Velma Babić
Velma Babić was born in 1970 in Hamburg, Germany. From 1977, she grew up in Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia. From the beginning of the first conflicts in the 1990s, the re-established national sentiments all over Yugoslavia also radicalized in Velma’s hometown Banja Luka. As the war moved closer to Bosnia, Velma witnessed the younger population being forced to join the war on the frontier. Most of those who went would never come back. At the time, she understood that all those young people born in the 70s like herself would be victims of the tragic events, no matter which side they fought on. In normal circumstances, most of them would have listened to and played music; instead, her generation appeared lost and sacrificed in this war.
In parallel, Velma’s situation worsened because of the loss of her mother and her father becoming unemployed. After surviving various violent assaults, she realized that staying was no longer an option; those new men in the city she could not recognize anymore were posing a severe threat. Velma decided to flee to Germany to start a new life, and eventually even managed to bring the rest of her family out of the country.
Sharing the fate of many refugees, she has made a living working in factories, in the health care system, and various other jobs, often also to support her family. At some point later, she was able to dedicate her energy to her future: Taking up her old plan to study literature, she enrolled in Slavic and German Literature, with a particular focus on Bosnian literature created during and after the war. The main areas of interest were: How did the collapse of Yugoslavia impact the identity of the people, how the collective/individual memories changed from this moment, and how is trauma reflected in the text? In 2007, she finished her studies with a Master of Arts degree from LMU Munich.
During her next stays abroad in Colombia and the United States, she began to dedicate herself intensively to photography and painting. Through those mediums, she reconnected gradually with her experiences and articulated the same topics – memory, identity fragments, and trauma – through her pictures. Currently, she lives and works with her family in Munich, Germany, and has another domicile in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where people often consider her a stranger.