Ježevo Motel is the "common denominator" for the numerous fates of people from the East and South who have invested practically everything so that they can reach the "right side of the world", and who are stopped by the successful action of police patrols on the threshold of Schengen Europe at a former motel on a highway which linked the cities of a former republic.

Capital and goods - yes, people - no! is the slogan which can be used to describe the global trend of movement and exchange of "resources". In that story, people have the least value. A warm welcome is reserved only for affluent business people wanting to invest, for highly educated expert specialists, for athletes who bring home medals. Powerful people have the possibility for unlimited movement, while the poor are condemned to their own homelands which, unfortunately, often mean war-torn areas, deprivation, poverty, persecution. Or, in Orwellian terms, "all people are equal, only some are more equal than others." In such a world, how to be an individual from that part of the West: how to be a Kurd, a Somalian, how to have different political orientations from that of the ruling ones, how to be poor, sick, a woman? If by birth you belong to the wrong side of the world do you have the right to dream and to wish, nothing more and nothing less, for a normal life? The waiting for the setting up of a just world order, the "Age of Aquarius": freedom, justice and prosperity is an unattainable goal. Consequently the solution, now and immediately, is sought in the West, sometimes even at the cost of life. The journey to the West for many ends between one's homeland and the desired goal, at the Detention Centre for Foreigners - the former Ježevo Motel in Croatia.

How can an artist-photographer (whose medium of photography is exclusively a means of expression and not one of the techniques of which to use in one's work)-who within the scope of one art project photographs migrants-express his social engagement, at the same time maintaining an ethical and aesthetic integrity of his work and in the process not feel like a voyeur, like a "visual predator"? How to escape the possibility of manipulating the situation and subject, with the very act of separating/framing of a specific segment of reality?

When the genre of social photography first appeared at the end of the 19th century, art spoke of the so-called second half of humanity. The essence of social photography as an art and documentary form is a critical approach to researching social reality. Its frequent motifs are life and work conditions, places of social injustice that are unreachable or unknown to ordinary citizens. Not less important is the act of publication, issuing to the public social circumstances, that is, the denouncing of social evils. Only with the publication of such photographs is it possible for them to influence the social milieu, for them to call on and urge for change.

It is in this context that I see the photographs of Boris Cvjetanović taken at the Ježevo Motel. The "Detention Centre for Refugees" as a place of social injustice and the individual, migrant, in a temporary place of residence between the past from which the refugee wishes to escape and the unknown future. The empty space where no personal traces are left, as temporariness and transitoriness are indisputable. The individual body as the only referential point, the only traveling expense.

By their theme and documentary quality (but not by their ethnographic-sociological narrative quality) these photographs belong to the genre of social photography, and their media presence within the framework of specific civil initiatives is one of the ways in which to speak out on social reality today. At the same time, they retain the characteristics of Cvjetanović's entire opus: a pronounced subjectivity in the selection of motifs and manner of framing, the exaltation of the "little" things and emotional engagement, which makes them autonomous art works which also function without social contextualization.


Boris Cvjetanović (HR),
Artist based in Zagreb, Croatia
contactable via mfranulic@yahoo.com

Markita Franulić
Curator and Art Critic based in Zagreb, Croatia
mfranulic@yahoo.com