Open Heart Surgery – 2011

Open Heart Surgery is a way of understanding myself in relationship with the world around me – a way of understanding myself as a Balkan and as a human being. The works represent attitudes, stages of human feelings and places (photographed in Romania and in Bosnia). Feelings and places from “where I belong”. Open Heart Surgery, generally speaking, is not about where, but about why I belong here and not somewhere else. The works are about the feelings that I’ve been having over the years. Feelings of loneliness, of isolation, of continuous interiorisation, “integrated” in specific places, currently met in the Balkan region: abandoned places, old buildings, places that are considered to be characteristically or sometimes kind of a cliché for this region. A world torn apart by history, people and circumstances. A world of doubts, of insecurities, but in essence a true, vivid world. Finally, this series represents an indirect self-portrait realized through human figures and places from where I was born and from where I currently live.