EXTRAVAGANT BODIES: Crime and punishment

The objects photographed are part of archival records taken over from the funds of the municipal criminal attorney’s office in Kruševac, Serbia. Since they belong to the said category of judicial investigation, they are not related to any given crime, but have perhaps been used in a beating up, taken away in a police raid and used as means of intimidation in a situation of conflict, in which some person, or several persons, has or have been physically endangered by another or others.
Administratively filed as evidence proving the guilt of someone, such objects ultimately are considered closed as archival records and five years after being deposited are destroyed on the advice of a commission.
By moving from one use area to another – from commodity item in a shop, via a private object to a forensic artefact, the object changes its function and semantic character. It is labelled on the basis of changes in its use value, the presence of people being sensed in the manner in which it was perhaps used, such an object opening up a space for questions and assumptions about the latent value of abuse.