I am... nature that relaxes me and a playful child in Sarajevo parks
EDINA HALILOVIC | Arts, Activism and Social Justice Summer School | Urban Word Collective | Global | Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
I decided to show a Sarajevo park where I spent time as a child and to which I still like to return because the tall poplars relax me. In this park, during the war, we collected old branches to warm ourselves in the cold Sarajevo winters. Nature is an integral part of me and I believe that a person cannot survive without nature at any age: neither as a child who can learn the inevitability of life from nature, as a young person who can find inspiration in nature, but also as a person in the third age of life as what am I now, who finds peace of mind in nature.
In October 2023, an exhibition was held on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dobrivoj Beljkašić, an artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who fled to Bristol in the early 1990s due to the war raging in Sarajevo and the rest of the country. The exhibition was realized in the art museum Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I often hang out with my peers at additional activities for us senior citizens. The museum educator who works with the museum audience organized an additional activity for us where we were guided through the exhibition "Painter of Restless Imagination, Dobrivoje Beljkašić, 1923-2023" with active participation in the discussion about the works. Through works in which the artist depicted the Sarajevo bridges, and the sacred architecture of this multi-ethnic city with a multi-layered cultural history, we talked about our upbringing in pre-war Sarajevo. For the creative task, we were given by the educator to illustrate the areas of the city, buildings, or people that symbolize our growing up in this city and the way in which the city, its environment, and people shaped our identity.
