the end and the beginning/početak i kraj

The work began from a line in Wisława Szymborska’s poem The End and the Beginning: after every war, someone has to clean up.

My most formative impression of collectively-minded action was and has remained the memory of my grandmother, and later my mother, tirelessly cleaning the dangerous rubble from the yard outside the first apartment we moved into after the war — not as a kind of condemned women’s labor, but as a continuation of a gesture older than discourse, a female gesture, which simultaneously sees the world for what it is, and for how it could be. This gesture is at the core of this piece.

Commissioned by UN Women for the international conference Gender and Peace in the Balkans: Tracing the Path Forward, held in Sarajevo in February 2025.