The video points out social injustices and tells a story of Bosnia beyond its official history. Through a window we observe people at a public drinking water fountain. Their buckets and bottles fill up agonisingly slow with the much-needed water. The video has a duration of 27 minutes and invites visitors to pause and wait.
Ljubija is a small and charming town in the northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina known for its rich iron ore deposits exploited since Roman times. The town saw its economical and cultural high peak development during the socialist Yugoslavia but at the beginning of the ´90s, as the Yugoslav economy started to decline and the iron production was dropping, thousands of people were left jobless and impoverished. Furthermore, as the result of the fratricidal Bosnian 92-95 war this once strongly multi-ethnic community was ethnically cleansed from Muslims and Croats. After the Dayton Peace agreement that ended the war and divided the country between the two warring parties, Ljubija became administratively part of the Serb-controlled entity.At the same time it became the entity´s geographical and logistical periphery and a dead-end town which pushed wealthier local Serbs to move out and into bigger centers like Prijedor or Banja Luka. Over the following few years the town´s population got even more pauperized: the refugee centers from the other towns in the entity needed to be closed, and those remaining refugees who still needed the state support and had nowhere to go (mostly also sick and elderly), were sent collectively to the places like Ljubija – out of sight. Ljubija became and still is, one of the most impoverished communities in the entire of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In 2009 when the "Fountain" video recording was made, the so called upper part of Ljubija with approx. 1000 inhabitants was living with daily water reductions for over a decade. The only fountain from which the inhabitants could collect potable water was a pre-war concrete fountain depicted in the video. As if it wanted to add insult to an injury its water pressure was so low that it would take ca 30 minutes to fill up a 5L bucket. In the video, I am filming with a candid camera through my friend´s balcony few of these agonisingly slow water filling sessions.
Cesma, Video, 27´
