EUROPE: LIFE IS SOMEWHERE ELSE

"Europe: Now you see it, now you don't."
Wim Wenders (from the speech during the conference "A Soul For Europe"
in Berlin, 2006)

The project consists of three parts: Europe, Brussels & Serbia, and it questions the sense of national identity (or the lack of it) in today's Europe, through photos of immigrants living in Brussels (“capital” of EU), lonely individuals walking through the cities of European Union and portraits of Serbian parents, whose children have moved to Europe, hoping for a better life.

For all the people of these three groups, the title of the project EUROPE: life is somewhere else, means something completely different.

 

IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

“… Today, European idea is fighting a battle on the European borders and, to a less degree, on some of the foreign territories. But even somewhat reasonable person would experience European polytonality as disharmony, despite of the abundance of harmonic nuances of the music that Europe’s political elites are pleading for.

Maja Medić’s eye, objective but engaged, gifted but not determined, as it should be with the exquisite professionals, has caught a lot of the essential irony of this process. Ironic and alone, it poses question marks, not equality sign, in this historical transfer, and a subtle meaning of this irony is that there are non-European ethnicities and unclassified codes thriving in European centers, grouped on the other side of political strategies and on this side of life.

Whether it catches the variety of Orient in the heart of Brussels (Turkish part of town, its chaotic bazaars, diversity that remains a great unknown for European architectural greyness, or African rhythms, body language and human faces of the numerous African population on the streets, their relaxing nonchalance comparing to the administrative rhythms of the city, Maja Medić, once a citizen of Brussels herself, with rarely seen expressiveness and efficiency,  effortless, as if, with every shot, she’s annihilating the possibility of demarcation that would leave Europe on the other side of its own self-sufficiency.

Hence that powerful, exquisitely pin-downed black-and-white contrast in the Europe series that brings us closer to a different, synchronic Europe which is less obvious, but equally relevant and essential, due to its individual inheritance and its communication void, where city maps make drafts for a world without people.

...
Contrasting these European extremes and interfering them in one overall (pan)European image, Maja Medić is supplementing it, if not completing it with Serbia which has, as we can see in double accentuation of present-absent (present parents of absent children), duly paid its mite, not participating in its essential controversy: isn’t Europe today an ideal place for non-European world?”

(Part of the text from the catalogue)
Miroljub Stojanović