About the project:

New Beginning for Kosovo
With Kosovo’s widely expected independence delayed by Russian opposition and bogged down in diplomatic wrangling, I set out to make a portrait of this tiny corner of Europe, a province of Serbia, but under the jurisdiction of the United Nations, it’s population of two million besieged by power cuts and water shortages, its infrastructure in tatters and it’s financial institutions and businesses unable to function normally due to it’s unclear status.

During the three trips that I made with the grant money I had a mantra running through my head; it came from a long ago review of Waiting for Godot that described it as “a play in which nothing happens, twice.” This seemed to me to be the perfect summation of Kosovo at that time, a place in limbo, a country in waiting that was completely hamstrung by the fact that it was not actually a country.

Kosovo was the place that just about every diplomat in the world wanted to forget but couldn’t, a minefield of redrawn borders and precedents in international law that many believed would have huge implications for independence movements worldwide in the years to come.

Through all this there was a population trying to move on from the war, and there were some reveling in the chaos. Gas stations (one every 3.7 miles), shopping malls and extravagant mansions mushroomed all over Kosovo as the lucky few reaped their rewards. For the rest there was weariness at having to wait so long for what most of us take for granted, and, hanging over everything, was the unknown fate of the 2500 Albanians, Serbs and Roma who were still missing from the conflict. Around once a month, a truck would arrive from Serbia, bringing a few dozen bodies of ethnic Albanians from the mass graves that were dug there to hide the victims of the wartime massacres, but it was a piecemeal process and the majority of the missing remained unaccounted for. Their absence was like an open wound between the Albanian and Serb communities, preventing any chance of reconciliation.

Independence finally came for Kosovo in February 2008. Within a few months, Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, citing Kosovo as a precedent.