Title: Sarajevo Khamsa
Year: 2009
(click on the image)
Medium: digital print
Minimum size: 100 x 70cm
"Social stigma is severe social disapproval of personal characteristics or beliefs that are against cultural norms. Social stigma often leads to marginalization."
When applied to entire groups, regions or cities, social stigma becomes an ideology, a doctrine resulting with cultural politics, ideological mapping, ghettoizing, marginalizing, pauperizing, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, genocides and destruction of entire populations, cities/parts of the cities.
This particular "social stigma" derives from Eurocentric Orientalist and social Orientalist constructions and perceptions of the Other whose culture and spirituality is perceived and portrayed as inferior, backward, primitive, non-European, non-Western, or non-Christian - therefore a possible threat.
Once alienated from the European soils, demonized and stripped of its humanity, the Other can be terminated and erased from the ideological map of Europe together with its cultural, political and economic centers. Sarajevo, (nicknamed "Northern Damascus" by some Western visitors during the late 19th and early 20th century ) has always been and to some is still more than a symbolic center of "the European Other".
For centuries, the Damascus rose (Rosa damascena) has been considered as being a symbol of beauty and love. Read more about the The Sarajevo Rose here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarajevo_Rose
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