The Project
This is an excerpt from a report by
Natascha Fischell on one aspect of her visit to Sarajevo in 1999. This years work in Sarajevo will be filled with activities of a similar nature.
Self-portraits
The idea for the project arose from my personal interest in portraiture.
For me portraiture is a way to engage myself with the person opposite and from my own experiences I know that it makes this person feel special.
Earlier this year I have realised a large group project with mentally and physically disabled children from a residence home and children from local schools in Baldoyle (Dublin). They painted life-size portraits of each other which we then pasted onto walls around the village. Later we have also done a mural in the same style.
I was invited to work with 50 children from the SOS Children's Village. In comparison to Sarajevo's state orphanage this place is heaven on earth. The SOS Kinderdoff idea was well known to me. I respect and admire its concept and especially the people that make it work.
The SOS Children's Village Sarajevo was built six years ago.
About 90 children live there in 16 separate homes with their SOS mothers and SOS aunts. I was invited to live with them for one week in order to introduce my project and to supervise the work. During those days I experienced the village's amazing spirit. I will always be fascinated by so much charity and love.
After nearly four years of brutal armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzigovina, with an estimated
250,000 people killed, there are more than 2,000 orphans in Sarajevo, including Republika
Srpska. As a result of war, these children all share different kinds of traumatic experiences.
They lost the people most important to them; their parents, as well as those things important to their development; their toys, their own room, their bed. The children of SOS Children's Village all have their own stories. Most of them have witnessed other people being tortured or killed and all have experienced the lack of food, clothes and medical help as well as exile, separation and poverty. They have witnessed bombing and the destruction of homes and schools which confused them and changed their idea of the world.
Looking at what these children have suffered from, I wanted my art project to be happy and optimistic. My main concern was to provide a good time throughout in order to build new positive emotional experiences. Children have to be regarded as individual personalities. They have the right to play and to express themselves in a creative way. My project's intention was to encourage the children and to stimulate their personality development through creativity.
For the project all children received a camera and a roll of film with which they took photographs of what is important to them in their life (objects, people, places...). I remember sitting in front of the guest-house or walking through to the village when the children were busy with their cameras, proud and satisfied, with a big smile on their faces. I was as happy as them.
After one week the children have taken about 1,000 photographs. The German Embassy in Sarajevo was very helpful to cover the costs for development and print.
We spent the second week of the project co-ordinating the pictures, as each child was asked to put their name on the back of the photograph as well as a short description or a title of the image.
They called me "teta Natasha". We had such fun together and developed our own language of communication. I have never met children that are so desperate for hugs and caressing.
The photographs all turned out well and I was proud of the children for the effort they made. There were only happy pictures, taken around the village. The most common images were the new homes, the SOS mothers and aunts, the brothers and sisters, friends and the children's own room and toys.
I went back with the photographs to where I was staying during the second half of the project. It was a place on the outskirts of Sarajevo, in Stup, where German students founded the seminar college: SCHULER HELFEN LEBEN. Following the motto "Bosnia Alive" they initiate workshops and projects with young international and locals in order to overcome prejudices and hatred.
During the following days a group of performance artists from Bologna helped me to prepare little stickers with the address of SOS Children's Village and put them on the back of the photographs. We also had to cover the pictures with self-adhesive film, make holes and tie a ribbon onto each photograph. It was a lot of work, indeed, but dealing with the images meant dealing with the children's souls as each picture was their personal expression.
