Ma Bice Bolje
The task of creating a comprehensive or objective account of the recent war in former Yugoslavia, a war whose survivors and perpetrators deal with it by overlooking its traces, is an impossible one. Ma Bice Bolje by Goran Galic and Gian-Reto Gredig illustrates physical barriers and enunciates some of the entrenched psychological rifts still to be found in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It does not offer a conclusive image and a key for the reader to decipher it; instead it is a complex accumulation of layers of image, text, narrative and critique. «Ma Bice Bolje» translates as Itll get better; it would once be commonly heard in the former Yugoslavia, but it is a rarely expressed sentiment today.
Ma Bice Bolje is based on travels between 2001 and 2005 by Galic´ and Gredig around what is today Bosnia-Herzegovina. The pair met in 2002 in Zurich, then students of photography and social anthropology respectively. Their work together began as two discrete projects: Galics wish to explore and photograph Bosnia, to better understand the recent conflict in the country his parents had left for Switzerland; and Gredigs documentation of this investigation. Their work would eventually become a collaboration that transcends the specific to make an abstract study of how documentary and history are constructed.
