugoslav wars), as well as border identities (post-migrant and interethnic) emerge and intertwine within the personal stories of historical figures, contemporary citizens, and the artist herself. Alongside citizens’ narratives concerning the 2001 war and ethnic conflict in Macedonia – in particular that of a young Albanian woman whitnessing identity transformations beyond the limits of state-promoted multiculturalism – the work also traces the history of the former Royal Yugoslav embassy in Berlin. The building, constructed during the Nazi era on the expropriated site of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy villa, first housed the writer and Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, who sought to prevent his country from aligning with fascist alliances. By transforming the personal into the universal, the project questions the responsibility of creating and transmitting heritage – material, cultural, linguistic, non-institutional or private in ways that enable imagining and building more just and inclusive societies.
The research for the project was supported by the Culture Moves Europe – Individual Mobility of Artists and Cultural Professionals programme by the Goethe Institute, a project funded by the European Union. The research phase was conducted with the support and in collaboration with Kontrapunkt Skopje. The production of the publication and the video essay was realised with the support from Pro Peace (Forum ZFD) Skopje.
