Melanie Friend
University of Sussex, Media and Film

Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible

Melanie Friend will discuss her exhibition installation piece on Kosovo, entitled Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible (first shown at Camerawork, London,1996, toured till 2001) together with images from her subsequent book No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo, published 2001

Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible used 16 small colour photographs of innocuous empty homes and gardens in Kosovo during the 1990s’ repression of Kosovars by the Milosevic regime, [in the period leading up to the war of 1998/99]. These images were juxtaposed with a soundtrack in the gallery. Kosovars’ oral testimonies (mostly in Albanian) spoke of police raids, abuse and torture that took place in these spaces. The inhabitants were sometimes too nervous of retribution to be identified, and even if willing, their trauma was ‘invisible’. The empty home is represented as both an immaculate domestic interior – an apparently tranquil space - but also as a place of insecurity and fear. Sound is integral to the piece, as is the text to the small catalogue accompanying the exhibition. The trauma, inaccessible to conventional documentary photography, is removed from the realm of the visual and articulated through the voices of the inhabitants.

In No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo the theme of empty domestic interiors was continued with the Serbs, Roma and others, who, after the war, were then themselves reluctant to be identified through portraiture.