Citizen NoPlace
Stephanie Davidson
"When we are alive we do not know we are ghosts". 1
I have never been to where I am from. It has become a dream landscape and I am partly always there. I have never been there but I am partly always there.
In 1944 a village of german speaking Yugoslavians were forced out of the country which was to become Tito’s Croatia. They were considered to be patches of ethnic inconsistency in the country. Their citizenships were taken away. They faced concentration camps if they refused to leave. Their land and belongings were absorbed into the new state. As refugees they arrived in Austria, some later immigrating to North or South America. My Oma and Opa made new lives in Leamington, Canada, the tomato capital of the world.
The land that was taken from them is irreplaceable. Like a lost puzzle piece this place is a gap in the lives of the people who lived there, and carries through like a hereditary bruise, into younger generations.
It carries through like a kind of black-out in identity.
This home video came to me through the community of people who left Kapetanova. I don’t know the man who took the video but I am connected to him through this chain of place, this place that is now no place and lots of places. These are pictures of the source. Looking at them it doesn’t matter if my eyes are open or shut. They are dream images from my imaginary life, my imagined home.
I wanted to make a project that evoked this place, that brought me there for a prolonged moment, that made me remember what I have never known but what is in me, my hunches, bruises.
I used the home video and took characters from it. I took the feelings from their homes and the moods off their faces and I traced lines in a completely intuitive way. I traced my way back to this place.
None of the lines are freehand.
From the lines I made a construction and put it on my body instead of the bodies of the women in the video. I wore this construction that I traced from that place and it was heavy and uncomfortable and dug into my shoulders with the weight of itself. It had shelves and holes to tie things to but it was empty. It became a kind of time machine.
"Time is a square wheel. Running fast enough in the alleys I could perhaps catch him who passed through here even before I was born before I was born. For this it suffices that the centuries be well guarded inside the Castle. Imaginary memories, imaginary life: I have already lived here we lived on the fourth floor, by the window of the living room you could see the corner of the City Hall. No more imaginary a life than my other ancient lives. The country of the past belongs to the same continent as the imagined country. They meet and mingle their fields, their squares, their sweet salt waters".2
1 p.306 “Attacks of the Castle” by Helene
Cixous, in Rethinking Architecture edited by Neil Leach. London: Routledge,
1997.
2 p.307 ibid