Flex Mentallo

The residents were not allowed down into the town. We didn’t go either - until we learned that the residents were sneaking down regardless! So we snuck down too. We lived on the same diet - stale bread and chocolate soup for breakfast. Cracked a tooth on the bread one morning I recall. but we were allowed to take the children on escorted trips beyond the camp, higher up into the hills.

The camp was hidden away from the view of the town, in the hills above

Diane had put us in touch with the Bosnian Support Group, a very small charity that funded a volunteer at the Bosnian Refugee Camp at Hrastnik, near Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. He was a retired army colonel named Bernard. (To my shame I can’t recall his surname and the Bosnian Support Group seems to have disappeared from history.) He played a vital role as our guide and interpreter. Bobby and I made a conscious decision to live as the refugees lived. Entire families were squeezed into tiny (but immaculately kept) rooms in what for all the world resembled a concentration camp. Hrastnik:

She later published an account of ATI's work including some references to our first trip. linky: ATI Bobby was to return to Croatia and Bosnia many times.

I should state for the record that I am not an art therapist. But I blagged my way into the meeting anyway, half expecting to be thrown out when I fessed up, as I did when the meeting started. I was tolerated however, and when it transpired that there were only two of us willing to make the trip, I found myself quickly making plans. That was the first time I sold my comic collection for reasons other than to buy more comics. (It was not however the last - but that is another story, and takes us back to India. Another time perhaps....) It was actually quite a modest collection but paid for the trip. My colleague on this trip was art therapist Bobby Lloyd, who with Debra Kalmanowitz later co-founded the Art Therapy Initiative, which emerged from the exploratory work we did together.

I was living in London, scratching out a tenuous living as a community artist. There were periods of work, and other periods of what the thespians like to call "just resting dear." And it was during one of these latter periods that I happened to learn that Diane Waller, Head of Goldsmiths College's Art Therapy Department in Lewisham, just a few miles from where I lived in Bermondsey, was advertising an event on behalf of Warchild. (Irrelevant note: If you attended last year's Super Comic Convention in London last year, Bermondsey was on the opposite bank of the Thames from the venue.) At that point Warchild were thinking of setting up an art therapy centre for child victims of torture to be based in Sarajevo. Waller already had connections with Yugoslavia that pre-dated the war so Warchild had approached her for assistance. They wanted art therapists to volunteer to visit the besieged city to do some research, see if this centre was a viable option.

The men and women who ran Warchild were nothing if not unreasonable, and it was this unreasonableness that drew me in. I have been trying to stay unreasonable ever since. Warchild set up "The Serious Road Trip" - a regular convoy that took essential supplies to the besieged people of Mostar. Leeson remembers a day when, "the doctors asked if I could shine the light of my video camera so they could amputate some kid's leg without anaesthetic. I thought to myself: what the hell am I doing holding this light? Am I going insane, or has the world gone insane?" But more on Warchild, Oasis, the Stone Roses et al later....

The first thing Leeson said to me when I met him at a fundraiser at the Warchild offices was "Got any pot?" In my eyes he went from fustian BBC mandarin to ageing hippy in an instant. And it was the quietly heroic Osborne who, every few weeks for several years, and at grave risk to his life, smuggled car boot loads of insulin through the Serb blockades into Sarajevo. That is where I met him, and how he came to help me rescue Yasna's cat. (More on that tale of "reckless cowardice" later.) I asked him what would happen if the Serbs caught him smuggling and in a quiet, matter of fact voice he said, "Oh, they'd shoot me."

They were well connected to the higher echelons of the television and music industries, and had a genius for fundraising. They were also slightly crazy, but then to do what they did took a bit of madness - that inability to be reasonable in the face of the unreasonable.

In 1994 I travelled to the former Yugoslavia on behalf of Warchild, a UK based charity. War Child was founded in 1993 by filmmakers David Wilson and Bill Leeson, and Nigel Osborne, a composer and music professor, who had been shocked at the way the atrocities of this terrible war were being ignored by the West.

Welcome to Sarajevo "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw In the course of my experiences in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia I found myself more than once in situations that felt very much like being on the inside of one of Tarkovsky's movies.

Of that there is no doubt. I've noticed BZ does have these periods of absence. Let's hope he is back soon!

Tomorrow : Welcome to Sarajevo

And this:

Anyone who has tracked this thread that reflects for but a moment will understand the powerful impact Tarkovsky has had on my work, perhaps more than any painter. Figures in a sepia toned landscape. Memory. Water. Dream. Yet I havent consciously thought about him for many years, though I think my preoccupation with his work comes through in certain works, such as this:

This was also the first movie Tarkovsky made following his own exile from the USSR. He made only one more film before he too died. He died of cancer, but one may wish to believe that like the characters in Nostalghia, he died of the same wasting disease as they, cut off from the source. "My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." Ingmar Bergman

Like the musician before him, the historian has died in exile of nostalgia.

Then, the final scene. The historian sits in front of the farmhouse we saw earlier. Beside him is the dog. But as the camera pulls away we see that it is in fact contained within the ruined church we saw earlier. At the precise moment of our realisation, that this is an image after death, snow begins to fall.

The candle flickers out halfway across. On the second attempt, he succeeds, but apparently dies of a heart attack.

Later, at an ancient spa, he learns that there is a legend that if when the pool is drained, one can carry a lit candle from one side to the other; one will achieve one's heart's desire. He makes the attempt.

At another point in the movie, the historian comes across the shell of a ruined church.