BALKANS

Since the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 2000s, the Balkan region has been in transit between two states: a rapprochement with the European Union has been taking shape for nearly 15 years, while at the same time, historical ties with Russia persist – not to mention the growing influence of China in the region. Two decades have passed and Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and Kosovo are still evolving on the margins, according to their own rules, in their own temporality.

This situation is reflected in the iconography. The Balkans seem today to be outside the flow of images. I was 6 years old at the time of the confrontations and the sequences of the siege of Sarajevo remain engraved in my mind. They flooded all the TV sets. On the other hand, the documents that illustrate all the current complexity of this region are few and far between.

The present seems to be evaded by the weight of a past still too heavy and a more promising future. It is a changing environment where everything continues slowly without anything definitive happening. All the images presented in this photozine constitute the subjective archives of a memory in suspension and a future in the process of being built.