I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

Sylvia Plath

Street poet and street artist Bifido doesn’t mean to be morose, but here in Mostar he can’t help himself as he creates mirrored expressions of a sullen, ill-tempered youth on city streets. Part of the Bosnian /Herzegovinian street art festival named after this city of 113,000 Croats (48.4%), Bosniaks (44.1%), and Serbs (4.1%), the annual meeting of international and local artists produces a broad variety of artworks for the city.

Bifido has been here before, and he says his feeling of ardor and confliction are hopelessly intertwined. “I have a special connection with this country,” he tells us of this city grown in the wake of and destruction of war; a gorgeous bridge now a symbol to many, one that rises over troubled waters. “I love Bosnia. I met her and I fell in love with her.”

The bridge, he says, is inhabited by an odd mix of memory, hope for the future, and questionable tourism trade that includes souvenir shops, odd perfumes, and “the most Bosnian thing you can find is the Ibrahimovic jersey (which is not Bosnian).”

But above all else, for Bifido, is the feeling of this city he returns to, and the feeling of the river that runs through it, the Neretva.

“Neretva is for me a state of mind,” he says. “It is not a river, is liquid melancholy. Every day we spend a couple of hours together.” “This work is my tribute to this land. To this city. To all the people who live there. Even the most assholes. A cry melted along the tortured walls. Walls of inhabited houses, of empty houses. The cry of the invisible.”

238

138

45