REUNITED / 2019

Ars Aevi Bridge (Renzo Piano Ars Aevi Museum)

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

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The walk over the Ars Aevi bridge called “REUNITED” is a perfomative action on the bridge that was built in 2002 by renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano. The only bridge that was constructed after the war over the river Miljacka on the part where during the siege, it separated occupied with the besieged part of Sarajevo, and following that, separated author and his father. Their reunion never happen, and the artist from his father’s death in 1994, NEVER crossed the bridge that separated them then, the Bridge of Fraternity and Unity.

 

Following this fact, this temporal symbolism son/father/son, the walk of the author and his son over the river, which (on that particular part from the period of the siege) did not cross for over 25 years, represents a kind of kinetic (à mouvoir) action with which the author ends his trilogy devoted to sentimental connection with his father. By passing it today with his son, over the Ars Aevi Bridge, as a symbol of art of the epoch (the name of the bridge in Latin), as a symbol of a new epoch of life in which this symbolic performance is the counterbalance of the emptiness that was installed with the violent separation of the author and his father 25 years ago.

 

The first part of this autobiographical triptych was an exhibition called “DVD (divided)”, premierly shown in Sarajevo in June 2002 and divided into two parts: an intervention in the space of the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a photographic exhibition at gallery Roman Petrović. In-situ intervention in the National Gallery consisted of the barbed-wire with which the gallery, and thus the permanent collection of the gallery was divided into two parts, with the aim of pointing to the problem of physical separation. Works exposed at the gallery Roman Petrović are a series of photographs taken in cities that have gone through history with the problem of physical separation: Sarajevo, Mostar, Rijeka, Geneva and Belfast. Photos from this cycle are part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Old Arts Museum Belfast.

 

The second part, was in-situ intervention in the public space called “UNITED”, on the Bridge of Fraternity and Unity, the place that was dividing for the last time author and his father, and their photographic portraits of the ID card from that period, were placed in the middle of the bridge.

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Photo above: Amer Bogilović

Photo down: Nadia Capuzzo