“Post memory describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experience they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images and behaviours among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right”. (Hirsch, 2008)

The stories which we are told allow us to fabricate our realms of imagination, creating utopians of a place never before visited by us personally. Through gathering memories of those who have lived in Yugoslavia, I am interested in the juxtaposition of contemporary printmaking and post memory. By means of placing objects from participants’ stories into my video pieces, contained within a house or the forest, creating a utopia of a country that may now only exist through memory.

Yugoslavia separated in 1992, and with that the disappearance of a country along with the identity of its inhabitants. In being of Macedonian descent, possessing what may be interpreted as real picture memories of a place and a time in which I have never been before. Through means of being told stories as a child of this place has this been imprinted in my mind, a memory of another life.