Sarajevo International

Kristina Leko, 2001

123' beta SP/ DV
A series of 12 single-channel videos (unlimited edition) / 12 site specific public art video installations, Sarajevo 2001

Bosnian, French, Italian, Spanish, English, German with English or Bosnian subtitles

Stories in collaboration with: Ana Abdelbasit, Francis Bueb, Yvana Enzler, Nabil el Hassan, Paul Lowe, Krista Maresch, Marty McKeller, Chriss Miller, Marco Noce, Paola Ossa, Imad Ziyada

Team:
Cinematography:
Videoediting:
Curated by Lejla Hodžić
Produced by Amra Čamo, Dunja Blažević & SCCA Sarajevo

Artist's statement

Communication and creativity

As a video artist I define my mission as authentic research and documentation work. Authentic video documents are always the result of fruitful interaction of the people involved. Video is basically a tool of horizontal communication. As an artist, I want to share my artistic and video skills with others. Here I recall the philosophy of early video artists and activists from the early 1970s: In the future, they said, everyone will be free to make his or her own "television." My mission is to help people to express themselves through the video medium in the realm of my projects. I am the initiator and mediator of the work process, I help and teach the participants in my projects to create their small stories and corresponding video documents. In the long term, through my video communication projects, I would like to create an archive of authentic video documents made by various people. That is my way of being an artist and supporting the process of democratization of the media that is nowadays happening on the global level. Kristina Leko, 2001

A series of twelve short video stories different in their formal aspects and content was created in close collaboration with the twelve portrayed persons. The participants have taken an active role in this documentary endeavor. Rather than objects of the story telling, they are story tellers and coauthors of the videos: the twelve foreigners who moved to Sarajevo for personal reasons during the 1990s. They differ from each other in their social background, religion and nationality: from university professor to a small Chinese shopkeeper. The idea of the project was to show economical, political and social background of an after-war and former eastern society through the representative selection of foreign citizens. Relevant social and historical issues are revealed through personal video documents. Communication with and among the participants, and to help their integration with social environment were the aims of the project realized through showing the videos in different public sites in the city: a book-shop, a restaurant, French Cultural Center, Student Cultural Center, airport etc. The choice of the public venues was done in collaboration with participants up to their wishes. In collaboration with me, each of the participants shaped his/her story him/herself. The realization of video material took 50 days. Different cultural backgrounds caused big differences in the way participants involved themselves in the creative process. Some of them did shooting themselves, wrote story or statement and creatively dealt with video-structure. For two or three, however, telling the story in a direct way was the only possible expression. Being so, the videos differ from each other a lot.

1. IDENTITY/IDENTITIES, a video by Yvana Enzler and Kristina Leko, 9 min. 10 sec.
Yvana Enzler, born in 1952 in Switzerland, diplomat, came to Sarajevo in 1998, and not by chance. Her video speaks of her search for her roots: Yvana follows the female line of her family, and reveals her complex religious and national identity. The story of three women from her family, her great-great- grandmother born in Sarajevo at the beginning of the 19th century, her great-grandmother and her grandmother, each of whom is in her own way related to the Balkans. In the video, photographs from her family album alternate with pictures of Sarajevo, relating to the four religious identities (Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic).

2. THE CAR , a video by Ana Abdelbasit and Kristina Leko, 9 min. 50 sec.
Ana Abdelbasit, born in 1975 in Kuwait, living in Sarajevo since 1999, creates in this video work a portrait of the most important object in her life, her car, which, like her, traveled the road from Kuwait to Sarajevo, but in contrast to her passed through two wars, one in Kuwait and another in Bosnia. A Croatian citizen, Sudanese on her father's side, her story nevertheless begins and ends in Sarajevo. In this video, Ana thanks her Sarajevo friends for their assistance and support.

3. FRIENDS, a video by Imad Ziyada and Kristina Leko, 14 min. 55 sec.
Imad Ziyada, Palestinian born in Baghdad in 1966, in fact a refugee from Iraq, civil engineer, today independently runs his own photocopy shop and design studio in Sarajevo, where he has lived since 1996 with his wife and two children, both born in Sarajevo. He came to Sarajevo thanks first of all to the assistance of his friend, Vjekoslav Saja, whom he met in Baghdad at the end of the 1980s. Imad Ziyada tells his story about friendship simply and warmly. The story is unsettling in its truthfulness, in its description of a friendship that knows no bounds, as well as in the fact that it shows Sarajevo as a place like any other, where, with the power of will and effort, anyone can make his/her dreams come true.

4. SHAME , a video by Marco Noce and Kristina Leko, 9 min. 35 sec.
Marco Noce, born in Italy in 1963, came to Sarajevo in 1998 to teach Italian as a lecturer at the Philosophy Faculty. Today, aside from his job at the faculty, he works as an officer at the Italian Embassy, volunteers for the Sarajevo Italian Society, voluntarily teaches two Italian language courses, and is the founder of a nongovernmental bureau for cultural exchange between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Italy. His video story starts with a sonnet of Petrarch which serves an introduction to the reasons for Noce's coming to Sarajevo. Marco Noce, through Petrarch's sonnet and his personal experience, speaks about the feeling of guilt and shame that arise in connection with Sarajevo, and about the feeling of uneasiness shared by many other people who have been lucky enough not to have personally experienced war.

