Video: 5:03”, digital print on photo paper
‘PARTI-cipation X - Ocupar a Cidade’, Prato Riverside, Lisbon, Portugal, 2024


In 1941, a concentration camp was built on the island of Pag in Croatia. The Slana concentration camp was an extermination camp, part of the Ustasha concentration camp and death pit system. The majority of prisoners were Serbs, Jews and Croatian communists. Recently, tourist trails have been created recently, strongly promoted through digital media. ‘Life on Mars Trail’, as the trail is called, consists of several-kilometer-long paths and concrete routes that run in the immediate vicinity of or through the area of ​​the former concentration camp. In order to make the stay more attractive for tourists, a via ferrata was even built on the rocky beach of Slana (at the site of the camp). The beaches in Metajna and Slana are very popular with tourists, and in the nearby bars, tourists enjoy the charms of the sea to the sound of music, unaware that this is taking place at the site of execution.

The Slana camp operated for three months until August 1941. Historians estimate that the number of deaths in the camp ranged from 8,000 to 12,000. In the first weeks, prisoners died mainly from physical violence, exhaustion, heat, hunger and thirst. As the transports became more frequent and the camp began to run out of space, the Ustasha began to carry out mass executions of prisoners. In August, the Ustasha were forced by Mussolini to abandon and liquidate all concentration camps in the area. Before the liquidation of the camp on the island of Pag, the Ustasha carried out a mass shooting above the Slana camp. A total of ten mass graves were found on the nearby hills. Already in September 1941, the Italian military sanitary and disinfection commission discovered two shallow mass graves. The exhumations were carried out for epidemiological reasons, as the residents of Metajna complained about the terrible stench coming from the vicinity of the camp. They found 791 dead and burned bodies of camp prisoners, as well as an innumerable number of body parts, among whom were 293 women and 91 children aged 5 to 15. Thousends of other bodies were never found.

This is ongoing project being financed from European Funds by the National Recovery Plan (Krajowy Plan Odbudowy).