day0Yesterday, when I entered the huge abandoned railroad warehouse in Turin, I went numb with pain. My hosts were showing this structure to me as their memento of pride: their past and future glory, but my senses told me a different story. It took me a couple of seconds to reach the end of the train of my painful thoughts: the Srebrenica slaughter house, the huge abandoned facility there, rails ruins weeds… a factory turned prison where 15 thousand people were held one night, eight thousand executed over the next few days.
As the Torino people were speaking thoughtfully of urban design and renewal, I was thinking of the design of crime and loss of hope.
Have I become perverted?
My hostess said: look how the trees grow among the cracks in this beautiful building. We plan to adapt it, make it an exhibition space.
I know: where atrocities are committed, nature rebels.
When I first saw Mirso’s faces, I went cold with fear. I didn’t know why. It took me longer to realize than I did in the Turin warehouse, maybe seven seconds, to realize that I was once again reminded of the Srebrenica victims.
Mirso’s faces could be theirs: floating, nameless, graveless, lifeless, nationless, harmless and yet scary as only ghosts can be.
They change as they move, or as my mind moves towards them: they became less scary and more friendly as I accept their fate as actors within my own conscience. I try to read the faces, give them names and ages, tell their stories, do what I usually do with living or dead, make them human, make them one of us, make them part of my life or of life as such. To humanize them, because there is too much beauty in this world but not enough love.