5. THE PYRAMID, a video by Chris Miller and Kristina Leko, 7 min. 45 sec.
The video is the story of Chris Miller, born in 1972 in California, an officer at the World Bank, who came to wartime Sarajevo in 1994 for personal reasons. Chris charms us in his fluent Bosnian while he shows us his favorite places in town. Chris considers Sarajevo and Bosnia his home. The video also contains an appeal directed to his friends who left Sarajevo during and after the war. Chris would really like them to return and believes that the economy here will improve soon.

6. PRIDE, a video by Nabil el Hassan and Kristina Leko, 4 min. 50 sec.
Nabil el Hassan, born in Syria in 1959, came to Sarajevo in 1979. He represents a relatively large group of foreign students from the nonaligned countries who studied in the former Yugoslavia. In a short statement, this doctor explains his motives for staying in Sarajevo during the war.

7. A PLACE FROM THE FUTURE, a video by Paola Ossa and Kristina Leko, 9 min. 15 sec.
Paola Ossa was born in 1972 in Chile, where she met her husband, who is Chilean on his father's side and Bosnian on his mother's. A little over a year ago, she came to live in Sarajevo with her son Lucas. Paola believes that it's sometimes possible to see one's own future. Thus, arriving in Sarajevo, she quickly noticed a place that she had seen on television, a scene that had stayed with her, inexplicably alive in her memories. Paola speaks of her first impressions about Sarajevo, about her encounter with Islamic culture; she is delighted with the peace and quiet, which doesn't exist in the place she comes from.

8. A SOCIAL SCULPTURE, a video by Francis Bueb and Kristina Leko, 14 min. 50 sec.
Francis Bueb, born in 1950 in France, came to wartime Sarajevo in 1994 and founded the Andre Malraux Cultural Center. He decided to let the people who work at the Center speak for themselves in this video. Thus the employees speak about the Center and its founder. In many aspects an unusual and enviable institution, this Center embodies the rare spirit of its founder, who in the difficult wartime and postwar period succeeded in channeling not only his own enthusiasm, but also the enthusiasm of many others, the enthusiasm and belief in culture and engaging in culture.

9. BOSNIAN-AUSTRIAN FRIENDSHIP, a video by Krista Maresch and Kristina Leko, 9 min. 40 sec.
Krista Maresch, born in 1968 in Austria, professor of the German language, met some young people from Sarajevo in Vienna, only to move to Sarajevo three years later. Krista's video symbolically uses home video recordings, and speaks of the existence of a dual perspective: one is of Bosnia in Vienna, young people who were forced to emigrate from Sarajevo during the war; the other is a picture of Sarajevo in the postwar period. The video speaks of the differences in mentality and about the efforts to bridge these differences.

10. A DAY WITH MARTY, a video by Marty McKeller and Kristina Leko, 14 min. 35 sec.
Marty McKeller, born in Scotland, chef, caters for members of the international community in Sarajevo, and is clearly in love with the people and the way of life there. The video takes us through a typical day, from morning until night, which among other things consists of collecting the ingredients for her special recipe for "Marty's Sarajevo Desperation Dish", which originated in 1997 as a consequence of the lack of foodstuffs available in the market.

11. PHOTOGRAPHER, a video by Paul Lowe and Kristina Leko, 11 min. 15 sec.
The video of Paul Lowe, born in England in 1963, living in Sarajevo full-time since 1999, takes us on the road to Foča, where he goes out in search of people he photographed during and after the war. He's a photographer who wants to avoid the depersonalization of the photographer's and reporter's job; to avoid the alienation of the media industry that turns people into news, stories and newspaper headlines. Paul wants to create a more intimate relationship, to give people the photos he took of them, to speak with them and to follow their problems and joys as they return to their homes.

12. I DON'T REMEMBER HIS NAME, a video by Kristina Leko, 7 min. 10 sec.
This video is a meditation on a banal everyday situation, shopping in a Chinese market, discovering personal and human contact in the ordinarily alienated act of buying. It is about the author's attempt to communicate with a Chinese shopkeeper which, because of the language barrier, comes to a halt at numbers. The shopkeeper’s language ability is limited to pronounce the prices of his offerings. Although the act of buying is simple and real, it is a surrealistic encounter of two distant worlds and cultures embodied by a buyer (the artist) and a seller ( the Chinese shopkeeper), as well as conditioned by recent historical events. The shop is full with cheap cloths and cheap household goods, as well as with cheap funny toys that no one really needs. Showing the inventory of the shop relates to the impoverishment of the Sarajevo inhabitants. The video refers indirectly to recent increased immigration of the Chinese people in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. It is the only video in the series that didn't start through a collaboration with the person presented in the video. The Chinese community in Sarajevo was rather closed and it was impossible to find a person that would get involved in the project more intensively.

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