Upon returning from America to Serbia, I felt Vinča calling me to study her, feel her, live her, and translate her into fresh colors.
Through my veins flows the deep awareness that the Vinčans chose to leave visible history the moment civilization turned toward conquest and destruction – toward power, form, and shallow surface. Knowing their way of life could not survive the new paradigm, they withdrew. They buried, scattered, and silenced their knowledge to await different time.
That time is now.
As the world once again asks “how do we continue”, Vičha rises again within me, and within anyone ready to allow her not to dominate, but to offer a path toward healing.
For the Vinčans, past, present, and future were not separate, they were layered. Time did not “pass,” it returned. And in Vinča’s silence, I hear the pulse of now.
My life continues with Vinča. I exist in those people, as they live within me. Through my poetics, I do not recall a forgotten civilization – I extend an invitation to recognize it as a living guide. A timeless archetype reminding us not to live linearly, endlessly seeking more, but to feel our own cycles, to synchronize with natural harmony, to restore the power of community and live within the flow of humanness.
Where Silence Speaks the Pulse of Life
My diptych exhibited at History Miami Museum, September – November 2025
My diptych “Where Silence Speaks the Pulse of Life” is a visual bridge between Vinča and a world seeking restoration. These are not landscapes – they are energetic maps: renderings of a spiritual ecology that flowed through me to reawaken the essential values of Vinča as guidance for a new civilizational paradigm.
Painting 1: Inner River
(Left side of diptych, acrylics on stretched canvas, 50x40cm)
This work embodies my deepest connection to Vinča through the inner currents of being. Layers of green and organic movement represent the spiritual rivers flowing beneath consciousness – instinct, intuition, sensitivity, and ancestral knowledge that does not speak in words. This visual stream dialogues with the rhythms of earth, water, and breath.
Painting 2: Sacred Memory
(Right side of diptych, acrylics on stretched canvas, 50x40cm)
This panel evokes the archetype of the Vinčan woman living within me, sending a call to remember the circle from which we all emerged. To awaken the memory we carry in our bones, in water, in veins. To listen to the silence from which wisdom arises. To honor nature’s rhythm and celebrate the sacredness of existence through conscious presence.
Vinča as the First Example of Civilized and Applied Intelligence
The Vinča Civilization, which thrived between 5700 and 4500 BCE in the area of present-day Serbia and the broader Balkans, is increasingly recognized by archaeologists and contemporary scholars as one of the earliest high cultures of the Old World. Its significance lies not only in its antiquity but in its highly developed aspects of everyday life, spirituality, and social organization—testimonies of a remarkably applied intelligence.
Vinča featured the first known urban planning system in Europe. Its settlements were not chaotic clusters but were carefully designed in concentric circles, with central spaces designated for communal rituals, communication, and shared labor. Dwellings were aligned with solstitial and lunar orientations, built from natural materials (wood, clay, grass), and featured defined rooms, hearths, and ventilation systems.
The inhabitants developed sophisticated technology: tools made of stone, bone, and wood, but also early use of metal alloys (copper), positioning Vinča as the oldest known metallurgical culture in Europe. These tools combined organic and processed materials with a precision that reflects deep understanding of function, durability, and natural resources. Vinča’s people practiced domestication of animals, systematic agriculture, and developed a complex agro-fishing regime that supported long-term, stable settlement.
A particularly important element is the so-called Vinča Script—series of inscribed symbols found on ceramic tablets, vessels, and figurines, which many scholars recognize as the world’s oldest form of written communication, predating both Sumerian and Egyptian scripts. These symbols suggest the presence of a linguistic system or, at the very least, a codified thought model.
Vinča presents us with a picture of an intelligent, ecologically balanced, and spiritually rich society, whose achievements were not coincidental, but systemic, deliberate, and consciously applied.
The Civilizational Reach of Vinča: A Functional and Spiritual Symbiosis
Vinča should be understood not only as a spiritual or symbolic force but also as a pragmatic, technologically advanced, and socially cohesive culture. Despite its Neolithic context, it transcends the stereotype of a “primitive society,” offering standards that later civilizations would only gradually attain.
Vinča does not awe with monuments, but with its mature coexistence with nature. In a time when the world struggles to regenerate, Vinča reminds us that sustainability is not only a goal of the future – but exists in our deep memory.
Its society nurtured balance between feminine and masculine principles. The Vinčan woman was not a symbol of power but of rhythm – a guardian of cycles, connected with the moon, fertility, silence, and the inner sanctuary. The Vinčan man did not represent dominance, but structure and presence – providing, building, and maintaining the community’s outer structures. Community was not organized through authority, but through mutual presence. Family was not a hierarchical pyramid, but a circular system of care, learning, and trust. Children were raised within the rhythm of the collective, guided by ancestral wisdom and daily rituals, not external authority.
