Walls That Open Worlds

An article by Marko Ćurčić

The first thing you see when you arrive at the Čačak bus station are the murals painted on the nearby silos. Once part of the large agricultural cooperative “Žitopromet”, the silos were a true monument to post-war construction, accompanied by a legend that they had been cast in concrete with millimetre precision under the watchful eye of an experienced but formally untrained builder. Through the efforts of a group of young people from Čačak, they were rescued from post-transition decay and transformed into a monument to abstract art.

The three silos proved to be an ideal canvas for a temporal triptych in which three different artists, from Čačak, Belgrade and Germany, explore the intertwining of past, present and future. Although each artist has a distinctive style, the three murals form a harmonious whole through their play with colour and the deconstruction of geometric shapes. At first, I wondered how the somewhat conservative city of Čačak had embraced such a monumental work of abstract art, until I noticed that the first mural in the trilogy was, in fact, a deconstructed landscape of the Čačak region. Ethnic motifs and pastoral elements are broken down, allowing one of the symbols of Čačak, the plum, to emerge.

When you return to your hometown after being away for a few years, you notice every change, while for those who have stayed, it is all part of an indifferent everyday routine. It is easy to spot all the deviations from the city you have dreamed about for years. That is why the friend who had come to meet me at the bus station was surprised to see me staring so intently at the silos as soon as I stepped off the bus. I wondered whether the people of Čačak had, after everything, become so accustomed to their surroundings that they could no longer see the forest for the trees, focusing on individual murals they liked without noticing the overall transformation that this mural movement, organised over the past ten years by Dani urbane kulture (DUK), had brought to the city.

It turned out I was partly right. As my friend explained, people had simply got used to the murals and no longer noticed the decorated facades as much as they noticed the old, dilapidated buildings without them. Indeed, over the following days I became aware of the remarkable function that street art theorists call the pacification of public space: concealing graffiti that serve as outbursts of bitterness and anger by anonymous authors. There are fewer and fewer of these inscriptions, and what is interesting is that the anonymous haters have not returned to the scene of the crime to scribble over the walls, now covered with murals. Like in some strange version of the fable of Aska and the Wolf, they have remained spellbound, refusing to destroy the decorated walls.

Already at the bus station, I asked my friend to show me the other murals.

“There are now more than 130,” he replied.

“I don't know if I'll manage to find them all, but we can start with the ones painted last year, while you were away from Čačak, and see how far we get.”

The previous year marked DUK's tenth anniversary, and the organisers had made an effort to bring together a whole host of artists from Serbia and abroad. Each of them brought an intriguing blend of personal style and the environment in which they had grown up.

You don't have to walk far from the bus station before coming across the first mural, whichever direction you take. Right in the city centre, we came across a residential building decorated with lace motifs, through which the artist from Poland sought to highlight the artistic value of traditional handicrafts. Then there was a house painted with geometric shapes drawn from pre-Columbian Latin American cultures, yet bearing an unmistakable resemblance to the rugs that have been woven for centuries in southern Serbia. Through a play of shapes and different shades of green, the mural on the facade of the building opposite the city park becomes its mirror image, a kind of extension of the park into the grey urban landscape. It seems to me that most of the works that play with colour and geometric abstraction, forming harmonious wholes both with their surroundings and within the artwork itself, challenge the assumptions of the few critics who consider street art chaotic and spontaneous.

However, the city also features figurative works spanning various genres, from hyperrealism to pop art. These are works that bring imagined and existing worlds to life on walls, with the former sometimes seeming more real than the latter. An artist from Spain frequently uses clock faces and birds as motifs. It is as if he wants to remind us of the ancient warning to mortals, memento mori, while at the same time offering comfort through an invitation to live life to the fullest, striving to be as free as a bird in flight. Not far from there is a portrait of a young girl surrounded by an endless lake and slender birch trees, making the viewer feel as though they are standing before a painting by Ivan Bilibin, renowned for combining Russian folklore with Art Nouveau. Further east, there is a mural by a Japanese artist who incorporates shapes found in the Japanese woodworking technique known as kumiko into his depictions of animals.

But there was one mural I stopped in front of for longer than usual.

“You and your damn cats,” my friend remarked jokingly. “I knew this one would be your favourite.”

Yes, me and my damn cats. An obsession that clearly knows no boundaries, given that it is also the central theme of Peruvian artist Nemo's mural entitled “Mačak de Čačak” (The Cat of Čačak). An obsession that spills over into the pages of magical realism, the literary movement that this mural so clearly draws inspiration from. It is that desire to portray ordinary things in extraordinary ways, as described by Čačak painter Bogić Risimović. The cat depicted as a living creature, the jaguar that has contributed so much to South American aesthetics, and the cat as a folkloric and mystical being, a link to the otherworld and a guide through liminal spaces. With one half rooted in everyday Peruvian life and the other in the cosmic mysticism of shamans and ayahuasca, derived from the emerald rainforest whose colours cover half of the mural. One eye fixed on the viewer and the other gazing into the beyond, “Mačak de Čačak”, although visually divided in two, forms a phenomenological and perceptual whole.

However, the combination of the green colours of the magical world and the everyday greyish tones of the leopard further reinforced a thought I had had ever since seeing the first mural. Memories of leaving the city and visiting neglected rural roadside memorials came flooding back. Later, my guide through the murals of Čačak also recalled how, many years ago, we had come across a group of krajputaši at the foot of Mount Rudnik. Some had been restored, while most looked like a swirling mass of grey stone and green moss, standing upright that day just as they had stood for centuries before. Moving a krajputaš is said to bring a terrible curse, one that many people still fear today. The belief most likely came to us with stonemasons from Herzegovina, who had inherited it from ancient Bogomil stećci, medieval tombstones on which one would often find the following plea and warning carved into the stone:

... And I beg you, do not tread upon me. I was as you are, and you shall be as I am...

A stone that laughs, a stone that looks threateningly at you, a stone that defies oblivion, a stone that calls upon the passing traveller to stop, as Branko V. Radičević once wrote. But never a stone that weeps, never a morbid cult of death, but rather a celebration of life. The universality of human existence, from the Spanish mural to the krajputaši of Rudnik and Kablar: we are all mortal, and that is precisely why we should make the most of the time we have been given in this world. Soldiers who fell in battle call upon their fellow countrymen to enjoy the freedom they fought for, while those who died in peacetime wish to be remembered for the joyful lives they led. The human soul is free as a bird, which is why, alongside Christian symbolism, a dove pecking at juicy grapes is such a common motif on krajputaši. Stone flocks of doves beneath Mount Rudnik, seemingly ready to take flight into the blue of the heavens.

They were never decorated in black, but only in bright colours and rich ornamentation, with flowers and geometric patterns adorning the stone. Such motifs, almost springlike in character, reflected the youth and innocence of most of those to whom the memorials were dedicated. The famous Čikiriz krajputaši of Kablar, with their intricate details carved into the anterija (traditional long coat) and other elements of the figures' traditional dress, are hardly distinguishable from the South and Central American geometric patterns seen just a few dozen kilometres away, on the murals in the centre of Čačak.

Radojko Nikolić was absolutely right when he described krajputaši as “the peasant's soul carved in stone”. Seen in this light, a mural is the soul of an urban person on a wall. The depiction of the inner and outer worlds of both the creator and the viewer. Having had the opportunity to compare the two, I realised that the universality of human happiness, suffering, anxiety and the need to communicate through art with future generations renders meaningless those absurd dichotomies of Village–City, Serbia–World, Them–Us.

After all, aren't the silos where my journey began three great roadside monuments marking the road into Čačak?