Her project was designed not as a closed artwork but as an expanding archive. Visitors could add their own stories from other towns and camps. “It could become a protest piece,” she says. “A collection of proof that officially doesn’t exist.”
Since then, genocide-related work has filled much of her professional life. “My whole year has been genocide, genocide, genocide,” she says. “I did this to myself, of course. But I think after this I need a break. Maybe I’ll make something about woods.”
She laughs, then pauses. “But even the woods in Bosnia exist because of landmines. The last untouched forests in Europe are untouched because people can’t enter them.”
Being part of the second generation shapes how she understands the responsibility of cherishing the legacy and sharing historical facts. She does not speak of it as a duty, but of an urge.
“I never thought about it as responsibility,” she says. “More like something I can’t not do.”
That urge is shared among many young Bosnians in the diaspora. At a summer school in Bosnia held in 2025, she found herself for the first time in a group of young women with similar backgrounds. “We could talk about parents, about non-Bosnian partners who don’t understand, about everything. It was bonding through shared drama.”
She describes the second generation as belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. “Both apply,” she says.
Even language reflects that in-between state. She notices how certain words are always spoken in one language, regardless of context. Dutch with cousins, Bosnian with parents, but suddenly a German word appears in both. “It’s like we made our own language,” she says. “And somehow everyone still understands.”
For Karabasic, art is the space where those contradictions meet: memory and distance, history and daily life, personal and political. It is not decorative. It is investigative, commemorative and quietly resistant.
“Spomenik,” she says, using the Bosnian word for monument, “is about changing the narrative. In some places they teach children that war criminals were heroes, that camps were just transit centres. My work is about documenting what happened and pushing back against that.”
She does not claim to resolve anything. She does not present answers. Instead, she builds objects that hold stories that were once hidden, and that now refuse to disappear.
“I was born after the war,” she says. “But the war found me anyway.”