POČITELJ ALWAYS LOOKS LIKE AS IT HAS JUST TAKEN WUDU
FROM POCITELJ TO NOWHERE
Počitelj always looks like as it has just taken wudu!* With the splashed out heavens to whose secret are leaning its head and hands of minarets, clock towers and chimneys, from which there for centuries scent a juicy salute to life. Of the swift Neretva legs that are rushing to grasp the wisdom of the sea. Such - upright on the prayer mat spread for it by its warm homeland Herzegovina, purely and devotionally, by some ancient knowledge socialized, there stands Pocitelj always in prayer toward its old-covenantal homeland – The Time. And in that resides the riddle-solving. By Time fertilized, it receives us in its inwardness pregnant with the beauty and dream. Pocitelj - both the father-rock and the mother-earth. A Living thing that keeps for us our dooms - to remain at least a record in the Time, and that keeps us from our dooms - not to be the eternal seed without parentage.
We enter into that alive figure and decipher in its heart the ancient brotherhood between thoughts and feelings. They come, those without homeland, born in the excess of names, faces and streets, strangers to everything that is not a word or thought, and there becomes to them warm and soft each hand. And those come, who already possess security from the indifference of some doors, and their love doubles. That's why we all are in Pocitelj familiar, and same by something. At home, ours, with ourselves and with others.
Pocitelj guards the horizontal fate of words. To the most intimate measure reduced loneliness between home and home, stone and stone, between staircases, a lump of earth and someone else's mound, it holds a word not to seclude itself or become arrogant before is reached by another one. Guards It too a vertical fate of a picture. It helps it to test the infinity in the finality of the horizon - above, and its human earthly walk – down. Pocitelj guards too a multiply fate of a sound. It let it spread across beyond widths and below depths, and to return again to itself. Do we love this city because of it? The alive breath of the mother-earth and the father-rock, which fertilizing the soul of Art - that their dearest child. And whether only for that?
From Pocitelj to the dark haze above this city. To the sound of trams and the traces of human fractured always completely unheard talk. From Pocitelj to the numb paintings across the galleries, dimmed without light, air and human breath. From Pocitelj to the words shackled inside hard covers on the bookshelves. From there to this sound here in cold halls, for which only we know not whether it always succeeds go to Pocitelj and then return into us and itself - without regret. From Pocitelj to all these numerous doors, completely indifferent whether we will get through them in or out.
From Pocitelj - to Nowhere. Because here, in Sarajevo, is somehow hard and too rushed a hand of a friend from Pocitelj.
Art Colony of Pocitelj, summer, 1974.
Sarajevo, winter, 1974.
*Wudu=ablution, Muslim ritual washing before prayer.
P.S. This poetic prose by a guest of the Colony was published in COMMUNIST edition of The Colony Art Catalog "Ten years of Počitelj Art Colony, 1974", but it is the only contribution from the former Content that was not (by Azra B. & Co.) reprinted in the post-war's - DEMOCRATIC!
O TEMPORA, O MORES!
