5 th December 1978
After more than 17 years I have visited Bosnia. On the way to Mostar, where initially my project was suppose to happen, I stopped in Banja Luka to visit relatives like I used to do in childhood for summer holidays. Upon arrival in Banja Luka I was immediately overwhelmed and the course of my project's trajectory changed for good. I decided to stay and make the project in Banja Luka. The fact that I never reached Mostar somehow became irrelevant. I have encountered the physical space that preserved images from my childhood in some kind of a stop-frame.
The outline of the city has changed as I expected it would in the course of time.
But Boska is still Banja Luka's landmark, built as a cutting edge department store and today it is one of the last existing shopping malls that belonged to the chain of the Yugoslav department stores. It represents concrete mega-structure inspired by the American "shopping mall" architecture from 60', designed without any direct formal relationship to the local heritage. It was part of the larger urbanistic project called City Centre 1 that was commissioned after the big earthquake that happened in 1969.
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It was as if the most important landmark of the former life of the city, some kind of a monument to the self-management system of former Yugoslavia, stayed untouched. It was precisely the encounter with the department store Boska that profoundly changed the course of my project. I felt certain urge to document this status quo before inevitable flux of time makes it disappear and blend into reality. The absurd race with time began. The change was about to start, and you could feel suspense in the air.
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Department store Boska is a public space open to all citizens of Banja Luka, but it sometimes seemed to me like I was the only one there. It was somehow difficult to overcome the feeling of an explorer who was slowly and very carefully approaching the location while engaging in contact with the workers, since inside there were no shoppers and only few passers by. It was during the process of research (i.e. exploration) that I found out carefully mounted places of memory and respect toward Boska's collective and it's history.
Indeed, this work was made inside Boska and talks about the people that work and exist in this space, which haven't changed since 1978. It was created through archiving and documenting with the means of video and photography.
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"Od kako je umro Drug Tito situacija u drustvu je veoma losa, pa samim tim i u fudbalu"*
is an artwork that has been formulated through collaboration between myself - Bojan Fajfric, an artist, and Mustafa Ekic - Muki, Boska's worker.
Upon my first conversations with the saleswomen of Boska name Muki was mentioned too often. It was at a time of my thorough exploration of the place of Boska, which considered long and exhausting stays in this closed space, isolated from regular time and space and their social and political implications. Off course I had no idea why they were directing me to this man. But some days later, when I met him and when he showed me this book of his, I understood why.
This scrap- book represents a private log of Boska, compiled of personal and official pictures from the early days of this collective until today.
From that time on, I saw Muki as some sort of an alter-ego, which helped me to define my own position in relation to the subject of my research.
That is why this work is articulated trough the character of Muki, a man that works all of his life in Boska, in it's administration department. Ever since our first meeting Muki has done a lot to help me with the project and it was because we share the same goal: to reconstruct the history of this place from the personal point of view and to maintain this kind of an archive and document history.
*"Ever since the Comrade Tito died situation in society is very bad, therefore also in football"
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