INTRODUCTION
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MENTAL HEALTH
HEATING
TRANSPORT
PETS

Mental Health

AMRA ZULFIKARPASIC
DESIGNER
"ADVICE FOR SURVIVAL"

 Work was a kind of mental exercise for all of us or perhaps a means of mentally resisting. And it was interesting how during the war, if you ran into five people and asked them what they were doing, you would find that each of those five people was working on some kind of project of their own. This was because no one was able to give you or find you a job. You had to think up some kind of job for yourself. I worked a lot during the war, and that pretty much saved my life. Jobs that are perhaps less important now, when looking at them from a different point of view. At that time during the war, they seemed to me as if they were the most important thing in the world, even more important than my own life.

And so I was going out to make trademarks for people, to design their projects, because that was terribly important to me. And I never thought about the possibility of something happening to me because of someone else's project, like the possibility of my getting killed, for example. And this was at a time when there wasn't any electricity at all, there wasn't anything. There was no water, there wasn't anything. This made work difficult for designers, because every one of my jobs depended on electricity in order to be realized in the end.

FAIZA KAPETANOVIC
TEACHER
"MASQUERADE BALL PROVIDES MOMENTARY DISTRACTION"

 I was impressed the most by a masked ball, then we decided that children should dress as animals or as whatever they admired or were interested in. And believe me, the dressing up was so skillfully done that not even their parents or the neighbors could recognize them. They dressed up as kings and princes, as butterflies. And on the whole, as characters who signified freedom. Who signified what they wanted in their hearts? So that while playacting they could forget what was going on outside, all the horror of shelling and everything we went through.

The characters that the children thought signified freedom and which they dressed up as were butterflies lions, kings and princes. Because for them a lion was strength and they thought that with a lion's mask they could eat up those outside, who didn't let them go out, who scared their parents, who killed them. Those who dressed up as kings waved around their scepters so vehemently, probably to wipe out what was happening outside and to solve by a single stroke the situation and restore it to what it had been before the horror began

SNJEZANA HUFNAGEL
MUSIC PROFESSOR
"A FASHION SHOW OF PLASTER AND YEAST"

I experienced horrors in the will to survive. I often walked on a hill where shells were falling, where I would pick chicory, dandelions, and where I gathered wood, because there was no firewood, and that was how I came up with the idea that besides my will to survive, I had the will to do something pleasant, and to protect myself in that way. To protect my psychological and emotional stability. On the hill I found clay, and I mixed the clay with water, added some other ingredients, and made wonderful jewelry. On one occasion a Mr. Janez, director of Princip Seljo Society, saw my jewelry and liked it very much, and that gave him the idea of having the models in a fashion show wear my jewelry with old dresses that were taken out of storage. For this reason, the show was called Mothball '94, so that people would know that the dresses had been in storage for a long time, and still looked good on good-looking young women. And they were decorated with my jewelry. The fashion show was very cheerful, although a few shells fell in the neighborhood. The atmosphere was pleasant. The place was lit up; there were floodlights and torches.


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