GEBHARDT, Dirk - Play Life. Neighbors in the Western Balkans

Background information

"All over the world, people are once again defining themselves by an old phenomenon: nation states. The nation as the bringer of salvation in a complex world, one's own state is glorified and degrades other nations in an imaginary hierarchy. Historically, nation states are a recent phenomenon. Only since the French Revolution have people sought identity in language, borders and nation. Before that, kings ruled over a multitude of countries and peoples. In their territory, many languages were spoken and the population belonged to different religions. In absolutism, the king kept the people together. New political ideas and economic approaches to production required new mechanisms of identification. Language, race, and border now formed a nation. National myths emerged that historically justified this new definition of the state. The Germans took advantage of the war against France in 1871, and a German king was proclaimed emperor - although in 1815 Germany still consisted of more than 39 states that united to form the German Confederation. The new states of the Western Balkans used similar approaches to define their national identity. Some built pseudo-historical buildings and sculptures to emphasize the historical existence of their nations; others used religion and reinterpretations of historical moments in the Balkans to bolster their belief in the right to dominate other nations. From the outside, it looks like a mimicry of commonly used patterns for nation building - it looks like 'Play Life'. The Balkans have been multicultural for centuries. The different dynasties dealt tolerantly with the mix of religions, languages and traditions. Only since the collapse of the Yugoslav Republic have nationalist forces established marginal differences as patterns of separation. The most serious example of nationalist reinterpretation is language. Serbo-Croatian has been a language with a grammatical system since the 18th century. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the successor states developed new names for politically motivated reasons: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Linguistically, these cannot be defined as independent languages. Rather, they are slightly different realizations of a macrolanguage and thus de facto the same language system - Serbo-Croatian.

Content

The color photographs in his book of photographs 'Play Life. Neighbors in the Western Balkans' by Dirk GEBHARDT show seemingly casual everyday situations, but why is the destroyed Ministry of Defense still standing in Belgrade fifteen years after the Kosovo war? Why are there over 2000 new monuments in Skopje?
From 2009 to 2017, Dirk GEBHARDT searched for the subtle symbols of the national in the streetscape of the capital cities, Pristina (Kosovo), Belgrade (Serbia), Skopje (North Macedonia)and Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina)." (slightly adapted publisher's text, for the original: © Slanted, 2019)

About the German photographer, Dirk GEBHARDT

Photo books by and with participation of Dirk GEBHARDT