This exhibition commemorates the 1620 persons who disappeared during the armed conflict in Kosovo and the immediate aftermath, including the years 1998 and 2000. It comes at a time of denouncements and the discovery of long suspected mass graves in the territory of Serbia.
The details of the 1620 persons revealed in this exhibition are not the details of missing or disappeared persons, but rather the details of people who were abducted, made disappear by force, executed and hidden in mass graves, which, over the course of more than 20 years since the crimes were committed against the people of Kosovo, have been obscured, thus making the search and, as a result, their discovery, more and more complicated.
Grass has overtaken the soil where the traces and proof lie.
Once upon a time, is a normal beginning of every fairy tale. In this case it is the beginning of a war story. A world that is revealed to us, through the innocent eyes of children, is a world that similar to a fairy tale should never belong to reality.
This exhibition was done together with the family members and it expresses their wish to remember these children through the remaining objects of an interrupted childhood.
No day is ordinary in war, and no day of peace will ever be complete as long as a new war is happening somewhere else. War has the ability to drain and simultaneously annihilate meanings; of language, dignity, humanity, and of time. Following this concept of diminishment, which is the essence of war itself, the exhibition, which is dedicated to all of its survivors, symbolically decides to condense the entire duration of the war by reconstructing and presenting a single day of it. This day, whose autopsy is divided into thousands of fragile moments, contains all kinds of severe human rights violations, where each story told shrinks until it transforms into a fragment, similar to the revived images of a traumatic memory.
