Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible

ABSTRACT

Melanie Friend's exhibition Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible (Camerawork, London 1996, toured until 2001) used sixteen small color images of innocuous, empty homes and gardens in Kosovo together with voiced testimonies on a soundtrack to convey the 1990s' repression of Kosovars by the Milo?evi? regime, in the period leading up to the war of 1998/99. Her subsequent book No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (Midnight Editions, USA: 2001), whilst also publishing portraits of refugees in Macedonia and the visual traces left by the war in Kosovo, also continued the theme of invisible trauma. Here she discusses how the work came into being.