Portrait of my Mother
/10
- Portrait of my Mother
- 1999
- 5 channel video/slide installation
- 64min
Milica Tomić’s video work "Portrait of My Mother" was made in the days following the NATO bombardment of Belgrade. Tomić focuses on the complex links between the trauma of the loss of Yugoslavian Modernism and the new politics of identity and gender of the Milošević years. She politicizes the biography of her mother Marija Milutinović as an exemplary life. The journey leads to her mother’s apartment in a Tito era satellite town on the periphery—taking us past Muslim housing projects from the turn of the century and an apartment block hit by NATO bombs. At the end of the 1970s, in the wake of personal and professional crises, Milutinović, a theater and television actress known for her abstract-minimalist style, retired from the stage and began to weave tapestries, possessed to an almost spiritual degree by ideas of the natural and the organic, and of the Serbian tradition. These were the years of her daughter’s puberty and adolescence, a period that also witnessed the first signs of ethnic nationalism. At this time, Milutinović also divorced her second husband, a Muslim. The double representation of the mother’s identity crisis - seen in the dialogue with her daughter, for example, in the story about a dispute over the correct pronunciation of the first name of a nanny, i.e., about her ethnicity—and her confrontation with the flexible and performative identity concepts of her daughter is reflected in the spaces she walks through to get to her mother’s home—a house whose very architecture represents the projection of a future that appears betrayed in today’s Belgrade. As if to work through the trauma of this development at the level of the unconscious, Tomić inserts passages of black leader with illustratively noisy sound sequences at breaks in the narrative and switches to slow motion when people whose biographies are linked with that of her mother accidentally walk in front of her. G.S.