(2024)
Creative process | walking art Photograph | Video | Sound
Temporary installation and walkings recorded in video, sound and still image; carried out in the surroundings of Mostar (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and continued later in Péja (Republic of Kosovo)
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EN | PT
See what lies beyond the ground | 2024
Provisory installation | Demarcation tape and stones | variable dimensions
Treading the Invisible:
Cartographies of Risk and Resistance
In the fractured terrains of post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, the act of walking becomes a radical gesture - a negotiation with histories etched into soil and stone. This body of work, rooted in performance and walking art, interrogates the interplay of territory, memory, and invisible borders. By deliberately straying beyond the algorithmic safety of hiking apps and marked trails, the project subverts the commodification of landscape, instead embracing the precarious agency of movement in spaces haunted by both geopolitical violence and ecological latency.
See what lies beyond the ground | 2024
video still | 16:9 | 2'12" | b&w | sound
See what lies beyond the ground | 2024
Provisory installation | Demarcation tape and stones | variable dimensions
In the outskirts of Mostar, where the Neretva’s currents mirror the region’s unresolved tensions, each step performed a dialogue with absence. The landmine - an artifact of territorial demarcation and ethno-nationalist warfare - loomed as spectral interlocutor. These dormant threats, now statistically diminished yet symbolically potent, transformed the walk into a durational performance of trust and trespass. Documentation through fragmented photography, erratic soundscapes, and destabilized video mirrors the terrain’s discontinuous narratives, where nature’s reclamation battles the scars of human division.
The work’s continuation in Kosovo’s Péja region amplifies this inquiry. Here, the geopolitical is inseparable from the geological: limestone karsts bear witness to shifting sovereignties, while shepherd paths trace older cosmographies than those imposed by modern borders. By forging “new” routes through these palimpsestic landscapes, the walks perform a counter-cartography - one that rejects the clean lines of state-sanctioned maps in favor of corporeal, improvisational knowledge.
Drawing from psychogeography’s tradition of dérive, yet inflected with the Balkan context’s specific weight, this practice reimagines walking as a form of embodied research. It asks: How do unmarked territories hold memory? Can the body, through its vulnerable trajectory, expose the fissures between official histories and lived topographies? In resisting the curated pathways of digital platforms -which sanitize risk and erase political residue - the work insists on art’s capacity to map not just space, but the volatile intersections of ecology, trauma, and resistance.
See what lies beyond the ground | 2024
video stills | 16:9 | 2'12" | b&w | sound
Minefield warning sign recorded during my walk
near Péja (Republic of Kosovo).
Hiking app showing marked trails considered safe and my current position.
