synopsis
Belgrade: White City, Black City
These photos were taken in Belgrade over the past two years. Belgrade, in other words "the white city", the capital of the country I left ten years ago, disgusted by the violence of the nineties, which never ended. Belgrade where I came back a little by chance, a little out of envy, intertwined with hopes and apprehensions.
Immediately I needed to walk, walk, survey, observe. As if to confront fears. I went in search of something without knowing what; my steps are always uncertain, yet determined.
And here are these images full of black ink.
"The woman is waiting for night to fall. All day long, at his windows, on the second floor of the building, the curtains remain drawn. The man downstairs wonders if it's true that she's there, if he didn't dream that she had returned. And then night falls. Everywhere the lights on the windows come on. The woman gets off. She glances around, as if to make sure that everything is deserted. For a fraction of a second his eyes search the darkness, scrutinize the black hole of the porch where the man is hiding."
- Sylvain Prudhomme, "Aménagements successifs du noir" (excerpt).
- Sylvain Prudhomme, "Aménagements successifs du noir" (excerpt).
photos of the book
technical information
publisher : rue du bouquet
2019
40 pages
dimensions : 18 x 24 cm
500 copies
2019
40 pages
dimensions : 18 x 24 cm
500 copies
about Sladjana Stankovic
Sladjana Stankovic (born 1966 in Trstenik, Yugoslavia). She has been living and working in France since 2002.
Coming from a proletarian family in a vanished country, she regularly returns in search of this human reality, as if to confirm that it really existed. She found in workers and miners the values on which life before was built. Life before the collapse. Attentive to the worlds on the margins, she spent time in an orphanage in Bulgaria, lost at the foot of the mountain.
For the past ten years, she has been following Roma in the slums around Belgrade. The series Habités is thus built over time, frame by frame, between his memories, his encounters and his emotions with this people. His latest series La Douce brings together images taken between 2004 and 2021 between France and Serbia, fragments of an autobiography that is situated between fiction and reality. His country, the former Yugoslavia, collapsed. The former republics are tearing each other apart. They gained their independence at the cost of wars and terrible violence. She lived this period in Serbia from start to finish. In 2002, she arrived in France. Carried by the energy of a new beginning. She lives. She is learning the language. She is looking for her place. She separated from her children. But it is moving forward. A second life. Different. She photographs this round trip between France and Serbia. The Sweet One is that woman who retraces the journey towards what is lost. But nothing can be affected.
This need and desire to cross views began between 2011 and 2013 in Serbia to confront the more intimate subject of returning to the country and the fears that haunted it after the violence of the 90s. She then chose to join forces with the French writer Sylvain Prudhomme. The result of their artistic conversation, Aménagements successifs du noir, was presented in 2014 as part of the Krokodil literary festival, then revived in the gallery of the Institut français in Belgrade, and in Bulgaria at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia as part of the European Month of Photography. It was then presented in France at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie for readings by Sylvie Hugues in 2019; at the Week-end à l'Est festival, at the Folia gallery in Paris and at the Phémina Festival in Fontainebleau in 2020. Aménagements successifs du noir was published in 2019 by Rue Du Bouquet, Paris.
Sladjana Stankovic's other works have been regularly exhibited in France, notably at the Douze-Douze festivals, the Nuits de Pierrevert, the month of photography in Nièvre, Grands Chemins as well as at the Maison d'Europe et d'Orient in Paris. In 2022, Sladjana Stankovic is one of the winners of the Maison Blanche 2022 Prize, Photo Marseille.
For the past ten years, she has been following Roma in the slums around Belgrade. The series Habités is thus built over time, frame by frame, between his memories, his encounters and his emotions with this people. His latest series La Douce brings together images taken between 2004 and 2021 between France and Serbia, fragments of an autobiography that is situated between fiction and reality. His country, the former Yugoslavia, collapsed. The former republics are tearing each other apart. They gained their independence at the cost of wars and terrible violence. She lived this period in Serbia from start to finish. In 2002, she arrived in France. Carried by the energy of a new beginning. She lives. She is learning the language. She is looking for her place. She separated from her children. But it is moving forward. A second life. Different. She photographs this round trip between France and Serbia. The Sweet One is that woman who retraces the journey towards what is lost. But nothing can be affected.
This need and desire to cross views began between 2011 and 2013 in Serbia to confront the more intimate subject of returning to the country and the fears that haunted it after the violence of the 90s. She then chose to join forces with the French writer Sylvain Prudhomme. The result of their artistic conversation, Aménagements successifs du noir, was presented in 2014 as part of the Krokodil literary festival, then revived in the gallery of the Institut français in Belgrade, and in Bulgaria at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia as part of the European Month of Photography. It was then presented in France at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie for readings by Sylvie Hugues in 2019; at the Week-end à l'Est festival, at the Folia gallery in Paris and at the Phémina Festival in Fontainebleau in 2020. Aménagements successifs du noir was published in 2019 by Rue Du Bouquet, Paris.
Sladjana Stankovic's other works have been regularly exhibited in France, notably at the Douze-Douze festivals, the Nuits de Pierrevert, the month of photography in Nièvre, Grands Chemins as well as at the Maison d'Europe et d'Orient in Paris. In 2022, Sladjana Stankovic is one of the winners of the Maison Blanche 2022 Prize, Photo Marseille.
source : Sladjana Stankovic website
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publisher : rue du bouquet
2019 (1st edition)
2019 (1st edition)