Bridging concept with reality

By Matthew Paul Gonzalez

My project group created an interactive collage on Instagram @voicesofkosovo which focuses on the characters, images and sounds of Kosovo and highlights the hopes, dreams, fears and frustrations of the people we met during our trip. In many ways it is both an homage to Kosovo and a platform to highlight the stories and the perspectives of ordinary Kosovars.

Making this kind of collage requires that you engage with your surroundings in a variety of ways. We captured audio of the sounds of the streets, the cafes, the playgrounds, the rolling fields and the daily humdrum of life across Kosovo. We took photos of the cities, mountains and lakes, graffiti and people we found. Ultimately though, the core of our project was comprised of interviewing as many people as we could wherever we could in order to achieve the widest and richest possible pastiche of individuals and quotes to draw upon when we made the final product.

While we, of course, spoke with many fascinating people from the various organisations we visited, the core of the idea for our project was to speak to ordinary people. Some hastily exchanged numbers landed us a few interviews in a more formal setting, but in large part speaking to people was as simple as striking up a conversation with a stranger on the street, at the hostel or in a taxi. It was here that many of our most interesting quotes and opinions were found. Many fit the mould of what we had seen elsewhere, but often we would hear something that no one else had mentioned. 

 

In the field these unique little insights are usually intensely valuable, and I think this comes through in the collage. An excellent example of this is Hashim, the taxi driver, who took us back from a meeting to our hostel on a rainy afternoon in Prishtina. He lamented the current state of Kosovo, but had a powerful statement of hope. He told us that he had “no passport, no visa, no money, only God.” Of course, not all of our conversations revealed such hidden gold. In Mitrovica, a member of my group and I almost missed the UN bus because we had been busy interviewing someone who owned a dental practice in Prishtina. When asked what we should tell the world about Kosovo, he said, “Tell them to come and get their teeth done!” This was interesting in its own way, I suppose, but not exactly collage-worthy.

I think I have a couple of takeaways from the specific experience of this kind of field work. Firstly, that I now feel a bit more comfortable just walking up to someone and asking for a bit of their time in order to ask a few questions. In the beginning, my interview partner had to twist my arm and push me towards someone in order to force me to build the nerve to say hello. On a deeper level though, I think these experiences drove home to me the fact that everyone you see around you has a full and rich history and perspective, including their own hopes and fears.

This is the sort of thing that everyone knows on a conceptual level. I mean, of course, everyone has their own life, and that’s not exactly a revelation. However, there is a difference between understanding something conceptually and being confronted with it in person. This is especially the case with a theme as personal as hopes and fears, which strikes to the core of what it means to be human.  Being faced with the different individual stories of the voices of Kosovo and the paradoxes and contradictions that come to the fore in post-conflict environments really highlighted the importance of crossing that bridge between what may exist conceptually and what is reality.