My Heart Won't Let Me Sleep / Srdce Neda Spavat (2021)
My Heart Won’t Let Me Sleep looks at the private life and thoughts of Croatia’s best known writer Ivana Brlić Mažuranić (1874 - 1938). The work combines contemporary portraits of women living in Slavonski Brod (town where the writer spent most of her life) with little known images from her family albums and writer’s personal correspondence. At fourteen, she wrote in her diary: “For now, you should know, my plan is to become something.” A high order for the woman born in the nineteen century, living in a provincial town, married off at eighteenth. She did it. Four times nominated for Nobel, mother to seven children and a symbol of a good Croatian woman according to the rules of patriarchy - Ivana paid a high price for trying to be great at it all. Relentless fight between the desire to be a perfect wife and a mother and her desire to create, resulted in a long term depression and eventual suicide.
Work done in collaboration with Otvoreni likovni pogon with support of Ministry of Culture and City of Slavonski Brod.
“Through the clumsy handwriting, through the spelling mistakes, they came out broken, distorted, but nothing could stop them anymore! I neither heard nor saw anything, the hand followed an irresistible force, the letters seemed in a hurry, coming out somewhat stretched and self-possessed, as if the water carried them… […] I cared not about the outside world as my excited soul, tasted for the first time, the purest delight that life is able to provide.”
“You enjoy your semi-life. Vegetate and be content! I am not giving up. I will not give up. I want to live. I want to make. Not make with a cooking spoon or a needle because I have no interest in that. I want to do something useful. I want to escape that sad life.” (Ivana Brlić Mažuranić as a teenager)
"Today I swam for the first time. I do not care about the new swimsuit being late. Summer would pass waiting for it. The water is divine! You swim like you don't swim; it’s like you are being cradled.”
"I want to, and have to stay at home, because I lived from my 18th year to 64th for it, for my children, for my husband, for the idea of a family, just like any other honest woman. My literature, that favourite pastime of mine, was done secretly, away from the others, taking one hundredth of my time. I believed so much in the complete duty of a woman to dedicate herself to the last to her home!”
"My illness began to totally destroy me at the moment when I felt that no one needed me anymore. Through fifty years I have learned to always live for somebody else, mostly for many of them. - I can't cope - I can't take root - I've been wandering for the last few years! "[…] - I have no external or internal will to recover."
“I saw the world too soon; the others see it too, but do not understand it. God gave me this terrible ability of reason too soon: I saw and could not un-see it. "
“Your true being stands in relation to what you call your material self in a way in which a great plain full of light would stand in relation to a glass cup upturned in the middle of it. The light breaks in the glass and causes (in conjunction with your body) flaws, pains, pleasures. The inside of the glass, the light that is in it, stands in alliance with the light of the whole plain. That interior is what you feel is your soul - but your true being is all that vast plain in which you stand and all the phenomena and all the lights and all the warmth and all the sounds that fill it. And just as simply, as when you turn up the glass cup, the light that was in it melts with the light of the whole plain, with same simplicity, death merges your soul with your true being.”
