Green, Green, Grass of Home

Home inhabits us as much as we inhabit it. We identify ourselves with places and these places punctuate our lives. With  their loss, by choice or force, we lose what we lived in them. This work in collaboration with Emanuel Licha shows me in a green field while describing my apartment in Sarajevo, the apartment where my grandparents lived and, after them, I myself lived before the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Since then other people have occupied my apartment and have refused to leave it. Attempts to get the apartment back have remained unfruitful as of the time the video was made, even though official laws exist for the restitution of apartments occupied during the war. I haven’t been in my apartment for more than 10 years, but in my filmed description I try to remember it with great detail; I walk through the field as I would walk through my apartment; I go from one room to the other, describing it and telling anecdotes. From this description Emanuel Licha drew a plan of this apartment he has never seen. Mental maps are used in various fields such as geography or psychology to understand how someone projects oneself in a certain space.