I AM AKIKO

The first few times I read this novel – a children’s book, I couldn’t get past page 22 without tears coming to my eyes. It’s indescribable when something so emotional touches childhood memories. Namely, all my works done as homework throughout my elementary education, since they stood out and were different from others, were somehow accepted with unhidden suspicion and silently attributed to talented parents. For other children, there was no doubt that my father, who was known to be a medical doctor and therefore supposedly omnipotent, drew, wrote, and did everything for me. 
On page twenty-two of the novel, the author Stefan Tićmi depicts how his main character, little Akiko, seemingly an ordinary girl, gives an unexpectedly imaginative response to the assigned winter drawing topic. While all the other children drew the usual snowman, Akiko colored circles in gray on her drawing paper. When it was time to review the works, the teacher delightedly praised each of those uniform drawings. When it was the girl’s turn, she placed her gray circles, which she had cut out, on the floor, tore the rest of the paper into small pieces, placed a chair beside them, climbed on it, and started showering the gray circles, which from above looked like hats on people’s heads, with the paper pieces like a snowstorm. Considering that the girl in the story didn’t go too well because of this, it brought me back to the early days of my schooling when I was in similar situations, feeling the burden of injustice from those who should have supported my creative uniqueness. Instead, their negative attitude and suspicion somehow encouraged odium against me.
While the children in the story behaved like real children and started blowing to spread the paper flakes around the classroom like the wind, the teacher, dissatisfied with Akiko’s answer that this is how she sees winter, gave her a failing grade. As I prepared and planned how to visually represent my experience of the story about this girl, I couldn’t shake the feeling that time passes, but the rigidity of the system remains the same, which is not good for education since the progress of a society is brought by the exceptional individuals, not the masses.

The thoughts of the little student, who walked heavily back to her seat, made me feel melancholic all the time while painting this mural. I felt like their echo resonated stronger and stronger in my head: “I sat down and thought, who is to blame for my melting differently on the inside.” My primary goal was to highlight the negative aspect of a system that does not allow different way of thinking from the prescribed one, and I did this by drawing the children who played the role of the wind dark, to the point that my mom, watching the real-time process photos on the internet, sent me a message asking why I painted the children black. The contrast between Akiko and other characters, in line with the message I wanted to convey, was supposed to be emphasized, so the light was solely on the girl, whom I depicted as a barefoot rebel in a surreal scene of overstepping the chair edge, like a scene from some distant unfulfilled dream. In the drawing, the girl’s hands were stylized in the way the system preparing her for life, represented by her teacher, wanted her to have.
The model for the mural was little Nika from Pančevo, the daughter of our famous set designer Mina Miladinović. I received incredible support for creating this mural from the Donji Dorćol Association, led by tireless Mina Ćirić.
I painted the mural under enormous amount pressure because at that time, my first book, related to the five-year anniversary of my creative street work, was supposed to be published according to the agreed deadline, with the promotion planned at the opening of a scheduled exhibition in the SKC, which greatly drained my energy for work.
It turned out that the printer was completely unprepared for this challenge, so I had to go to Novi Sad and later to Valjevo straight from the scaffold. When I returned to the twenty-meter-high scaffold the next day, the wind was strong, and it was raining. Despite everything, after almost ten days of round-the-clock work, the mural was finished, the book printed, and the exhibition held. Looking back, I would say that everything that has happened to me so far was according to the all-or-nothing principle, and I must admit that such a winning approach was greatly encouraged and strengthened by a black-and-white poem whose chorus “We will play and win” my father often repeated in difficult situations.