Serbia

Predrag Djaković’s installation brings together photographs, personal archives, maps, and administrative documents in a constellation of fragments that interrogates 20th century memory. Not a linear historical narrative, but an exploration of how memory persists in what remains.

The project unfolds against the backdrop of global fractures in modernity, when ideals such as reason, humanism, and progress broke down under the pressures of violence, ideology, and mass manipulation. Rather than referring to a specific national context, it reflects a shared global experience, marked by the collapse of unifying systems of values.

Because communities can harden within their own representations, becoming instruments of exclusion, the selected materials act as critical elements that question the processes of collective identity formation.

The leitmotiv of the suitcases evokes the forced mobility that shaped the century – deportations, exiles, migrations, and failed returns – illustrating what has been called a “moving archive”.

The piano improvisation in A minor gives structure and continuity to the installation, which evokes archetypes of collapse and potential rebirth, opening a space to consider the possibility of a new shared language of values after inherited models have exhausted their authority.