Remember can't forget / Work cycle / Point 1 / Wound inside
The area of Old Sajmište in Belgrade is a place of many memories.
In 1937-1938, this was the site of the Belgrade Fair, where pavilions were built and cultural and commercial life took place. The first Belgrade Fair opened on September 11, 1937. And already on December 8, 1941, the Jews of Belgrade were sent to the fairgrounds, which were transformed by the German military administration into the Jewish camp Zemun (Judenlager Semlin). By December 12, there were already more than 5,000 prisoners in the camp.
In the Belgrade archives, there are 4 letters from nurse Hilda Deich, who voluntarily went to the camp to work in the camp hospital and help people. And like a large number of prisoners, she died there.
After the Second World War, the area of the fair was used to build barracks for the builders of New Belgrade (a district of the city located between Stari Sajmište and Zemun). People still live there. The Italian pavilion was given over to the workshops of the Serbian Union of Artists (there are still workshops there).
In July 2022, the reconstruction of the central tower of the fair began, which currently houses the Zemun Holocaust Museum. Next in line is the former Italian pavilion.
Once I get to this place, I can’t stop thinking about it and I come there again and again. The layers of historical traumatic context, the everyday life of the people for whom this is home, the gradual restoration of the memorial function, all this creates a very multifaceted pattern of the territory. The simultaneous presence of memory and, at the same time, the flow of ordinary life in the present against the background of this memoriality, outlines the issue of the visibility of memory and the history of the place.
Next to the 1984 memorial plaque, in memory of “the forty thousand people from all over our country who were cruelly tortured and killed there,” there are clotheslines stretched out on the street to dry. Washed clothes keep appearing there. Women come out with basins and hang their laundry in the sun. I hang my work nearby. My laundry dissolves in the environment, the wire frame refers to the tragic context of the place. A transparent cube, like transparent memories, inside which there is a trauma — a crosshair of barbed wire. A fragment of memory that cannot be extracted, which reminds of itself by stirring in the body of memory.
Not far away, at an outdoor table, women drink coffee in the morning and talk. I worry that they might start asking questions about what I am doing here. But they continue to talk, and then they take the cups and tray and go inside the barracks. The work dissolves in space, I become invisible and dissolve with it.
Through the ghostly cube of memories, a material reminder of the events of the past can be seen, a memorial plaque from 1984, next to which lies a dried wreath.