In our daily lives we all search for moments of tranquillity. Darija Jelinčić started her project Escapes during such a search. Her escape from a stressful life in Prague was a last-minute trip to Lesbos, Greece. Leaving the city behind, she found serenity on the island whilst facing the blue of the sea and the sky. She experienced herself in the immensity of space, with nothing in between her and the soothing straight line of the horizon. It made her think about how trapped we all are in our constructed realities of urban centres, where the struggle for success makes us disconnected from nature, and consequently, from ourselves. After leaving the island, Darija started exploring the ways humans search for solutions to the problems that artificial urban spaces create. She did so in Prague where she lives, but also during her travels: in Greece, Holland, United States, Croatia, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. In all those places Darija searched for moments of serenity. She composes her photographs carefully, usually placing her subjects at the centre, capturing their relationship with their surroundings. She examines them through their experience of space.

Escapes is an exploration about the human experience, about our state of mind during those moments of tranquillity, but also about the physical aspect of it – as in a photograph of a fairground ride. We look up at the sky and see people comfortably sitting on the ride, spinning gently in space, with nothing above them but blue skies. We come to realise that being connected with ourselves means being connected to space. Darija’s Escapes is a search for something we have lost along the way. It is a search for our origins, our connection with nature and with one another. Therefore, Escapes is, paradoxically, a search for the way back home.

Silvia Potočki

In this photographic project, I explore the landscapes of rivers in constant flux, in the regions of Kaunas in Lithuania and Valladolid in Spain. There, the river is not merely perceived as a natural phenomenon. Its flow and the landscape it shapes has long attracted people who imbue this natural phenomenon with symbolic meaning. I am interested in how rivers influence the behaviour of people who live alongside them, and the unique narratives of life in search of harmony, balance, and coexistence with nature. I am intrigued by the dialogue between the cultural and the natural, as well as by how much we can integrate nature into our contemporary lives.

I wanted to position myself within the river landscape to draw attention to the transience of things and contemplate what it gives to me and to the people who live with this landscape.

Darija Jelinčić

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us”, writes T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, reminding us of the inevitable merging of the individual into the world that surrounds them. This world is not only human society, but also the entire complex of living and non-living universe from which humanity has emerged. Darija Jelinčić sought places where our internal currents merge into the sea of reality, photographing rivers and the people who next to them. Their everyday lives, seemingly ordinary, urban and suburban existences, obtain a surprising aura in the sharp light of her images. This light is perhaps the discreet yet intense presence of the river, that “strong brown god” (to quote Eliot again), in their existences, a hidden harmony between people and their environment.

Because light is like flowing water. Gentle in its lazy but unstoppable pouring over the world, yet unpredictably cruel – when it reveals things we would rather stayed unknown, thus drawing us into whirlpools of anxiety. Light enables us to see the world, become aware of all its beautiful and repulsive aspects, but also its impermanence and transience. And we, like the characters in these photographs, stand in the light and are part of it, as it caresses us and as we burn within it. Darija reminds us that we are thrown into this river of reality and that we can surrender to its flow.

Feđa Gavrilović

This precious food item composed of a white mineral of specific taste is ubiquitous, easily accessible, and above all, essential for human life. Salt is an integral part of our lives, it plays a pivotal role in the body’s many physiological processes, and has had various social usages throughout history, from being a means of payment or a substance to prevent infections and a preservative, all the way to being a magical ingredient used in religious rituals. Most of these practices are no longer in use in modern society. However, different beliefs and sayings associated with this chemical compound are still part of the living tradition of the Slavic people.

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Proverbs, practices and customs closely related to salt, therapeutic marine environments, and the tradition of sea salt production form the backbone of Darija Jelinčić’s work who, through video work and photographic series, sometimes with accompanying objects, presents her artistic and research project called Salt with a kind of museological approach. The artist creates works without excessive mystification and pretentiousness, while her unique artistic sensibility resonates with softness, tenderness and minimalism of expression. In addition to the dominant landscape motifs, linking most of the other works is the ancient human need and effort to directly manipulate the forces of nature, and thus one’s own destiny, through various procedures. By depicting her own body covered in salt, the artist invokes luck, referring to one of the beliefs associated with evocation magic, while putting salt in the four corners of the house, hanging salt bags in the four corners of the crib or placing a glass of salt water by the bed at night is seen as apotropaic magic, functioning as protection against invisible negative forces. Used in optimal proportions and conditions, salt purifies, protects, preserves and nourishes, whereas its excessive or insufficient use results in an imbalance that destroys life in water or on land, so in a figurative sense, salt symbolises the need to establish balance in every aspect of life. This thought also runs through the holy books, for example, in the words that Jesus addresses to all of us: “You are the salt of the Earth”, but in the context of maintaining moral balance, since salt enriches that which already exists when it is part of the human experience.

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Amid recent and even long-lasting events happening at the local and global level, Darija Jelinčić points to a potential source of security, stability and motivation existing within the traditional frameworks, to the customs and beliefs gradually fading into oblivion, which point to a close connection between cosmic forces and human spirituality, to the need for establishing psychophysical harmony. Maybe we should put some sea salt in our pockets for good luck, just in case, although many will see the need to take this advice with a grain of salt.

Sara Mikelić

A handbook to the other world

If, for whatever reason, you are afraid of dying, you probably won’t find a safer place than eastern Serbia. For, nobody really dies there. Vlachs, a small ethnic group with a deeply rooted cult of death, make sure that life as you know it goes on even if you’ve somehow stopped breathing. Surely, there is magic involved, but the real spell is the ability to transform what would elsewhere be viewed a tragedy, into a celebration of life that transcends the borders between this and the other world. Well, at least until the deceased gets to know their way around it well enough never to wander back. 

For the Vlachs never underestimate the sacred forces that influence their lives. They believe that the existence of the living is tightly interwoven with the life of the dead whose departure is uncertain. The Vlach traditional culture is, therefore, rich in mystic rituals such as the invocation of the dead, gifting the deceased bestowing them with all that they had used in worldly life because they cannot set out on a safe journey to the other world without it, the invocation of the Sun, the Moon and the stars to pool their strengths together and help the souls to continue their journey in peace. The dead are welcome to return, attend feasts and parties, as long as their moods and intentions are friendly and under control.

Even if you find death to be “not all that special”, being among the Vlachs is still an unforgettable experience. Have a safe journey!

 *descriptions of rituals in collaboration with ethnologist Paun Es Durlic