I Believe More in Horoscope

E-mail received on November 9th, 2006, from Belgrade artist Vesna Milicevic:

Dear Maja,

I intended to write for quite some time already since I like your work very much. Predrag Pajdic gave me your e-mail address. I am an artist from Belgrade. We have exhibited together in “Paranoia.” I am sending you a photo that I took the day before yesterday in Kalemegdan [park]. Probably you already now that your work at the October Salon [“Art, life and confusion,” curated by René Block] in Belgrade provoked casual passersby — or however we may call them. In Kalemegdan the organizers had to change it a couple of times because it was covered with all kinds of inscriptions: 4S [a nationalist Serb sign — “only Serbs together are safe”] and things like that. The last day of the October Salon I passed by your work and took a picture. What I am sending you now is the final ‘shape.’ Anyway, no work at the Salon — and there were exceptional works in my opinion — had such an interaction with the public. An arrow straight into the middle of the target. If something deserves the epithet POWERFUL then that is your billboard. And as far as nationalism and nationalists in Serbia — the land of paradoxes — are concerned: those who were until yesterday against any goods coming from Croatia are lining for hours in front of the newly made hypermarket from Zagreb in hopes of getting a Croatian product for cheap. Does that mean that profit is gaining over nationalism? Always something new in the Balkans. Hope to see you in London in January.

All the best,
Vesna