Solo exhibition It’s easy to be

“It’s easy to be …”
-Visual reflection on public and private, in the hilly and rural parts of the Balkans
11.12.2018 – 8-01.2019 SKC Kragujevac (PRESS)

“It’s easy to be a man, and being a woman is hard,” is the sentence pronounced by
Hajdar, one of the oldest Virgin in Northern Albania, in the documentary “Last
Balkan Virgin” produced by Vice Serbia.
The term “Virdžina”(Virgin) appears in my life at the end of the last century, getting
to know the film of the director Srdjan Karanovic, filmed in 1991 in Yugoslavia. The
story describes Stevan, a young heir of a family who is lured by the fact that there are
too many female children. Stevan’s own family condemns him to live as a boy,
although he was born as a girl. His family is actually followed by the custom of
“swearing virgins” (“virgin” or “tobelia”) to avoid condemnation of society because it
has exclusively female offspring. There are various reasons for becoming Virginia,
and the Stevan case from the mentioned film is just one of them. It can also be from
purely personal incentives, in the case when young girls do not have the identity of
the sex and the gender with which they were born. Also, there are cases where, from
the grief for a lost partner, women remain consecrated Virgin, while there may also
be escape from contracted and unwanted marriage. In this act, they commit
themselves to eternal virginity, which separates them from the category of the
woman, does not lead them into the category of a man, but certainly creates the
possibility of permanent exclusion from the obligation to be a woman. The status of a
Virginia woman is certainly gaining freedom of movement in a public domain, not a
private, hidden area of women’s life. In all these cases, I analyze the patriarchal
situation in the mountainous rural areas of the Balkans: Northern Albania, Kosovo
and Montenegro, for which Virdžina’s phenomenology is linked. Written documents
testify that the existence of a phenomenon has been recorded since 1860, and in a
documentary film recently captured from the production of Vice, we note that there
are still, of course, in a much smaller number than before, but that they are certainly
the oldest third generation of Europeans.
The visual vocabulary I transpose with this phenomenon in visual speech serves
elements that symbolically depict the private and public domain in the life of a
woman / man / Virgin. It is based on the motifs of the mountain parts of the Balkans,
as a symbol of the public and free movement of one person. As a reflection on the
way of life in remote places and the patriarchate that is still present in them. I choose
this motif for media that are traditionally related to women’s handicrafts and the
private sphere of her life: embroidery, sewing, batik painting textiles, decorative
painting of fabrics, needles and kitchen cloths. Thus, these two areas intertwine, blur
and postulate the gender and gender positions, which in the case of Virginia are
socially constructed.
(In this text I am using the information found in the scientific works Suzana
Milevski, Predrag Šarčević and Marko Kokotec, Virdžina films Srđan Karanović and
“The Last Balkan Virginia” Vice Serbia)