When I was searching a topic for my diploma work on the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, I was going for something where you can go without calling anybody, announcing myself, organizing or arranging.
I never really liked to depend on somebody and I like working on my own. I wanted to find a situation where life takes place without my intervention which I was able to find - a home for elderly people, only a few minutes from where I live, litterary across the street. I never managed to see it from the inside before and I didn’t know anybody who was living there, so my first visit to the home was shocking. It was shocking because after many years from the death of my father’s mother, I felt the smell of olderness and old, less movable people. This stale air was sealed deep down in my first childhood memories. My grandma was immovable in bed for almost 15 years before she died and as a kid before I used to get inside of her room where she lived with my grandfather and just stay horrified by the smell of the room. “In Awaiting” is a project on which I started working on in October 2018 until June 2019 and it’s showing the daily lifes of elderly people in pension, living their last days in this institution which didn’t had a chance to get renovated since the 1970s when it was made in the former country of Yugoslavia. It also looks a bit like a time capsule but the people who live there actually don’t see it that way. Through this work I’m trying to show the mood, the feelings they reflect to me through communicating with them and to see how they react in a conversation with “alien body” or tourist attraction with a camera inside their personal space. Through my images, I’m showing how the last life phase of these people actually looks like and I’m trying to capture the moments of what I’d like to call “a state of waiting to be gone” while also confronting myself with my childhood war memories, fear of loosing my parents and death in general. (Mario Ilic)
Diplom 2018/2019
