Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina 🇧🇦
Street Arts Mostar
Curated by Marina Mimoza
Acrylic paint on concrete wall
8 x 14 m
2017
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Mostar is a small town in the south of Bosnia-Herzegovina, located in a mountainous area where many cultures live, including Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Muslims and Orthodox Catholics.
The mural is located on a place called Abrašević, where there was once a line of fire during the Bosnian war (1992 – 1995). Some buildings in the area, still in ruins, show walls peppered with bullet holes. The neighbors told me that “many soldiers fought on this ground and the building you are painting was completely destroyed”.
During the first day of work, a neighbor named Mario appeared close to the scaffold. He told me that he would like to see some spaces of the wall original color – pastel yellow – which can be seen in the H8 quadrant.
The next day, a woman named Slata started to shout some words in Bosnian, saying that the white and red colors of B3 reminded her of the Croatian flag. A neighbor who tried to calm her down translated for me afterwards that the Croatian army killed her husband during the war. So I transformed the color combination by erasing the white with blue paint. Slata calmed down, we shook hands and then she got me a coffee. Finally, she asked me to draw her dog “Pongui” – a toy poodle- on the wall.
The third day, another person appeared on the scene, also shouting. He did not want to see yellow stars on the blue background. He argued that it was a reference to the Bosnia-Herzegovina flag. That same afternoon, another man called Boris also expressed his anger: the crescent moon and the stars reminded him of Islam. So the moon closed into a circle and I painted more stars, reconfiguring the position of elements in the work, where at a first sight there were 32 figures in total, the number of pieces in a chess set.
Boris returned the next day. Standing in front of the wall, he stared at the mural in silence for fifteen minutes. All at once, he started yelling at me in Bosnian. I watched him from the second floor of the scaffold, without knowing what to answer. Suddenly, he executes a theatrical gesture. He unfolds an imaginary revolver from his pocket and pulls the trigger twice. I look at him, perplexed, and repeat the same gesture, adding a question mark with my hand, as we Argentinians and Italians do, with the fingers all together facing up. A photographer of the festival approaches and talks to the man. He tells me later that he is a war veteran, quite mentally ill, who speaks a difficult dialect but he could understand that in this same place he saw people killing during the war.
Mario and another man appear on the scene. Marina, the festival director, arrives at the place and starts to talk with them. None of these men like square shapes because it makes them think of the Croatian flag. And so many black squares represents death. They suggest I draw colored chess figures like the knight or the rook. Marina, amused and nervous about the situation, begins to ask people walking around Abrašević:
“What do you see in this painting?”, to which some respond:
-a carpet.
-a checkers board.
-a sun.
-a set of colors.
-a child’s drawing.
-Joan Miró.
-a chess board.
-a sky.
But Mario and the other two men do not like the painting. A three hour discussion starts. In the meantime, I go to a bar to drink coffee and write. When I got back to the wall, everyone was gone. A man with his son that lives in the neighbourhood tell me that they heard about the conflictive discussion but that he and his family love the mural.
On the last day of work, a lady threatens us from her red car with a call to the police, because she thinks that painting walls is wrong. An hour goes by and two policemen arrive. We are asked to enter into the van with Zakky, Camilo Theic and Nicolás Alfalfa, without explanation. We arrive at the police station and to pass the time, I play chess with Alfalfa. One hour later, Marina appears at the station and then we are free.
We come back to Abrašević and continue to paint. The mural is finished when I cover the balconies of the first, second and third floors. In the evening, the owner of the third appears and tells me that she wants her balcony white and not green.
The next day we left the city by bus to Dubrovnik and then to Sisak, Croatia. Three days later, Marina sends me a photo of the mural without the scaffolding. Mysteriously, three yellow circles appeared in C1, E1 and G1.
A week later, Marina sends me another photo in which three yellow triangles appeared in B2, F2 and H2.
Questions:
When is a work in public space finished?
Who is the author?
Who does it belong to? To the artist who runs it? To the inhabitants of the neighborhood? To those who change it over time? To all of them together?
Is it possible to play a 38-piece chess match?
What else can you add or subtract from this mural?
How do external agents have an influence during the process? To what level?
Does painting in a public space sensitize people?
Can a work in a hierarchical institution generate the same level of sensitivity?
What is a flag beyond an arbitrary combination of colors? Does a determined color combination justify the death of another?
Are colors symbols?
Are war and play antagonistic notions?
Should I have painted the toy poodle “Pongui”?
Thanks to Camilo Theic, Florencia Fitz, Nicolás Alfalfa and Zakky Zadro.