Quiet Dreams Stay Awake

maja_medic — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:02:58 +0000

This project was born out of the everlasting search of the truth behind the face of an individual who’s living in the net of social norms, expectations of others, moral grounds and unspoken rules of everyday life…
How other people see us? What do we choose to show? Who are we inside of our heads? What are the topics of our private thoughts? How grand is the difference between those two faces – the private and the public one? Is it possible to ever know somebody completely, even if you share a life with that other person for 64 years?

Using the photographs, documents, letters, poems and writings of my grand mother,
I am searching for answers…

Reconstructed Femina

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:16:21 +0000

This (ongoing) project represents a comparative study of a women’s lives in XX century. It consists of collected material of four generations of women – data & photographs at their age of 27 and the audio recording of the story for each family. The idea is to do it in as many different countries as possible (for now I have the material from Serbia, Jordan and now collecting in Belgium).

With this project am questioning:

- What mostly defines a woman through generations – heritage, family tradition or social and historical situation?

- How much did the “emancipation” influenced life choices of a woman?

- Are we the slaves of the prejudices when we claim that “things used to function in one way and now they do in another” or is it true?

- What are the differences, but much more – similarities between different countries, cultures and histories, represented through these personal stories? Also:

- How much can we find out about a person just by looking at a photograph?

- How much are our feelings towards being photographed reflected in the photograph itself and how much has it altered from those times when taking a picture was a luxury of a privileged few, till now, when everyone can take a picture with their mobile phones?

- And how the photography from the family album changes through time.

With this project I don’t wish to impose answers nor to favor past or present, nor one country or another but to enable the observer to make his/her own conclusions based on this cut though time and space, presented through lives of the women, bind together by one (and the same) moment in there life (at the age of 27) but separated by geography, culture and social changes through history.

Maja Medic

Quiet Dreams Stay Awake

Reconstructed Femina