Place
Mijakovići is a village of about fifty houses in the hills above Vareš, ninety minutes from Sarajevo. Traditional Bosnian architecture, increasingly rare. Few permanent residents now. The neighbours are used to artists coming and going. Conversations over the fence, coffee in someone's yard. The welcome is genuine.
Nine hundred meters from here stands Bobovac, the capital of the medieval Bosnian kingdom, the last stronghold before falling to the Ottoman Empire in 1463. The ruins still stand on the hilltop, visible from the yard. Bobovac is not nostalgia for what was. It is a marker of interruption, and a point from which to begin again.
The mountain above the village is called Perun, after the Slavic god of thunder. A hiking trail passes by the house to the summit. The sign reads: Zvjezdane Staze.
The Name
Star paths. The name of a trail on the Via Dinarica network. It was here before us, nailed to a barn.
In the former Yugoslavia, Zvjezdane Staze was the translation of Star Trek. A vision of a future free from scarcity, war, and nationalism. A vision in which difference is richness. A vision in which exploration of the unknown is an ethical imperative.
The name remains as a reminder: a space of exploration, a space to investigate whether it is possible to live differently.
A living system
We think of this as an organism. Those who come may choose to become part of something that extends beyond their stay, or simply to pass through. Some encounters remain just that. Others incubate, cross-pollinate, find their own form, eventually become autonomous. Collaborations form and dissolve and form again. Projects emerge that we could not have planned.
What interests us is not the visible output but the conditions that allow something to emerge. A slow accumulation of connections, mostly invisible, surfacing occasionally, spreading elsewhere.
The Piano
There is a Petrof upright in the house. It has not been tuned in decades. It will not be.
My father bought it during the war, in Leipzig, with almost the last money we had. He died a few years later. I decided then: no tuning. Let it follow its own path.
It was in Tuzla for over twenty years before arriving in Mijakovići. Artists have recorded on it since. Roman Stolyar named his album Detuned by War. The phrase fits.
This piano is a metaphor. For post-Yugoslav existence. For everything that survives while carrying within it the traces of what happened. For the refusal to be "corrected" according to external standards. The piano has its path. So do we.
Principles
Sliding Scale
Each person pays according to their means. Those who pay more make it possible for others to come.
Samodoprinos
Part of all funds goes to the village. An old Yugoslav concept: collective financing of collective needs.
Zbor
The assembly. Direct democracy in its oldest form. The community gathers, deliberates, decides.
Transparency
All finances are public. A culture of accountability begins with small things.