Kaća Bradonjić from Sarajevo currently lives and works in Massachusetts, USA. She is engaged in researching the nature of space and time in the context of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Bradonjić is currently the guest lecturer of physics at the Wellesley College and a member of the Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA. She graduated from Boston University.
Bradonjić said that war and her refugee experience influenced her decision to deal with this precise area. As she points out, with the outbreak of war in B&H, when she was still a child, she realized that nothing in life is permanent nor secure and that war breaks someone’s life into three periods – before the war, during the war and after the war.
Moreover, Bradonjić also said that war affects the space. What used to be the road you took to carelessly go to the bakery in the neighborhood becomes very distant when it is a part of no man’s land. Thus, politics and force determine physical and practical distance between places. Exile is just like that. Bradonjić left Sarajevo in that spring when the war broke out, before Sarajevo became a black hole of suffering.
As Kaća said, she did not return to Sarajevo until she was 24 years old, but she kept the model of the city inside her head. “I knew by heart some parts of the city, how to get home from the school or from Cathedral to the Eternal Flame. I passed those roads frequently inside of my head, somehow preparing myself for coming back home,” Kaća recalled.
One of the ways to deal with that unexpected fragmentation of time was to turn to philosophers and something a lot more fundamental. In the end, she found herself in physics and the theory of relativity.
“That is the science of space and time completely expressed in mathematic equations. I can write them manually, manipulate them by rearranging symbols which represent different time parts. In those moments, when I have the pen in my hand, with my imagination and with knowledge about physics, mathematics and philosophy gathered for thousands of years and gathered in papers and books scattered over my desk, I finally transcend the warped geometry of conflict and get to understand my place in the time in the universe led by principles which are way out of the reach of politicians, militaries or weapons. That’s when I finally find peace and feel like home,” Bradonjić said.
(Source: akta.ba)
