Text by Jasmina Tešanović
Photos by Bruce Sterling

Stefan Sagmeister

In Belgrade... he came and left, but not altogether... For days now, in this half-abandoned summery Belgrade, mysterious billboards are puzzling our citizens. Zen Buddhistic minimalist statements, or street-art, or New York ads, or something completely new to us...

Not like Belgrade's normal ads, loudly promoting cigarettes, drinks, cars, and open sexism...

TRYING / TO LOOK / GOOD / LIMITS / MY LIFE...

Every piece has a different billboard of its own, placed in a different part of the city...

No semi-nude women, but blue areas / fences / undetermined nowheres...I would rather get lost in that nowhere than sit in some fancy car with a carton of great cigarettes next to some super-model robot. Yes, and if I do that, then what?

So, the performance of this artist-designer, an Austrian living in New York, is called 'Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far.'

Money does not make me happy; Being not truthful works against me; Having guts always works out for me; Trying to look good limits my life; Everything I do comes back to me... And some other thirty aphoristic wisdoms of this kind, which the artist threw into his lecture in the National Library. They also appear in his exhibition in the SUPERSPACE gallery on the Danube river.

While I listened to Stefan Sagmeister I had a deja vu, as if somebody threw a net on the top of our dirty loud and aggressive Belgrade which I once loved so much... And I even know why, because Belgrade is not much like Barcelona or Rome or Vienna, or New York or Los Angeles, although Belgrade had all the advantages of wild big dirty cities...

Belgrade refused to become that which was given to it naturally, that is an underground metropolis.

- It's a lovely city, says the designer.

- It doesn't lack for gritty charm, nods my American friend, who is used to Balkan hospitality but is still in business for rakija and cevapcici.

-It is my city, in transition to nowhere, I say suddenly, as if anxiously protecting some handicapped child.

Designers like Belgrade, so do architects. Rem Koolhaas was recently again in Belgrade for the festival of design. Some time earlier in Sharjah where Koolhaas went to admire the miracle of architecture and politics in that fundamentalist oasis, he spoke of Belgrade... I think it is still the much-repeated story by Le Corbusier - Belgrade is the ugliest city on the most beautiful spot in the world.

While I listen to these world stars of global design, it occurs to me that they know nothing of anything real to us. What do they know of mass graves, of spitting on the streets, about Belgrade mafia and sponzorushas.... Then I realize that they are not snobs, but it is me who is biased -- or maybe they just as biased as I myself am a snob.

When Sagmeister threw his cosmopolitan net on the Balkan capital of Southern Europe, as he calls the city, he got me too. I listened as if under a spell to his simple stories about the wisdom he has gathered, a model public lecture.

For example, "Having guts always works for me" -- he illustrated this with an anecdote in which he jumped off an underground train in the very last moment, at a stop that was not even his own, to chase a little old lady with a nice hat, in Vienna. Just to let her know something that had obsessed him on the train, and that is, that the old lady looks GREAT in her hat...

Or "Money does not make me happy". He described research that shows that after earning 50 000 dollars per year, if you somehow double that sum, nothing of significance changes in your life...

And an awesome motto now: "Everybody who is honest is interesting" -- this one really made me happy!

His simple honesty towards people and the place that evening teleported me to my dream-city, a place which does not exist as a concrete city, nor does it have any name.

That dream city within me is the sister city of the invisible cities of Italo Calvino, made of all the masterpieces and the ruins of world design and world architecture, of people, insects, rats and random dogs, phenomena that must go without saying or remain unspeakable, of fears and incredible flights, water fire earth and polluted air... the inner stuff of us who live there...

Here I am in reality, gazing from a rusty terrace in the Vracar part of Belgrade, at the tall decaying building of a maternity hospital: I was born there, my mother worked there, my daughter was born there too... But that building was invisible for me until Sagmeister pointed a billboard towards it saying: "Over time I get used to everything and start taking if for granted."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jasmina Tešanović is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanović on BoingBoing:

- Jasmina Tešanović: What About the Russians?
- Milan Martic sentenced in Hague
- Mothers of Mass Graves
- Hope for Serbia
- Stelarc in Ritopek
- Sarajevo Mon Amour
- MBOs
- Killing Journalists
- Jasmina Tešanović: Where Did Our History Go?
- Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide
- Carnival of Ruritania
- "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
- Faking Bombings
- Dispatch from Amsterdam
- Where are your Americans now?
- Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
- Slaughter in the Monastery
- Mermaid's Trail
- A Burial in Srebenica
- Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
- To Hague, to Hague
- Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties
- Floods and Bombs
- Scorpions Trial, April 13
- The Muslim Women 
- Belgrade: New Normality
- Serbia: An Underworld Journey
- Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
- The Long Goodbye
- Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
- Slobodan Milosevic Died
- Milosevic Funeral

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:00:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

View a recent day: August 20, 2007 | August 19, 2007 | August 18, 2007 | August 17, 2007 | August 16, 2007 | August 15, 2007 | August 14, 2007 | previous days | all BB archives by month and year