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Macedonia Dreaming by Ivan Blazhev
A box is turned into half a knight’s helmet, but between the face and cardboard is an echo of the war; the game with bow an arrow seems anything but harmless, and more confrontations are waiting. Today the word Macedonia evokes the country’s recent past: folklore poses headlessly against a bare wall. Will a soapbox race ever lead beyond the courtyard? This is highly doubtful as well. The year 1991 marked a new beginning for the people of Macedonia. They opposed the horror of war, corruption and ethnic tension with a special human quality of their own: hope. The desires that implies are often compressed into a seemingly somnambulistic situation, which the filmmaker and Macedonian photographer Ivan Blazhev approaches from the inside out in his photographic “road movie”. For two years he worked on the project “Macedonia Dreaming”, documenting the idea of dreams as a bridge between what the people of Macedonia people desire and what does not exist. Geographic or even political classifications play a secondary role here – they are the last aspects Blazhev wants in this portrait of his homeland. The country rather transformed itself on a extra-territorial plane, which is revealed in “Macedonia Dreaming” as its real strength: namely the sum of the personal microcosms, some bizarre, some poetic, that he traces here.
