Four Waters. I always wondered what actually connects those four sides. Is this crossroad a separation, or a meeting point? I would climb the highest branch of our apple tree and wonder at this mysterious crossing.
Sisterhood, 2018
Jelena Prljević
Storrs, CT, USA
“Four Waters” is an independent household located in the beautiful landscape of our village Ljubanje that my family, friends and I have been collectively transforming since the Summer of 2020 to become a meeting point and sanctuary for people gathered around the idea to celebrate hospitality, imagination, and further collaborations. In these past three years we have intensively worked on the transfer, restoration, and transformation of two abandoned family cottages where our grandmother Bosiljka was born and raised.
There is a house in the middle of the courtyard. It consists of two parts. The first part is made of stone and the other of wood. There is a basement and the first floor. Two doors, two windows, two rooms, and two smells. It is called the House on Four Waters even though it’s on the top of the rocky hill, and there is no river nearby.
The House on Four Waters: Introduction, 2014
Nataša and Jelena Prljević
Location: Ann Arbor, MI, USA / Novi Sad, Serbia
“Four Waters” stems from a long-distance collaborative art project “The House on Four Waters” envisioned in 2014 in collaboration with my sister and artist Nataša, focusing on the individual and collective ecologies of fear as they shape our memories, conflicts, and potential for repair and change.
Nataša wrote a short story as a response to the topic of play, inviting me to reflect upon it and respond in a way I find meaningful. We wrote a story about real and imagined sites of childhood memories centering around the abandoned house where we used to play as kids during the 90s. Our voices are weaved into one presenting the urge and inability to reconnect and create mutual memory. Here, the house functions as a metaphor for a shared experience that occupies a particular time and condition from our past, using a system of objects and perspectives to address the elusiveness of memory and imaginative sites of resistance. Bringing together individual and collective memories, we question notions of safety, freedom, and territory while celebrating radical imagination and the strength of children’s play. The multimedia installation “The House on Four Waters” and the hand-drawn animation “Sisterhood” are different ways we individually engaged with the story.
The House on Four Waters, 2015
Nataša Prljević
Detroit, MI, USA
“Four waters” is the term used in the traditional roofing system on the verge of extinction, known by its roof equally slanted on all four sides so each side carries the same amount of water and weight while having a fireplace in the middle of the room where the family would gather, share meals, stories, joys and hardships. The work we do as artists, educators and community members recognizes the need to sit with conflict in order to move forward collectively.
Land drawing, 2019
Miloš Prljević
Ljubanje, Serbia
Sketch, 2019
Joshua Nierodzinski, Nataša and Jelena Prljević
Ashford, CT, USA
In 2018, in Brooklyn, we formed an artist-run transnational platform HEKLER that fosters critical and experimental examination of hospitality and conflict, and opened a rented house floor, where we lived at the moment, to the community. We merge artistic, curatorial, pedagogical, publishing and organizing strategies centering liberatory potential of collaborative and collective work. For years we have been working independently, collaboratively and collectively with family, artists, educators, and activists across geographies.
Renovation and potential transformations of the physical spaces in the village started taking some formal framework in 2019 through long-distance conversations (Stockholm / New York) with the friend and architect Marina Ilić. I shared with Marina a sketch, Nataša, Joshua Nierodzinski and I made with the initial thoughts on spatial ideas, as well as the measurements sent by my father in Serbia. Two of us started a collaboration that involved design, 3D modeling, sketcking and rethinking of the ways the existing spaces are used in the village. Our meetings and experiences of collective work within HEKLER empowered the idea to build sustainable, independent and inclusive physical space outside of centers and encouraged the next step – to return to our village Ljubanje and to start the transformation process. Miloš Bojović joined this journey.
Image: Dandellion valley, Jelena Prljevic, Ljubanje
*Text excerpts: The House on Four Waters, 2014 Ann Arbor, MI, USA / Ljubanje, Serbia
During the building process, we used video, photography, sound and text, to create an archive which records the entire process of transformation, abandonment, disassembly, relocation and reassembly. This process indicates the unrevealing of the cross-generational traumatic knot, survival and reparation of the house as well as the community practicing feminist principles of action based on trust, collectivity, responsibility, and overcoming feelings of guilt and fear.
Jelena Prljević, Ljubanje, 2023.
*Text Excerpts: The House on Four Waters: Introduction, 2014, Nataša i Jelena Prljević, Ann Arbor, MI, USA / Ljubanje, Serbia