Kosovo Portraits
author: Yves Rousselet
title: Un gossiste attend l individual exhibition

Kosovo Portraits

My first stay in Kosovo had as origin, I must confess, a fortuitous entrance in the country.

At that time each one of my trips was done by the will of a map little precise, I approached by the road that connects Raska to Mitrovica, a German border-line withheld by militars. It's therefore in the Berliner's language that I had been given the first explanations on the statute, nicknamed then as "undetermined" of this province, final part of the puzzle born from the conflicts in former Jugoslavie.

It was during Summer 2005, three years and a half before the auto announcement of independence, of what it would become the youngest "nation" in the planet; since then only South Ossétia has been involved in a similar destination.

From my first meetings in Mitrovica, my first steps, and without a doubt, it's also necessary to confess "devious steps" , I keep an amount of very strong memories. In little time, with some words badly formulated, in the space of some images, with radicalism, I was confronted with the fracture, the two part's division of the city.

My interest, my fixation for the Balkans, since that date namely, had not stopped from growing, I do not cease to listen to the questions raised by the birth of the new states in this region, particularly Kosovo, today recognized by fifty countries members of U.N, that is 22 from the 27th states of European Community.

I continued to travel regularly into this piece of Europe between construction and explosion, so near and so far, like part of us all, always between reconciliation and rupture.

Text: Yves Rousselet
Translation: Sofia Quintas