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Gordana Čavić was said to be as beautiful as her own creation.
She died in Paris, in 1987, under strange circumstances.
She was 48 years old.
She left her home in Kúcanci, Slavonia, in former Yugoslavia and present-day Croatia, one autumn morning, in silence, so as not to explain herself to her first husband, Perica Kadić, a farmer.
She had promised herself that she would never live like her mother, whom the neighbors felt sorry for because her husband had run off with another woman.
The young woman took a train to Belgrade, where she lived for a while before achieving her dream of settling near the Seine.
Her short but intense life was spent surrounded by mystery, sheltered under multiple identities.
Of rumors that point to espionage and prostitution plots.
"Doing what she did, it's surprising that it lasted so long,"
his own mother sentenced the day of his burial in his homeland.
“They sealed his coffin with lead and they sealed it well.
If it hadn't been like that, it would have spread."
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Gordana poses in profile.
Dressed in a fine and flowing dress, she carefully grasps a red rose while she seems to caress the stuffed head of a bear whose huge mouth opens before the viewer.
“I'm not sure if he wanted to be scary or screaming in terror himself,” observes photographer Dragana Jurišić (Slavonski Brod, Croatia).
It was one of the first images that the artist saw of her aunt;
along with a few other crumpled photographs, she had been kept in a box of chocolates.
Together with a super 8 camera, they were one of the few belongings that the family of the enigmatic and glamorous relative they preferred not to talk about kept.
Gordana's portraits structure
Her Own
From her,
the latest of Jurišić's publications, whose red, velvety cover resembles a candy box, while the interior reminds us of detective novels from the sixties.
He composes a story where the text and the image complement each other seamlessly so that, in a way that is as devoid of artifice as it is full of poetry, it goes through a kind of fictional biography, in whose rich nuances beats the history of a land severely punished by the barbarism of war.
A powerful narrative that intertwines the history of women from different eras, whose stories were silenced for different reasons, as well as that of the author herself, to compose a complex and perceptive mosaic of feminine identities that, in search of their freedom, are so real as imagined.
"To all those with heavy wings who wanted to fly",
Image belonging to the book 'Her Own', by Dragana Jurišić.
Self-published (2022).Dragana Jurišić
Thus, the tragic figure of
L'Inconnue
del Seine finds a place in this narrative.
An unknown young woman whose body was found in the Parision River at the end of the 19th century.
The serene beauty that emanated from her death mask —carried out for ease of identification— would serve as an object of inspiration for Man Ray, Albert Camus, Anaïs Nin and Rainer Maria Rilke, among the many other artists “who projected imagined identities on this Mona Lisa drowned”, emphasizes Jurišić.
“His image of her speaks to a deep relationship between beauty and artistic endeavor.
Between the 'cult of beauty' and the notion of truth”.
Both Gordana and
L'Inconnue
fed the fantasies of others.
As did Léona Camille Ghislaine Delacourt, the protagonist of
Nadja,
the famous novel by André Breton.
“A young woman in the middle of a psychotic crisis, her me disintegrating, like the sun exploding in slow motion.
For a surrealist, Léona was a perfect guide into the unknown”, writes the photographer.
After writing the novel, where the great issues of the surrealist movement were synthesized, the author abandoned his muse.
"Sex with Nadja," said Breton, was "like making love to Joan of Arc."
The young woman was admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she spent years confined until her death.
The father of surrealism never visited her.
“Gordana Čavić, a dead woman, unable to speak for herself.
Am I different from Breton, a writer who built a platform for himself by sacrificing a soul from limbo?
She herself makes use of her own experiences, to express the pain, the stoic resilience, the survival instinct and, above all, the yearning for freedom that surrounds the different women that populate the work, in an attempt to make them muses erased from history recover the flight of their memory.
Her Own
.
Dragana Jurisic.
Self-published.
117 pages 50 euros.
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