Not long after crossing the Croatian border we were driving along a rocky road which didn´t seem to have an end, when unexpectedly we saw Klaus´s blue buss behind bushes. We didn´t have our tracking on so we were completely unaware that he had taken the same road. This accidental meeting led us to stay overnight in a local farmers field as an extended convoy again, and on top of that we arrived just in time for his vernisace of the field.
Next morning we drove to Jasenovac: our first Yugoslavian War Memorial.
Somewhere along the road we realised the potential of these massive abandoned war memorials all around former Yugoslavia, and we are now planning to see how some of them would fit in to our project. It seems, that there´s about 30-40 of them mainly in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, and the internet as well the people we met on the road, told us they´d be long forgotten and usually in distant locations. The statues seems to be so big that mapping and tracking would be quite impossible with any standard sized projectors, but for now we will go around and see what can be done.
With all this information in the background, we were very surprised to notice that Jasenovac was everything but abandoned: it was a very well maintained WW2 holocaust monument with a modern museum and extremely well kept surroundings. We arrived at noon and started with some research in the museum. The plan is to combine the history of these places to our own storyline, and give respect to the people involved through our work, so the museum tour certainly helped us to get in to the groove of the history… After an hour of personal stories and mementos about the holocaust we felt so devastated we drove to the nearest village to have an uplifting ice cream and restore energy for standing and dancing in the burning sun for the day. As it seems to be so often in Northern Croatia, also Jasenovac was full of bullet holes and run-down houses from the war. It didn´t acquire much acting skills to get into the mood of the theme…
Jasenovac was certainly too big and too public for overnight work with the projection, so we ended up doing a daytime shoot of dancing and a some still images. A very efficiently improvised day of working. After all the dancing, lying on the ground and all over the dusty monument, we were both extremely dirty and sweaty and decided to invest to a small hotel in Novska. Having a shower, internet and easy overnight procedures has certainly become luxuries!
