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By Alice Waugh Students everywhere endure stress trying to get into college and then keeping up with the workload once they’re there. But one SCAD student has experienced more stress in his life than most of his peers — the kind caused by bombs going off near his house, moving between different countries and learning new languages on the fly. Now he’s planning to combine those experiences with his artistic training to be an advocate for world peace. Urosh “Ollie” Perishic is a native of Belgrade, Serbia, and was in high school there when the popular resistance to dictator Slobodan Milosevic began. He took part in street demonstrations and saw first-hand the effects of war. After also living in Libya, Malta and Tunisia, he arrived in the United States in 1999 as a high-school exchange student. “I kind of escaped because I didn’t want to get drafted,” said Perishic. During high school, he and many of his friends and neighbors were participating in the movement he translated as “revolt with sound” — taking to the streets all day, every day, banging pots and drums, “making as much noise as we can, just to show we’re not going to sit around quietly,” he said. “When you’re oppressed, you have to fight for what you believe in.” Savannah is just the latest stop for the well-traveled Perishic. His family moved from Serbia (then part of the former Yugoslavia) to Libya when he was 4 and stayed for several years because of his father’s job. Perishic, an only child, attended an American school and learned both English and Arabic. The family fled to Tunisia for several months to escape the United Nations bombing in the late 1980s, so Perishic added French to his growing repertoire of languages. He also lived for more than a year in Malta, where he picked up a smattering of Maltese — “the weirdest language in the world,” he said with a laugh, describing it as a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic and English. The family returned to Belgrade just as Perishic started high school and began to contemplate his future. “I always expected to go to a technical school,” he said, noting that his father is a mechanical engineer and his grandfather an architect (his mother is a professor of English). “I’ve always made art, but I never thought of it as my [future] profession. I love to draw and paint. When I first came here, I had an eastern European style,” he said, noting his native country’s tradition of socialist art and constructivism. “It’s still very popular back home — it’s how people visually communicate.” While he was living in rural Mississippi as an exchange student during his senior year in high school, Perishic visited SCAD and was smitten; this was the only college he applied to. Now he’s a senior double-majoring in graphic design and broadcast design and motion graphics, and he’s thoroughly enjoying SCAD. “I’ve had wonderful friends, both international and from the States,” he said. He lived in Oglethorpe House earlier in his college career, but now shares an off-campus apartment with roommates from Lesotho and Bahrain. “Overall, SCAD has been a really good experience with great professors,” he said. Even as he winds up his studies, Perishic has also been collaborating with his roommates on starting a nonprofit organization called Revolt Against War. Though it’s still in the early planning stages, he hopes to recruit artists from various fields and produce an exhibition and possibly a book, with proceeds going toward advertising and other forms of communication to raise public awareness of and resistance to war. “To anyone who hasn’t experienced war, you’re the happiest person alive,” he said quietly. “Especially warfare as it is today — brutal and cowardly. There are no codes of war anymore. There’s nothing — just profit. War comes from greed, and greed comes from power; the more you want, the more you realize you don’t have.” Perishic’s feelings about war may have something to do with his love of fencing — an athletic, highly structured, but harmless, form of personal combat. “Fencing has rules,” he noted. Spreading the word about war is important in a climate where “the death of one person is tragic, but the death of a million is just a statistic,” Perishic said. “The American public doesn’t understand [what war is], except the people who’ve been to Vietnam or Iraq, but even then it’s not the same, because it’s war on somebody else’s soil, not war around the corner.” Perishic is also bemused by the American two-party system in a country of almost 300 million people. “In Serbia, there are 36 [political] parties in a country the size of Georgia,” he said. “It makes you be involved. You don’t know who to vote for unless you’ve been following things. “I’ve been involved in politics since early childhood,” he added. “When people are under a dictator, all conversations are political. It’s deep in my veins and I can’t do anything about it.” After he graduates, Perishic hopes to get a graphic or broadcast design job in a city like Chicago or New York for at least a year, but he plans to return to Serbia someday. “Too many bright minds have left,” he said. “I believe there’s a great future there. It’s a beautiful country with lots of history.” Waugh is executive editor in the college’s editorial department. |
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