Bosko Providzalo is not only the first artist to travel with the ARTMARATHON: He is also one of its three founders, and it was his philosophy that started the journey.

Since emigrating from Trebinje, Bosnia in 1991, he has mostly been living in Lucerne, Switzerland. Despite being barely 30 years old, he can already look back on an impressive quantity of works, and has developed a very distinctive technique and style of his own.

Due to the young age at which he arrived in Switzerland with its different mentality and unfamiliar way of life, it was the pain of suddenly being a stranger and the loss of his familiar environment that became the central experiences of his formative years. But soon, his troubles mixed with the hopeful realisation that his emigration had also allowed him to take a step through the mirror, into another form of existence: The existence of a modern nomad.

Despite being careful not to lose his roots in the Bosnian mentality and landscape, he soon became a citizen of the world, at home without a home in the metropoles and villages of the planet, devoted entirely to his creative work. Not being attached to any one society allowed him to look beyond society, to stand above it, to observe it honestly, and to see its flaws.

No matter to which countries and places life brought him, Bosko inevitably encountered - without even actively seeking them out - people like himself: Nomads, people on the way from some place to another, people who lived, and still live, completely outside of society and independently of its structures. From this outsider perspective, he gained the recognition that most people who live within society have become caught up in a mental half-world of consumerism and trivial non-issues, too blinded to see the real problems we should be facing.

The core of his philosophy and his artistic message is this nomadism, or more precisely: The belief that, in the 21st century, there will be more and more such nomads, as the systems which carried humanity through the second half of the 20th century cease to work. He believes the quality of life and security we currently enjoy are little more than an illusion that could collapse very quickly, and that the destruction of the environment, power politics and economic unstability will force more and more people to become refugees, always travelling, always on the run - that life within society as we know it will no longer be possible. Thus, they will be forced into their own form of nomadism.

In his art, Bosko reflects the superficiality of modern society, and the sheer impossibility of escaping from it - how society tries to force its trivial ways on the individual. In his own existance as a nomad, he lives out his own message and tries to find new ways to live: Peacefully alongside with society, but not within it.

The nomadism of Bosko Providzalo is a prophecy, and a warning: Modern nomads are everywhere - and nowhere.