Closing Casa Jasmina
Casa Jasmina started from a ruin. In 2014, my husband and I discovered an abandoned space in a once majestic factory, the old “Garrone Foundry” in Turin, which had been built in 1919 and abandoned in 1980. It was my idea to revive this derelict space, chase the rats from the corners and the pigeons from the broken windows, and transform it into what I thought of as the “Turinese House of the Future.” Our plan was to rethink home life from scratch as a utopian experiment.

In Europe, one doesn’t often get the tempting chance to start over clean without the heavy burdens of the past — especially in a city like Turin, which is famous for its aristocratic palaces and baroque marble porticos. Turin does, though, have zones of industrial decline by the old railway tracks, which sometimes disgorge unexploded World War II bombs, much…

Boing Boing

My life-long work of performance art is to somehow maintain my original passport: notwithstanding the life and opportunities of a techno-nomad.

I used to have a proper passport from the “Socialist Federation Republic of Yugoslavia,” and a fine, diplomatic one, too. At the time that was the most-desired passport in the black market, requiring the fewest travel-visas from any other country. It was a diplomatic passport from a buffer-state, a Cold War cushion-country between the East and West, between the imperial walls of USSR and USA .

Today my travel document is a Serbian passport, one of the worst passports in the whole world, from a small post-war country in transition to nowhere, hoping to make its way among the power-players of the Russian Federation, the European Union, and expansive China, the militant Turks, and other small, rival Balkan states that used to be our fellow-citizens. Marshal Tito…