The posthumous autobiography can be read here: I'm Going to Live a Hundred Years!  – by Katarina Radović, December 2024

"I'm going to live a hundred years!", said my grandmother on her 93rd birthday. But unfortunately, that was her final year. This is a long-term visual/literary study of my grandmother, i.e., 'Great Mother', source of life, and, at the same time, end to life – because, as a rule, no grandmother is perfect, she is both creator and destroyer. It is a story about perseverance in difficult circumstances (she survived two wars – WWII and the 1990s Balkan bloodshed, and changed five countries on one and the same territory: The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, SFRY, FRY, Serbia and Montenegro, and Serbia), testimony to a strong will to live, echoing through layers of memory – a story of presence and absence, guilt and forgiveness, abundance and deprivation, toughness and fragility, love and hate.  

The photo material comes from various stages of my grandmother's life and in several forms: photo collages consisting of a combination of old photographs from her archive, and more recent photographs I took of her or material objects related to her; my documentary photographs taken in the last fifteen years of her life; and images of posthumous installations, which I created based on my memory of her. Such a process has enabled me to delve deeper into the intimate world of my grandmother, in order better to understand who I am and who she was – the mother of my mother.

More often than not we want to believe that our parents, and likewise our ancestors, are heroes; and so, whether out of naivety or necessity, we tend to absolve their weaknesses, agree with their decisions, respect them (unconditionally), until such time as we eventually form our own perspective. We then realise that they, like us, are only human – inconsistent, fragile, surprising. After all, however ironic it may sound, the more one reads one's own life story, the less one recognises it as one's own.

This project (2012-2024) is a tribute to my grandmother, with references to the century she lived in.