Installation of the monument – Bruce Lee

(Mostar)
November 26, 2005

The author of the Bruce Lee monument is Ivan Fiolić from Zagreb. The Bruce Lee monument is made in collaboration with the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art.

About the Bruce Lee Monument

“In July 2003, during a public presentation, NGO Urban Movement Mostar came forward with an initiative to build up a monument to Bruce Lee in the city of Mostar.

The Bruce Lee-monument initiative represents an attempt to regain the meaning of the public spaces and at the same time to question the significance of monuments and symbols, both the old and the new ones. By mixing up a «high» stylistic registry (monuments, grandeur, bronze) and a «low» one (mass-culture, kung fu, heroes of our childhood), a short circuit of reception is produced: the «high» stylistic registry is being deconstructed and the overwhelming mythomania is being ironized (Who are our heroes? To whom and why do we build monuments?), but in the same time the «low» registry is being reevaluated, for its power to evoke little ordinary things of everyday life, that do not have anything to do with politics and ideologies, and that bring people and nations together, instead of separating them (everybody is fond of Bruce Lee: Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, left and right political options…). The value of Bruce Lee’s figure rests in its universal character and in its concreteness, capable of provoking concrete emotions, first of all a sense of necessity to fight for justice. Therefore, in Mostar it is not the actor or the character played by him that the monument is being built to, but it is the very idea of justice, represented in a plastic and universally acceptable way, that is also able to awake some positive vibrations through the figure of the famous kung-fu hero we have loved so much during our childhood.” (Nino Raspudić, Urban Movement Mostar)