Clarissa Thieme

In 2008 and 2009, Clarissa Thieme travelled through Bosnia-Herzegovina, setting up her camera at places where war crimes took place during the nineties. Now she returns to the same locations a decade later: what traces are left behind by a violent past?

Sarajevo during the siege in 1992: A group of armed men walks along the banks of the river Miljacka. One man is led away, and the group crosses the river. The neighbouring Grbavica district is about to be taken by the Serbs. The footage was shot by a man from an apartment in an adjacent skyscraper without knowing who the armed men were. Are they Serbs, Bosniaks? His camera wobbles, searches, pursues and retreats. The artist Clarissa Thieme finds the man who shot the film and has him once again recount how it happened.

The inhabitants trapped in Sarajevo during the Yugoslavian War made an amateur video calling for a time machine to get them out of the city. Simultaneous translation is used to bring this call out of the past and into the present.