Until We Are Worth More Than Gold

Selma Selman, an artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina of Romani origin, works with technological residues. On stage and in her installations, she welds and saws car scrap and mechanical waste, poetically entangling them with memories of war and displacement during the Bosnian War, while exploring the dimensions of racism and statelessness of the Roma community. Flowers of Life (2024), an installation composed of giant industrial grabs used in scrapyards. This hybrid, animated yet inanimate mechanical sculpture questions what actually constitutes ‘life’ and ‘value’ in the global ‘Wasteocene’ with its dialectics of extracting, discarding, and the othering of people, matter and places. The following excerpts are drawn from her recent works.