The Western Balkans is a politically constructed term that subsumes the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and Albania to a single entity. It is an enclave within Europe, enclosed by the EU's external border and the Schengen regime. The Balkans have historically functioned as a counter-image, a projection screen, crucial for the construction and consolidation of a European identity, just as the so-called Orient. Often rhetorically displaced from Europe, it serves as the internal Other from which the West seeks to distinguish itself.
Even today, narratives about the Balkans remain defined by external projections. The term 'balkanisation' has come to denote not only the fragmentation of large and viable political entities. It has also become synonymous with a regression to the tribal, the backward, the primitive and the barbarian. 'European Other' attempts to approach the Europe-Balkan dichotomy in a multi-dimensional installation.
The work draws on traditional kilim hand weaving and transfers it into an installative form through the use of diverse material, graphic elements and video works. It illuminates different perspectives on Western narratives of the region, thus attempting to situate the Western Balkans as a Space and its representation within the European narrative. At the same time, it is a playful aesthetic reference to these externally projected narratives, drawing on possible expectations and orientalist Balkan stereotypes, not so much rejecting them outright as subliminally aiming for their re-evocation in the viewer.
Furthermore, the work is dedicated to the complex contexts of imaginary cultural-spatial demarcations and identity constructions in an endeavor to depict them. In addition to different perspectives on the Western Balkans as a constructed space that can seemingly be located in a state of limbo outside of Western narratives, questions of othering, belonging and non-belonging are at the forefront of the work.
The images of the Balkans' geography, is to be understood as a narrative geography detached from its physical counterpart. European Other consists of a 2 by 2.30 m woven installation and three video works.