One of the most iconographic buildings in the former Yugoslavia is the mausoleum The House of Flowers (Kuća Cveća) – the resting place of Josip Broz Tito. As a socialist country Yugoslavia had a strong national identity with the working class, with the rural and peasant origins. It is striking then that The House of Flowers has honored its symbolic figure by surrounding him with exotic plants – a sort of a weird Tropicana – when there are so many folkloristic layers of meaning inscribed in some local plant life. But those local plants are also ‘weed’. They are the focus of this project.
Jelena Rakin studied film and literature in Switzerland (Zurich), the United States (Princeton), Germany (Essen), and Croatia (Osijek). Since 2010, she has taught courses on the aesthetics, theory, and history of film and photography at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, where she is currently a staff member. Her doctoral dissertation on the colorized films of the silent film era was published in 2021. This year Jelena has had her first solo photography exhibition at "Photobastei" in Zurich.
