V E B A H O O D

Iceland, 2010 © Velibor Božović

Iceland, 2010 © Velibor Božović

Same waterfalls on river Sela, some 50 years apart.

Into the Greenland Sea, Iceland, 2010 © Velibor Božović

The best literary love scene, or perhaps, the best orgasm description, that can be found in literature:

” I crouched down and, overcome by a sudden panic, looked over the edge. A couple lay down there, in the bottom of the pit, as I thought: a man stretched full length over another body of witch nothing was visible but legs, spread and angled. In the startled moment when that image went through me, which lasted an eternity, it seemed as if the man’s feet twitched like those of one just hanged.”

from The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

All images © Velibor Božović

Laurentians, 2009 © Velibor Božović

Sometimes it speaks to me but I do not understand it’s language. It is like hearing a beautiful song in a mysterious tongue, a frustrating thrill.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2009 © Velibor Božović

My latest work (see the preview here), still in progress, shows (or it will attempt to show) the present state of Bosnian medieval cemeteries. It is a collaboration with Toronto’s York University professor Amila Buturovic, also a native of Bosnia.

As she explains in the introduction to her first book on related subject, Stone Speaker which discusses the work of late Bosnian poet Mak Dizdar in relation to these cemeteries, they were ‘naturalised by landscape’ and remain the only witness, the silent one, to the lost world to which many contemporary Bosnians have uncertain relationship.

A few centuries of dense history passed, filled with imperial conquests, world wars, local wars and nationalistic awakening of different ethnic groups; consequently, the links between medieval dead and today’s Bosnian historical imagination were severed.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2009 © Velibor Božović

Hercegovina, 2008 © Velibor Božović

” For

You only know roads

That are carved and cleared

(And these are narrow and barren

indeed

No matter how weary

And long

They seem

To you

So proud and

So strong)

You only know the roads

That start

From eyes

And

Heart

But that’s not all…”

- from the poem Roads by Mak Dizdar

translation from Bosnian by Francis R. Jones