In a contemporary world where spirit and body are perceived as separate, Vinča offers a rare glimpse into a civilization that wove the sacred into the everyday. Art was not a luxury – it was an expression of everyday awareness.
Vinča figurines are portals, not statues. Over 2,000 figurines have been found – no two alike – suggesting they were not used for mass worship, but for intimate, personal connection with life forces. The figure was not decoration, it was a vessel of thought, a talisman, a mirror of collective memory.
Vinča, then, is not just an archaeological site – it is a spiritual matrix of a harmonious world. A cultural memory of balance between humans and nature, woman and man, spirit and form. Its time was suppressed – but now, Vinča returns to remind us of what the world has forgotten. Serbia, as the geographic heir of Vinča, bears a responsibility to reintroduce this lost-but-not-forgotten knowledge to the world.
Serbia: Cradle of Ancient Harmony in the Heart of the Modern World
The Vinča principle lives on in the Serbian woman. Throughout history, women in Serbia have been the invisible heroines of existence – keepers of home, family, and dignity. In times of war and poverty, they outwitted violence with silence. Carriers of tradition, they preserved stories, songs, customs. They raised generations with resilience and empathy, choosing non-violence as survival strategy, shielding life through diplomatic gentleness.
Vinča does not teach us to become something else – but to remember who we are. Its deities are not in the heavens nor enshrined in temples – they are present within us, in everyday rhythms, in cycles of the natural world.
Though ancient, Vinča is not primitive. It represents a mature way of living in alignment with self, nature, and community. By contrast, today’s technologically advanced world seeks new models of development (sustainable, just, spiritually literate), while facing inner desolation, spiritual confusion, and collective exhaustion. In an era of noise and fragmentation, where the human body is treated as a “tool” or “object of appearance,” and the soul is sought outside the self, the Vinčans recognized and transmitted spiritual dimensions through the body itself, its breath, rhythm, connection to celestial and earthly cycles.
In Vinča’s feminine wisdom, the body was understood as a map of time. Long before astrology, esotericism, or modern science, Vinčans saw in the woman’s body the cosmic measure of time – its menstrual cycle mirroring the moon. Work, planting, harvesting, rest were all structured around these cycles, honoring transformation through pregnancy, birth, and menopause. In the woman’s body, they honored not just life, but the universe itself.
Art was not a symbol of power, nor was it ornamental. It was a way of reading the world. Vinča figures do not glorify the “beautified” body. They portray presence, energy, fertility, reverence, and the wisdom of being.
Today, that energy re-emerges in a new form: the woman as architect of the future, not through dominance, but through presence, intuition, and connection. The Vinčan woman is not a myth, she is an archetype. And the contemporary woman artist is her living heir.
If Vinča is a teacher of the future, then perhaps the future has already existed.
And so today, exhibited here in an American museum, Serbia is not speaking of the past. It is bringing forward archetypal knowledge that belongs to the future.
Vinča does not ask us to reject technology, but to learn how to use it in service of nature. It does not ask us to abandon cities, but to rewild them. It does not call us to become “like them”, but to remember what is already within us.
Healing begins when we remember how to live in cycles – not in consumption, but in connection. Not in domination, but in rhythm, community, and care.
Vinča is not the past. Vinča is a possibility. A future. A direction toward a more meaningful, humane, and harmonious world.
What ancient memory still lives within you? I would love to hear how this story resonates — feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
With love,
Aleksandra Ilić Bjelica — BelA
Artist Statement
The core of my work lies in the exploration of human essence – the inner beauty we are all born with and naturally seek to live fully. Art is the language I use to touch the soul, mine and others’. It is the field through which I communicate with beings within myself and with the beings that live in others.
My mission is to help people live their truth with clarity, through artistic creation and shared practice. As an intuitive, large-scale painter and an entrepreneur in the field of art, I aim to strengthen my name as a brand and to grow my international credibility as an art investment advisor.
Through my work, I create spaces that invite people to slow down, to feel, and to remember. Art is not a product for me – it is a mirror, a portal, and a pulse of presence.
BIO
Master of Organizational Sciences with over 20 years of business experience across three continents. At her core — an entrepreneur and artist with an international portfolio.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries and art centers in New York, Illinois, Michigan, Serbia, and Croatia. Her paintings live in homes across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, as bridges of friendship, which she considers her most meaningful professional success.
By connecting people from diverse industries and professions around the world into purposeful partnerships, she laid the foundation for her art-driven entrepreneurial journey, one she has been cultivating for over a decade.
As a consultant, she has contributed to positioning U.S. cultural institutions on both local and global stages. Within the global G100 initiative, she was appointed Country Chair for Serbia in the field of Artistic Leadership. Today, her mission is centered on “Dimension in the World” – the international positioning of Serbian sculptors and painters by building strong bridges between art, business, and society.