into the pill - Issue 3

Tamara’s Belgrade

   Tamara never takes the bus or the tram. She walks to wherever she goes. And so we follow her in endless routes about the city without a map. She is our guide. She is showing us the park and the fortress, the Cinema Academy, the bombed buildings, the open markets where we buy fancy junk, the branches of Alpha Bank sprouting all over the place- loans being the newfound way of life in the Balkans-, the coffee shops serving huge ice creams which she frowns down upon, the squares full of people drinking their beer in the heat.
    This afternoon we are going for a walk by the river. The riverboats have been fashioned into improvised bars with the addition of a few seats and a string of light bulbs, where you can have pizza or french fries. Dead water and reeds, smell of chlorophyll rotting, taste of rubber in the air. Across the river in the New Belgrade huge apartment blocks rise like rotten teeth on the horizon. The sun is setting, heat turns from a harness to a vail, it won’t let you breathe. Nevertheless, a strange feeling of freedom inside our bodies after hours of walking, we are lost in the utopia of an unknown city we can discover anything.
     The river banks swerving away are full of houses. They are one room constructions, made of plywood, tinplates, plastic sheets, fronting onto tiny yards that overlook the river. And everywhere there are people who drink their beer, or are lost in daydreams in front of a wrecked table, they strive, they mend things, they sing or talk loudly, manifesting this kind of improvised life which is the extension of their “summer house”. We can’t ... read more

We can’t help but pause every once in a while and look with envy at this type of self-sufficiency, that promise of pure joy which they incongruously exude. People invariably respond to those glances which say “take us with you”. They wave even from a distance, as if they where passing by on a ship, they offer as a glass of beer, counting their blessings, they come close and ask questions. With Tamara as our spokesperson or even without words just waving we greet them and everybody is praising the landscape, accept proudly our admiration of their houses, in the swamp, under the factories, with a thick cloud of mosquitoes closing in all around us. We spray ourselves with anti-repellant from head to toe and we carry on towards the lake to eat fish soup.
   Next afternoon we rise after a stone-heavy siesta to welcome our guests. Tamara has spread the news, that two Greeks are looking for video artists based in Belgrade. Belgrade is a city broken by war and nationalism but also from Western disfavor and uneven fiscal development, with wide-spread poverty, with no network of galleries or state institutions to support the development and distribution of contemporary art production. Given this situation, artists form their own networks, artist-run festivals and variegated collectivities and dreaming of going abroad all the while carrying on with their dangerous game and sharing it between one another. The doorbell did not stop ringing. We expected three people and we had more than ten arrive with their DVDs, their two liter beer in plastic bottles, a jar of olives and some sweets. Two laptops were set up and we watched videos until two o’clock in the morning. Meanwhile we discussed, translating from serbian or in english or with gestures, war and politics, art and the art market and our intention to continue regardless. We spoke for “intothepill” which is also a game, a fertile and effective one we hope, but also a war machine , a strategy of laying foundations on inexisting grounds, improvised architecture using the materials that are at hand, as well as those we pick on the way and those we invent. We left Belgrade with a pack of DVDs, a number of e-mail addresses and the desire to return. This issue is the product of that evening’s harvest and so it is not the result of assiduous research, nor a panorama of Belgrade’s art video production.
 It is what came to us spontaneously and we hope that it carries the uneasiness and the risk of the accidental but also the vibration of contacting one another.

(Katerina Iliopoulou)

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