“It was not a traditional wedding, it was more like a party!” said Marina Pejovic, who married Vuk Stojkovic in front of 200 people in a Belgrade restaurant in 2017. (The groom wore pink.) “When my husband and I decided to get married, I didn’t care about anything except that Nenad would make the wedding rings.”
Ms. Pejovic, now 38 and a senior curator at the National Museum of Serbia, had followed the local jeweler Nenad Stojakovic on Facebook for years. “I wanted something unique that would really tell our story as a couple,” she said, adding that she “absolutely” wanted filigree.
They met Mr. Stojakovic to discuss the bands’ design. “We told him that when we were dating, my husband wrote a silly story about the two of us and I was an owl and he was a blackbird,” Ms. Pejovic said.
Five months and several consultations later, the rings were ready: a wide silver band with a filigree owl motif and a yellow sapphire for Ms. Pejovic; a plainer band of silver inlaid with a filigree blackbird for her future husband. “We love them,” she said, noting that four years later her sister commissioned her own wedding bands from Mr. Stojakovic.
“I love to sit with a customer and brainstorm the ideas,” Mr. Stojakovic, 39, said during an interview at his studio in the Vracar area of Belgrade. With tweezers and his bare hands, he was shaping silver wire into filigree motifs. Later, he would arrange them in a pattern within silver frames, which would become earrings, he said, “in about three days time.”
“Some people don’t have the patience,” he said. “You don’t see the result immediately. I love filigree because it is quiet and very meditative, not like silversmithing where you have to hammer. Filigree is just you, bending some small piece of wire. It’s laborious, but it’s peaceful.”
His collection of silver filigree earrings and pendants (which start at 300 euros, or about $310) is called Solaris, after a fictional planet in the 1972 Russian science-fiction film of the same name. In the movie, the planet’s liquid surface constantly swirls and changes — the effect that Mr. Stojakovic seeks in his design. “It’s always moving, it’s always in flux. I don’t intervene much,” he said as he twisted metal into a spiral. “It’s like a natural flow.”
Mr. Stojakovic sells some of his pieces — particularly the inexpensive kinetic jewelry made of brass, copper and stainless steel produced under his Studio Manufactura brand name — in galleries and art shops around Belgrade. But most of his filigree is sold from his studio and many are custom orders.
“Filigree is a combination of threads and beads,” he explained. “It’s from the Latin for filus, thread, and granus, grain or little ball.” He popped a small rectangle of pure silver onto a charcoal briquette and heated the silver with a blowtorch for a few seconds until it transformed — with a leap — into three irregularly shaped beads. The number of beads produced depends on the amount of silver, he said.
Mr. Stojakovic also makes his own filigree wire, an arduous process that he said requires two days, even though he makes just what he needs for coming projects. And a small amount of silver goes a long way, he said, with 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces, of silver making about 70 meters, or 230 feet, of wire.
The basic technique is an ancient one: The earliest dated pieces of filigree, from Mesopotamia, are from 3,000 B.C. and other examples have been found at archaeological sites across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.
But Mr. Stojakovic has been trying to evolve a modern style of filigree. He pointed to a finished earring full of tight spirals, saying: “This is not traditional filigree. I use much more wire, it’s denser and you can see the layers and the movement. It’s just different.”
In 2023, he represented Serbia in “Contemporary Filigree Jewellery,” a book featuring 37 filigree artists from 22 countries that was curated by Filipa Oliveira, a Portuguese jeweler, author and filigree teacher, and published with funding from the Scottish Goldsmiths Trust and the Goldsmiths’ Centre, in London.
“Nenad’s wearable art pieces ‘stood out from the crowd,’” Ms. Oliveira wrote in an email. “What makes his jewelry contemporary is the contrast between beautiful fine filigree wire threads and bold shapes which result in sculptural designs. The use of oxidized finishes is also an element of his work not commonly associated with traditional filigree.”
Mr. Stojakovic was born in a working-class neighborhood in Belgrade. In the Balkans, filigree skills traditionally were passed from father to son, but Mr. Stojakovic’s father was an electrician. And while he was interested in jewelry making and sculpture, he planned to become a scientist.
In 2006, after two years of study at the University of Belgrade’s department of molecular biology and genetics, he dropped out because his family was having financial problems, and eventually got a job in the jewelry store on an American cruise ship. Wherever it docked, he met dealers selling local gemstones, “emeralds from Colombia, opals from Australia,” he said. “This was my entry into the jewelry industry.”
On the strength of some tin sculptures he had made as a teenager, Mr. Stojakovic won a scholarship in 2009 to study jewelry design at the Accademia Riaci, an arts and design school in Florence, Italy. When he returned to Belgrade the following year, he established Studio Manufactura, but his work took a new direction after he attended an intensive four-day filigree workshop in Belgrade taught by Biljana Klekachkoska — known as Bibi — a distinguished and unconventional filigree maker from North Macedonia.
Ms. Klekachkoska, 51, learned filigree herself in 1997 when five craftsmen at a jewelry collective in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, agreed to teach her. “Because nobody was interested any more, the craftsmen were happy to show me,” she said during a telephone interview from Germany, where she now lives. She began teaching in 2005, and had Mr. Stojakovic as a student 10 years later. “Nenad is super-talented,” she said, “so he was able to learn filigree very quickly and it is a joy when you can share knowledge with people.”
They have stayed in touch ever since. And Ms. Klekachkoska said she particularly admires “his sculptural approach and Brutalist architecture influences and how he is exploring and mixing techniques.”
“Bibi was my first mentor,” Mr. Stojakovic said, “and straight away, I loved filigree. It wasn’t difficult for me and once I had the skill, I practiced and practiced.”
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