Sofia Bogdanovic

I am from Belgrade, former Yugoslavia. It was always and still is in Serbia. My Mother was an information scientist and she knew. She knew she needed to leave the country with all of us before the proverbial sh*t hit the fan. Not very many people in the general populace knew or could have guessed, as it was a beautiful and prosperous place to live, with rich, ancient ancestral culture, and not affiliated with either of the Eastern or Western block during the cold war. Ask anyone who travelled there, before the war. My Mom worked for much of her life towards the goal of moving the family to a Western country. When we left, and moved to Washington DC I was a teenager and was happy about it. I looked at it as a new beginning. That’s because I was a weird kid, sensitive, shy and bullied at school. When the war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1990, I was no longer there and it just didn’t sound real, even with friends reporting it to me. The life story then goes on, through many twists and turns, and I landed in Boulder Colorado, in 1999. When the bombs started falling on Serbia in the spring of that year, and as they continued dropping continuously for seventy seven days and nights, destroying the infrastructure, and killing many innocents, that’s when it/they really, really hit me. You will never know what this is like unless you have some comparable experiences, and I will never know what it’s like for people who are in these war zones themselves, unless the war zone comes to where I am. I had vivid dreams of being there, experiencing death. I guess I freaked out, went on a new-agey spiritual “high” (Boulder was the perfect place for that), trying to send as much positive energy, love and light to the situation. It triggered a whole lot of things that I won’t get into here. However, from then on, my visual art has assumed very visionary and light bearing qualities, and has been my tool for healing, for personal transformation, and to aid in global transformation. Seeing how we are all connected, and co-creating the world we live in, is something I have no choice in, it’s abundantly apparent.