The first coincidence of our biography — being born somewhere. Cultural background is a primary marker of one’s identity.

Influenced by the experience of living in and between two cultures, the work Ancestral Breakdown follows the story of my family from Yugoslavia to Switzerland. The question of origin and identity guides me during the search for connections and commonalities, a transculturality between these worlds.

Through an arrangement of fragments and two-sided objects, the installation raises questions of a collective post-war trauma characterized by abuse of power and, above all, migration. Through the installation, old role models, their social origins and the stigmatization accompanying them are addressed. Structures that are generally formative for identities and go beyond territorial borders are thus to be condensed.