DISPLACEMENT Planinska 7
Petra Slobodnjak
For 15 years I lived in a rented apartment in Pešča, a neighborhood in Zagreb. After buying my own place I left a building which became very precious to me. I moved in as a freshman student and over time I became part of a new community, perhaps even a new family. What began as common human interaction to ease the feeling of isolation, since I’ve been working from home for some years now, became a long-term process of befriending individuals of various lifestyles, religious beliefs and political ideologies. My story of living in the building is an eclectic collage of spontaneous events, interiors and idiosyncratic individuals between which developed an unexpected closeness. These photographs and texts are a tiny segment of a grander, intimate production of communal living that included laughter, tears, exhaustion, forgiveness, trust, support, embracing differences, creating a feeling of home and lessons needed (and learned) for personal growth. They are an attempt to portray all the wonderful, living color of Planinska 7.
Petra Slobodnjak is an artist from Croatia who graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, studying graphic product design, in Zagreb in 2012. Since 2014, Petra has been working as a freelance graphic designer and photographer. She is a Croatian Freelance Artist Association member and has exhibited her work regularly since 2008. For work DISPLACEMENT Planinska 7, she received the Ivan Kožarić award for the best young artist, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the City of Zagreb (in 2022) and award for the Best Young Artist in 2022 awarded by the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts. The mentioned work is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art collection in Zagreb. Her artistic work intertwined with her personal life, examining the boundaries between these two aspects. She explores the dynamics of society in her works, emphasizing personal responsibility in shaping the environment. Through artistic expression, she fosters awareness of an individual’s impact on broader societal changes, encouraging reflection on one’s actions and relationship to the surroundings. She is currently based in Zagreb.