The Ground That Doesn’t Hold

Comprised of 9 scenes – 9 watercolor drawings, The Ground That Doesn’t Hold is a wordless picture book that compresses the impressions from the time I spent in Bor, a mining city in Serbia, in 2022, as part of the As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future, a project initiated by Biljana Ćirić. The book turns the impressions from the collective walks into a dream-like narrative where collisions, extractions and transformations of things and people happen in shifting landscapes. The Ground That Doesn’t Hold speaks to the complex and uneasy relationships of the community of Bor to the mine, between socialist legacies and capitalist interests, between the urban and the rural communities and their different relations to mining, between the social needs and ecological concerns.