We invite you to the promotion of the book and video essay “Inheritance (All That We Leave Behind)” by the artist Ivana Sidzimovska, a project that opens space for reflecting on what we leave behind, and how and whether responsibility for that inheritance is assumed today.
About the video essay:
Through material traces, lived experiences, biographical narratives, and archival documents, the video essay reflects on the toxicity of ethno-nationalist systems and the urgency for non-identitarian practices. Bridging historical periods and geopolitical spaces, the project questions contemporary relationships to values, memories, and material objects inherited or left behind. Themes of expropriation (material heritage and cultural memory), restitution (citizenship and looted land), justice and reconciliation (the Holocaust and the Yugoslav wars), as well as border identities (post-migrant and interethnic) emerge and intertwine within the personal stories of historical figures, contemporary citizens, and the artist herself. Alongside citizens’ narratives concerning the 2001 war and ethnic conflict in Macedonia – in particular that of a young Albanian woman whitnessing identity transformations beyond the limits of state-promoted multiculturalism – the work also traces the history of the former Royal Yugoslav embassy in Berlin. The building, constructed during the Nazi era on the expropriated site of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy villa, first housed the writer and Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, who sought to prevent his country from aligning with fascist alliances. By transforming the personal into the universal, the project questions the responsibility of creating and transmitting heritage – material, cultural, linguistic, non-institutional or private in ways that enable imagining and building more just and inclusive societies.
About the book:
The publication is a collection of interviews documenting the personal experiences, memories, and reflections of people from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds in North Macedonia. The interviews are part of an oral history project and aim to preserve the living stories of individuals whose voices often remain unheard.
The event is organized through a collaborative effort between ProPeace Skopje and Kontrapunkt.
Join us for a shared reflection on inheritance, not as a static category, but as an open process that calls for care, responsibility, and new ways of being together.
The research for the project was supported by the Goethe-Institut – Culture Moves Europe programme, funded by the European Union, while the production of the publication and the video essay was realized with the support of ProPeace Skopje.
Споделено на: May 28, 2026 во 1:59 am