“Cleaning” is an ongoing body of work bringing together performance, sound, photography, drawing, and spatial installation.
The work originated as a site-responsive video performance developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, at a place marked by the historical aftermath of wartime violence against women. Within an abandoned and damaged architectural environment, a female figure repeatedly performs the simple act of sweeping.
Repeated beyond practical purpose, the gesture gradually shifts between care and exhaustion. Rather than reconstructing historical events, the work approaches their persistence through repetition, duration, and bodily action.
Recorded during the performance, the sound of scraping dust, debris, and broken building fragments developed into an autonomous work. Installed independently from the image, it transforms the gesture into an acoustic presence that extends beyond the visible body.
The photographic works develop parallel images in which bodies appear concealed, distant, or absorbed into landscapes, collective formations, and unstable terrains. Ruined structures and open landscapes become environments through which historical experience is approached indirectly, through distance, concealment, and spatial tension.
The drawings form a further layer within “Cleaning”. They translate fragments of experience into a reduced visual language. As intuitive inscriptions, they remain autonomous in relation to the other elements of the work while opening a different approach to the experiences from which it emerges.
A collective iteration of “Cleaning” expands the work beyond the individual performer. Unfolding as a shared action without choreography or instruction, participants engage individually within a space held in common.
Across its different forms, “Cleaning” remains centred on the act of sweeping: a gesture suspended between action and stillness, between what has been carried, what remains, and what continues.
Photographic works within Cleaning
The collective iteration of “Cleaning” unfolds as a shared action—
without choreography, without instruction. Participants engage individually, within a space held in common.
without choreography, without instruction. Participants engage individually, within a space held in common.
“In the end, we came back together…”
A collective demonstration against nationalism and fascism took place here, Sarajevo, 1992.
The performance returns to this site with a new generation, as part of the ongoing practice of “Cleaning.”
The performance returns to this site with a new generation, as part of the ongoing practice of “Cleaning.”
