“Collectors“ #2 / Installation: Table, (H=108cm, W=102cm, L=353cm) & UV light, (L=306cm), “Interscape VI-Day”, 1998 / Video projection & sound “Collectors”, 15:12 min./color, neon text, (L=260 cm), plants, 2001-2002

• In the age of media, we have a “hot” TV and a “cold” radio. Naturally, rather hot then cold one fascinates us more. Some years ago, I saw the news on the TV and I hardly fell asleep that night. However, what made this experience too hot for me was, the invisible and the unheard. The report showed women from Srebrenica silently sitting on the staircase in front of the city hall for days, waiting for something to happen. They were expecting from the authorities some explanation for their disappeared male family members. Nevertheless, nobody came out of the building.


• I was thinking for a long time what to do with this image that decided to stay in my brain. Its persistence and insistence were probably deriving from my empathy and, from the women’s point of view; I somehow identified with their conviction that there have to be answers to their questions. Anyhow, what amazed me really was their calm and silent determination.
  Recently, I also heard and saw on the TV the report concerning the trials on war criminals in Den Hague. An official from Belgrade made a statement: “We in Balkans do not practice written documentation of events in general. Therefore, it is normal that there are none on the ten years of war”. This statement surprised me because I know different. The self-defense of people involved into the bloody war is based on destroying the evidence, on their post-war pretended amnesia and even on falsification of their own history, which all protects them from facing the guilt. Such a statement also emphasizes the fragility of the social contract and it’s institutions. It doesn’t take much that we find ourselves in the state of barbarism.


• Consequently, I had the intention to name this show: This is no art. This is no exhibition.
  This is Pure Beauty. Nevertheless, it is a show, due to my acknowledgement, that no traumatic or other kind of experience is transferable and comprehensible. Anyhow, in our negotiation with the real, we have to articulate something and this something is the “Collectors” #2 show. The place is a structure of fragments that point to the gaps in the web of “missing evidence”, which are objects, landscapes, missing people and survivors, whose utterances might never be heard. Anyhow, they are present in their silence, which in the aftermath of carnage, a group of people in Europe is insisting to break through. The situation derives from non-linear, “rhizomatic” thinking and requires visitor’s conscious decoding and connection of meanings. What you see, hear and feel are composite elements that form the narration of a memorial. It is rather an atmosphere then a solid object-artifact. It takes time to heal and recover but the wound-pain tends to stay open and insists as a solid presence in fragmented memory.


• I am interested in how our actions and interpretations change places. What might be for a tourist an exotic place for holidays turns out to be for someone else the wasteland inhabited by ghosts and death. The beauty of exotic places and wastelands has to be inspected thoroughly. They have to be viewed closely and profoundly all with the aim that we claim our own living as a multiform flow. Consequently, we are capable to resist the tendencies, which insist to interpret our existences as one- dimensional/flat case disposable for abuse and manipulation.

Duba Sambolec, Trondheim, March 2002

[Text from the press release of Duba Sambolec's solo show "Collectors" #2 at trans-art Gallery, Trondheim, Norway in 2002]