“Hedgehog’s Home – Inventing a Better World” travels to Zagreb

**Due to the great interest of the audience, the exhibition “Hedgehog’s Home – Inventing a Better World” will be extended until until September 19, 2026.**

The Serbian Cultural Society “Prosvjeta” and the Museum of Yugoslavia invite you to the opening of the exhibition “Hedgehog’s Home – Inventing a Better World” in Zagreb, at the Serbian Cultural Centre, 21 Preradovićeva Street, on 16 th July at 7 p.m. 

The exhibition that has won numerous awards and has been visited by more than 150,000 visitors, which was prepared with participation of children from Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo, as well as numerous experts from the entire region, is travelling for the first time this summer, and the destination is Zagreb!

Branko Ćopić’s poem “Hedgehog’s Home” has a special place in the childhood memories of numerous generations born in Yugoslavia. Even today, seven decades after its publication, this literary work represents a field of identification, a shared place of memory and a strong trigger for nostalgia. Starting from its iconic status in the collective memory and the turbulent history of reception of this poem and its writer, an exhibition was created that aims to initiate a dialogue about the common intangible cultural heritage and its potentials in order to rethink our identities today, and simultaneously raise questions about the importance of home, the relationship to the recent past, the communities we belong to, xenophobia, memory, nostalgia, mental health.

A quote from Ćopić’s interview inspired the title and the basic structure of the exhibition: Sometimes it seems to me that children’s literature is just an escape from reality, from conflict with reality. A person avoids the inhuman world by returning to his childhood, inventing a new world that is better and more human than the one that surrounds him. There is a clear dualism between the terrible and dark world of reality and the imagined better world, which the writer creates for himself and his readers, and for this reason the exhibition consists of two parts. The first part dedicated to “Hedgehog’s Home”, designed as a fiction, was realized in cooperation with children aged five to ten from Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo and students of scenography of the University of Belgrade. Based on their ideas and drawings, this part of the exhibition was further shaped through a dialogue with numerous collaborators. The result is an interactive space that is a ground for playing and activating the imagination, but also a framework for reflection and intergenerational meetings and exchanges. The second part of the exhibition deals with the life of Branko Ćopić and has mainly a documentary character. Although clearly delineated physically, this boundary is not strict in the exhibition. The world of fiction is intertwined with elements of reality, and the writer’s room, in addition to documentary material, also represents a restored place of creativity, i.e. the place where Ćopić’s works, the imagined better world, were created.

In addition to the Collection of the Museum of Yugoslavia, most of the items were borrowed from the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Branko Ćopić Endowment, and the exhibition also provides an insight into the rich archive of interviews with numerous people of different sensibilities, orientations, and generations, which were recorded while this project was being prepared.

The authors of the exhibition are the curators of the Museum of Yugoslavia: Sara Sopić and Mirjana Slavković. The design and implementation of the exhibition was carried out by: Siniša Ilić (artist), Ana Dimitrijević and Aleksandar Popović (art collective Karkatag), Bojan Palikuća (sound designer), Nikola Krizanac (graphic designer) and Dušan Jevtić (project coordinator).

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This programme is implemented with the financial support of the Government Office for Human Rights and Rights of National Minorities. The content of this programme is the sole responsibility of the Serbian Cultural Society “Prosvjeta” and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the views of the Government Office for Human Rights and Rights of National Minorities.