Travnik: Frightened Eyes in the Grass

Printed photographs, sketches and maps; 84.1 x 118.9 cm and 7 pieces 21 x 29.7 cm, mounted foamcore. This project looks at some uncanny cenotaphs of Bogdan Bogdanović that were built in Travnik, Bosnia, in the times of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Travnik, which means meadow, is a small town but used to have four religions: Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish. I conducted interviews in Vienna with Bogdanović before he died in 2010 and took these photographs when I visited the site in Bosnia. When Bogdanović received a call from the mayor of Travnik, the site was already decided. It was on high ground between Old and New Travnik where a great many people had been shot there during World War II. The idea was to build cenotaphs. It was a place surrounded by uncultivated landscape, with an ‘airy’ quality. The figures of Travnik reflect Bogdanović’s own dreams more than anywhere else. He had a dream box in which he noted down his dreams when he woke up—a typical surrealist practice. One note from Bogdanović reads: ‘Images (of cities). Why was I horrified by them? Many cities looked at, but not seen’. Travnik shows once again that the dream of reason creates monsters, as Goya put it. After compiling the maps of minefields, photographs and sketches in a kind of a puzzle, I could not get rid of this sentence: Yugoslavia was a dream. A rotten one, perhaps. Bogdanović told me that one day a group of Italian tourists came to see his memorial for victims of fascism in Travnik. At the sight of the cenotaph they exclaimed, ‘Oh, we did not know there had been Etruscans here’. ‘But, of course there were’, Bogdan replied. ‘I felt like I had lived for two thousand years’