Opel Kadett B, 2013, installation
In 1975 after coming back from Italy, we moved to France, precisely to Thonon les Bains, invited by my father’s friend and potential maecenas Kop, originally from Zagreb.
After a short stay and a conflict with the ‘maecenas’ we escaped towards the suburbs of Paris, in the town of Ste Genevieve des Bois.
My uncle Izidor, who lived in Sweden at that time, organized Jehovah’s Witnesses from the area to visit us. We began to study the Bible with them and shortly we are joining them. Religious books were piling up…..
In 1977 after we moved again, this time to the very center of Paris, we decided to go back where we came from, to Rovinjsko Selo. In the overloaded Opel Kadett who had to transport all the goodies collected through all those years plus four children, there was no extra room for books.
The books were very important for us and I came up with a ‘genious’ sollution to put books in the only remaining empty space that was under the backseat where all the kids were sitting. It was the space where the springs of the seat should bend… I overloaded it with so many books that we were touching the car roof with our heads.
My father didn’t know about that ‘cargo’…
I remember the night scenery on the border with Yugoslavia, when the customs official was insisting just on books that were also on other places in the car… He said: You cannot do it like this, where is the list? What is the content?
Luckily they didn’t search the car, if they did they would found about thirty books with problematic content…
Opel Kadett B was done for the Smuggling Anthologies project at MMSU, Rijeka
https://smugglinganthologies.wordpress.com/
