HOUSE MUSEUM, installation, 2007
House Museum is build upon a story of a house, situated on peninsula Peljesac in Dalmatia (Croatia).
By adopting an archeological approach, this project explores questions of collective heritage, soty telling, value systems, expanded notions of the past and the present.
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In 2003 Serbian citizens were allowed for the first time (after the fall of Yugoslavia), to enter Croatian territory without visas. Finally, people had the possibility to enter again the territory banned for thirteen years, some of them even to visit their own (summer) houses.
My family’s summer house was build in 1972, in Žuljana, a small village on the Peninsula of Pelješac. When we found it again in 2003, only the flat roof and the walls were left, and it was obvious that different people had visited it during the war. Some village neighbors said that there were soldiers, homeless and immigrants coming and going…
In the last few years, every summer, we spend a month there, trying to restore the house by ourselves. Just the clearing of the rubbish took more than a week. In and around the house we came across different objects, some of which we kept. Together they become readable and bear witness to the history of one house.
We have decided to catalogue the found objects and by organizing them into the ‘House Museum’.
We divided the objects in to 3 sections:
1. x-1971
The walls of the summer house were erected on the ruins of a very old house. Objects in this category are from the time before the buying of the location and building of the summer house in 1972. Most of these objects were deep in the ground, damaged, and corroded.
2. 1971-1990
Djordje Šević built the summer house using the layout of the ruined edifice in the ground and the scattered old stones lying around. Second section contains the objects that belonged to the Šević family during the summers they spent there from 1972 to 1990.
3. 1990-2002
The last section is of those objects that arrived to the location with the events of the war. Unfortunately we have thrown away most of them during the clearing, so only a few of them remain and are included in the Museum collection.
project by Katarina Šević and Gergely László
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