A customs office building on the border between two towns, two countries, two social systems, two worlds, the Romanic and the Slavic, 65 years after the end of the war. On the 20th of December with the entry of Slovenia into the Schengen area, Nova Gorica for the first time in its short history finds itself without border fences. The same night, this traumatic space transforms into a meeting place. Inside are placed a camera, a microphone, a computer, and a curtain and people from both sides of the border start streaming in, bringing their stories and images, donating their contributions to the common holdings of memory. Donated memories and fragments of family and archive films tell how can two different realities find themselves simultaneously in the same place.
Cross-Border Memory Collection Actions
The purpose of memory-contributed actions is to create an open archive that evolves over time and becomes a kind of gift that we give to the people of both cities for generations to come. Much like a family album, designed by its incompleteness, it is an archive of memory in a constant process of creation and rearticulation. Namely, Nova Gorica (Yugoslavia/Slovenia) and Gorizia (Italy) were separated not only by the boundaries between two countries and social systems but also by the boundaries between two comprehensions of the past. The border crossings that have separated us for years can now become meeting points that reflect the relationship between personal and collective memory.
Actions: Smuggler’s Confessional (2007), Memory Clinic (2009), Album of the City (2011), Memory Clinic Ljubljana (2012), Found Portraits (2013), Images of Oblivion (2014), Sewn Memories (2015), Portraits of Buildings (2015) and The Solver of Memory (2018). (Source: Anja Medved)
Production: Kinoatelje, 2010
On 10 December 2009, the Memory Clinic, a public event aimed at collecting family photographs, was organized at a former border crossing between Nova Gorica (Slovenia) and Gorizia (Italy). The inhabitants of both cities were invited to go through their fa...
Production: Kinoatelje, 2007
Talks with some Gorizia artists from both sides of the border (between Yugoslavia and Italy), who participated in two transparent art exhibitions in Gorizia and Nova Gorica in the year of the opening of the border. We were interested in what the transitio...
Production: Kinoatelje, 2006
A story about the city Solkan and river Soča and how the border (between Yugoslavia and Italy after World War II) cut the river into Soča and Isonzo. And also, how Kayaking has become a school and a philosophy of life of a place.
Production: Kinoatelje, 2004
When the Primorska Region was annexed to Yugoslavía, the town of Gorica/Gorizia remained in Italy. In 1948, a new Gorizia (Nova Gorica) began to be built on the Yugoslav side. The town in a meadow, on a swamp, on an abandoned cemetery by an old bri...
Production: Kinoatelje, Deželni sedež RAI za Furlanijo Julijsko krajino – slovenski program, 2002
Documentary. Gorizia, Sept. 16th, 1947. The borderline has split the town, the fields, the people and the whole world into two parts. The borderline was imposed between houses and streets, between fields and gardens – between people. It has divided...