ANDREJ ĐERKOVIĆ
#funjestrasjećanja
#windowofremembrance
#fenetredusouvenir
30.05.2023
https://www.instagram.com/funjestra_sjecanja/
Following, in addition to the renowned inter/national galleries and museums where he never exhibits individualy twice, the unique personal appropriation of the place/space for the display of his works (the entrance to Dante Alighieri’s Tomb in Ravenna, Saint Peter's Square in the Vatican, Tito’s tomb in the House of Flowers in Belgrade, Pompidou Center abribus in Paris, ruined City Hall (Vijećnica) in Sarajevo, the penitentiary on Goli Otok island, the pastry shop Jadranka in Sarajevo, old Taxi vehicles in Havana and others), Andrej Đerković with his new exhibition on the social platform Instagram, is setting different standards with using the front pictorial scheme of the mentioned social network, which perfectly fits into a kind of personal triptych amarcord called "Window of remembrance".
This photographic series unites three lifelong friends and their destinies following the siege of Sarajevo. All three, lived "building to building" in the same Sarajevo neighborhood (Dobrinja, former Olympic village), went to the same class of newly opened local primary school, and continued to socialize until the early 1990s, when due to the siege of Sarajevo, their acquaintance became even more important. And finally, all three of them tragically lost their loved ones (brother/father) during the siege, which gave their fate this time a factual connection. What is it, that unites them even today, far away from the graves of their loved ones? As the physical connection is geographically impossible, we are left with the spiritual one, that is reflected in the view through the window (funjestra on author’s native dialect), the view that, from time to time is engraved in the memory of that lost part of ourselves.
Communicating due to geographical distance via social video platforms, the author placed the portraited (including himself) in that already established posture of remembrance in front of the window, and by directing the lens through a mobile telephone, he made a diptych hipstamatic photography series that fulfills a dual task, subject and object. The concept of the series follows the thinking of "involuntary memory" (Proustian memory) of Marcel Proust, according to which such a memory, is the memory of an impression and it happens in an improvised moment, rediscovering a place, sound, taste that we encountered already in childhood, so the past is again revived, this time in all its senses, as if we were living there again. As a final result, we got a melancholic visual window of remembrance about someone’s physical existence in Sacramento, Melbourne and Geneva, which all together today form this Sarajevo neighborhood, that has united their lives (and deaths).
While old photographs deliver our mental image of the past, those taken now turn the present into a mental image, similar to the past.
Susan Sontag, On Photography
(The New York Review of Books, 1977)
