Südost paket

‘When people migrate, they seem to be smuggling their future, taking it out from their home country to someplace else. The vague possibilities of this future, along with the high expectations that cause it are the strong factors for leaving, and this imagined future that is smuggled promises to appear and fulfil itself sometime and somewhere in this new and still undefined space where one moves to.

Through the action of ‘smuggling’, Südost Paket (Jugoistočni paket) questions this situation by switching the roles of desired and undesired spaces. The relations between physical space and cultural narrative are also reflected in the process of smuggling, in terms of smuggling ideas and representations of specific space understood in a specific way – but here the goods are smuggled
from Bosnia to Germany.

Hidden in a bus tire, the installation uses real everyday products and objects selected by the artist, which remind her of her home or funny stories and events about travelling and smuggling with buses from Bosnia. The artist transforms them into objects of desire, giving them an imaginary aura that is in BiH-a usually attributed to the products from Germany. These objects became a personification of identity and folklore, and together with the bus tire, they form a monument to the microcosm that is created in the bus during the 20-24 hours of crossing the border (physically and morally) on the way from Bosnia to Germany and vice versa. Many things happen on that bus. A lot of fear, anxiety, sadness, smuggling of simple goods and knowledge in some form, but also laughter, excitement and solidarity – depending on the direction of the bus.’ by Nikola Njavro