A Family Tree or the Absent Houses / 2020

A participatory action and ephemeral collective installation based on a subtle and direct relationship of visitors to the place of suffering of the victims of fascism

Dotrščina Memorial Park, Zagreb, Virtualni muzej Dotrščina

In 2020, I was invited by the Virtual Museum Dotrščina to create a site-specific work commemorating the victims of the fascist regime in Croatia. During the Second World War, the Ustaše militia and security forces of Nazi-supported government executed around 7,000 people at this site. The unclaimed bodies were later buried under the trees. Since the brutal disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the park has been neglected and is little used today. The Dotrščina Virtual Museum was established to raise awareness of this important site and to help preserve its memory (more).

Throughout the period of two months during the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown in spring 2020, I observed activities in the city forest of Cologne, Germany. Since playgrounds across the city were closed, suddenly parks were full of activities. All over the forest children with their parents built archaic tipi-like forms which I documented using a mobile GPS application, discovering a hidden “urbanistic” pattern in the ground plan of the park (see the post URBWALD-Soft Stems for Stable Systems).

In A Family Tree or the Absent Houses I connected the pandemic situation with trauma from the past to use the crisis as a kind of empathic channel, as a means of connecting with earlier traumata. Forming my concept around this idea of a crisis as a kind of empathic channel, and two aspects of absence (absence of the family histories that, following the crime, were never given the opportunity to exist, and the absence of the Museum which was planned, but never built), I invited the citizens to spend time in the forest building ephemeral “architectural compositions” from materials found on the site – fallen branches, twigs and leaves, and carve one name chosen from the list of the victims onto their creation.