Maja Bajević

(1999) or “Green, green grass at home” (2002) Bajević is looking for the meaning of home - places we inhabited and lived in. Using a method of mental mapping, she shows the personal experience about the past. The video work “Green, Green Grass of Home” documents a story about remembering a place, where first the artist’s grandmother and then she herself lived in. During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina until the time of making the video, the flat was inhabited by other people. During strolling through a green meadow Bajević evokes the memory of the flat and describes it there to her colleague Emanuel Licha.¹ Bajević notes: “In the same way as we occupy our home, it also lives in us. We identify with specific places and these mark our lives. With the disappearance of these places, we also lose everything that we lived through in them.”² “Washing” as a process is a recurring motif in the works of Bajević. In “Work – Washing Up” (2001) the women are washing the dirt of history; in cooperation with Fazila Efendić and Zlatija Efendić the artist had washed and washed once more until the fibers of the cloth began to defibrate. As “Work – Washing Up” alludes to the collective history of a country the focus of the work “En attendant” (1995) lies on a private, love story, that wears itself out. The moments where the ideologies end, once imagined and lived together began to disappear and to transform according to the new ideals, these moments are expressed in a way of “…: the repetition that will destroy the fabric in the end, … a way to pinpoint the most hurtful place, the place where once something was and is now missing.”³ A.B.