Sarajevo Document

The work I made for Nine Dragon Heads at the Sarajevo winter festival 2005 was titled Sarajevo Document

This work, part of a series of Travel Documents is dependent on a fetishised desire for movement. Its a forensic travel document, an evidential record that _someone else_ is going somewhere while I myself remain, a tourist having arrived is already thinking about leaving. The document is made up of a large number of graphite rubbings taken from vehicles. I concentrated on the unique footprint of each vehicle and collected prints from each tyre, collating print sets catalogued with the registration number of the vehicle. The evidence was collected in person over several days in Sarajevo streets. This is forensic tourism, collecting souvenirs of profound discontent. There is an element of paranoid civil surveillance that has been elevated to a recreational hobby. The finished dossier/ album was shown as a wall work. The process of sample collection had a performance element as I negotiated my intentions with car owners who speak a different language.

The process ::

I walked for four days in sub zero (down to minus 20 degrees, never warmer than minus 3) temperatures and heavy snow, taking tyre rubbings with graphite, one rubbing per vehicle on standard office A4 paper, labelled with the registration of the car it was taken from. It took four days to collect 45 rubbings. I was unprepared for the cold and for the fact that there actually were not very many cars and those that were there were either buried in snow fall or monitored by security personnel or both.

The work became a way of learning the city intimately as I covered ground, and an endurance work as I overcame the physical discomfort of walking long distances in icy conditions, slippery and treacherous underfoot, digging tyres out of snow drifts, brushing off frozen road grime with hands swollen and burning from cold, soothing suspicious car owners, trying to explain to the armed police who were called just what in hell I was doing under that car...

I was generally freaked by it all, but also had a great time challenging myself to finish what I started, and the work that resulted was a representative landscape drawing in a way that I had never anticipated before I started it. The black and white graphical nature of the tread rubbings reflected the monochrome and falsely idyllic snow not quite hiding the damage from exploding ordinance and machine gun fire. It was strangely poetically perfect for how the experience left me feeling, a haiku representation for the remaining medievil romance of the place and graveyards of identical headstones that cover kilometers, explaining nothing, understanding nothing but touching it and being touched by it anyway. Collecting the registration numbers made the work into a kind of reflection of the lingering paranoia and attempt at social control in a city where there are large numbers of uniformed men with guns patrolling and an equal number of black market street touters, prostitutes and beggars with black frost damage on their faces and hands.

Nine Dragon Heads in Sarajevo 2005 organised an exhibition at Gallery Novi Hram, where it opened on the 7th February. Participants included: Alois Schild (Austria) Ali Bramwell (New Zealand) Andreas Pytlik (Germany) Bill Zingaro (USA) Edin Numankadic (BiH) Gordana Andelic-Galic (BiH) Jessy Rahman (Surinam) Kazunori Kitazawa (Japan) Lee, Ji-Eon (Korea) Max Buhlman (Swiss) Neil Berecry-Brown (Australia) Park, Byoung-Uk (Korea) Sonja van Kerkhoff (Holland) Shin, Young-Gu (Korea).

Many thanks to Creative New Zealand who paid my airfare to Europe.