- I once met a curator who confessed to me that he had never in his life experienced the feeling of homesickness. I then said to him: “But that means that you have never in your life felt really at home anywhere.” He admitted that this was true. For me, home is not inevitably connected with a place, it is wherever I feel safe and well. Sarajevo, the town where I was born, is one such place but I mean that less in a geographical and more in a mental sense. As an artist I have reconstructed this city as a symbol. My work commemorates the many people who were forced to flee or emigrate and now must learn to live with this “sickness”. They are forced to recreate their native city Sarajevo or home. This is what the homeSICK is about.

- Yes indeed, it can be very pleasant to feel homesick, for this means that there is a home somewhere that you can long for. But it can also make you truly ill. If you are unable to get to this “home” or you do not have a “home”, it can be associated with great sorrow and suffering.

- Language can be home in one way but I don’t believe we should build our home in the language. Vienna and Sarajevo are small cities where this is relevant perhaps, but in large cities, say like New York, the term “native language” loses its meaning because almost everyone is a foreigner there and English is a foreign language to many. People create their own communities where they can communicate.

- This makes it easier. But isn’t it rather like a big supermarket with a huge range of goods in which one is likely to get lost, while one still cannot find the thing one is looking for, a home? Don’t forget that we Bosnians are not EU citizens and our freedom is very different to that of EU citizens. As a well-known Bosnian artist I am privileged, I have a Schengen visa. But other people have to pay a lot of money, deal with an incredible amount of paperwork and accept all kinds of indignities in order to be able to leave the country. A young Bosnian student cannot simply pack his rucksack and go on interrail in order to explore the world. This is a major problem for my country. The young people have never experienced Bosnia-Herzegovina as a prosperous country; all they have ever known is war or the post-war period. How should such young people be able to see that things can be different? Where can they find hope that something can be changed, that something can be started in our country? It is the same with Internet, low fair air travel or radio signals. Not all people have the same access.

- For me, the EU is primarily a political and economic community that attracts people because one can move freely across it without the obstruction of borders. I fear, however, that the more it grows the more it will exclude people and restrict diversity. At the moment we Bosnians experience the EU as rejects, so to speak, who have been shifted to the edge of this empire. Europe? My family and I have always regarded ourselves as Europeans. But European policy during the siege of Sarajevo and the war made it painfully clear to us all in BH that apparently we are not.

- Before the war my parents, my sister and I had discussed whether we should flee and we decided to stay. When someone tries to force you to leave your home because they maintain it is not your native country, this only strengthens your determination to stay. After my father was killed I was more certain than ever. I am firmly convinced that Sarajevo has benefited from my presence there as an artist.

- Exactly. In the work “FRAI” from 2004, I dealt with the theme of freedom. I had made a stamp with the word “free“, in the course of time the word faded and it finally vanished completely. I wanted to express the fact that freedom is something relative, not absolute. It is not a permanent feeling but something that comes and goes.

- No, although I don’t have the same freedom as you, to move around and to consume without restrictions – which is what is generally defined as freedom – I have different freedoms. There are innumerable feelings of freedom. When I lived in Vienna, I regarded the fact that, due to the complaints of the neighbours, I was not able to take a shower late at night as a lack of freedom. After the war one friend of mine said that if we had not survived the war, we would not know what it means to be free and happy. In one perverse way, the war also had something positive about it. In a different way one became richer and wiser. Freedom has so many different faces.

- At present, I am rather frustrated that as an individual there is increasingly little that one can change in this world. Millions of people can march on the streets protesting against the war and no government is in the slightest concerned. When the war in Israel and Lebanon broke out I was there …

- It was clear to me that Israel was not in acute danger, but I experienced how a great feeling of fear grew inside me. I also experienced a feeling of rage at the fact that I could do nothing to prevent this violence. Everything surfaced again, all my war traumas. The only thing I wanted to do was to run away!