In Conversation: Award Winners

Each newly selected piece enters an evolving, interactive framework that fosters critical engagement across artworks and genres. Together, they expand critical dimensions for sustained reflection on the histories, legacies, and ongoing implications of genocide. Through this growing arts-based discourse, the series advances deeper understanding of how genocide shapes collective memory, contemporary life, and our shared future.  

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Linda Paganelli

Beyond Genocide #19, Former Yugoslavia: “Echoes of Abandonment” completed 2025.

Echoes of Abandonment is a multi-sensory installation reflecting on genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. Centered around an illuminated kocka (cube) symbolizing the multi layered, multiple truths of the region. It merges archival imagery, regional symbols, abandoned sites, poetry, prayers, and evocative visuals. The piece unfolds as a triptych of experience: loss, violence, and denial; lament and death; and connection to the land, resistance and rebirth. The soundscape is a contemporary lament, guiding viewers through a spiritual and emotional landscape. The cube’s dynamic surfaces invite movement, evoking shifting memories and unresolved trauma. Rooted in fieldwork and collaboration with survivors, Echoes of Abandonment offers a poetic and critical lens on historical violence and its enduring aftermath. It moves between memory and imagination, grief and endurance, bearing witness to trauma while tracing paths toward renewal and belonging.