Bosfights/Live Free

Hooliganism has disappeared from the European football stadiums, but the fight has never stopped. Fighters who volunteered to fight for the colors of their club recently found a new home: remote forests. Teams compete with each other in a very organized way, with rules - and strict secrecy. Why do these men do this for pleasure? Three years ago I decided to make an attempt to gain access to this hermetically sealed world. The doors opened increasingly hesitantly for me. But the search swallowed me up more than I could ever have imagined. In April 2018 I was arrested and I ended up in jail for three weeks. Police and justice do not believe that I am investigating this subculture, but believe that I am involved. All my images were confiscated. Until today I received nothing in return. Still I worked on. By searching for the material that I had already sent, I was able to recover a small part of years of labor. Of the thousands of images I have saved forty, sometimes of poor quality. In addition, I have bundled newspaper articles, my interrogations, police statements, testimonies, screen shots, the diary of my captivity and screenshots of smartphone films, on which I can be seen as a photographer among the fighting parties. The reason why some faces are blurred is because certain people do not want to be recognizable for legal reasons. My goal was once to document forest fights. Against my will, I have become part of my work myself.

In 2006 I was invited to the wedding of my best friend in Serbia. I didn’t know anything about the country, besides that it had been in a war. The four days that I spent there left a great impression on me. I experienced the people as untouched and pure. Although we didn’t speak the same language, I was accepted as one of their own. For my series Sumadija, I travelled back in 2014 multiple times over the period of one year and lived for more than four months in Kragujevac, the capital of Sumadija in Central-Serbia. This region is known for its nature and its mountains. There is basically no tourism and little influence from the West. People are mostly self-sufficient and farming is their main income. I experienced Sumadija as a fairytale, in which elements of daily life blend into a magic-realistic world that looks strange for me as an outsider. From an open and honest perspective it captured my curiosity for the region and its people. The photographs convey a sense of humour, a light-hearted touch and a hint of surrealism.