clean up (2025)

Commissioned work by the UN WOMEN for the international conference Gender and Peace in the Balkans: Tracing the Path Forward, organised in Sarajevo in February 2025.

"My work on CLEAN UP began from a line from a poem by WS called the beginning and the end:

after every war, someone has to clean up the mess.

I think my most formative impression of collectively-minded action was and has remained the memory of my grandmother and then later my mother tirelessly cleaning the dangerous rubble from the yard outside the first apartment we moved into after the war - not as a kind of condemned women’s labor, but as a continuation of a gesture older than discourse, a female gesture, which h simultaneously sees the world for what it is, and for how it could be. That gesture is at the core of this piece."