Ivan Buvinić

The project thematizes the author's confrontation with personal experience of trauma and questions the role of photography and its (in) possibility of representing traumatic events and their consequences on the individual. The family table, on a symbolic level, testifies to the dynamics of human relations within the family and on a conceptual level it can be compared with the autopsy table. By reminiscing about traumatic events, as well as subsequently constructing situations from his personal past, he forensically approaches everyday objects as witnesses that influenced the construction of his identity. In this way, he’s opening the space of imagination and the possibility of changing the perception of the family home.

By combining several different approaches, from installation, archival photography, to video projection he’s attempting to reconstruct the image of his own childhood. When using photographs from the past, the artist is not subject to the nostalgic representation of the personal archive, but resists it and decides to re-examine those segments that most marked his childhood. One of the neuralgic points is the death of his grandfather, so he intervenes in a joint photo from his childhood with chemical methods of erasure, until the complete annulment of its contents. Project Safe House points to the many possibilities of the photographic medium in reinterpreting memory.