Early Artist’s Books

The artist’s book became a central part of my practice during my years in Italy. Two early hand-bound works, Ovunque vada and Dovunque vada (Wherever I Go), form a diptych centred on two cities — Macerata and Belgrade — and on the experience of seeing a place simultaneously from within and from a distance.

Ovunque vada (2006–2008), developed as my postgraduate graduation project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata, brings together drawings, texts, collected objects and fragments of everyday life. Influenced by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, the book explores the visible and invisible dimensions of the city and the emotional value carried by ordinary places. Its counterpart, Dovunque vada (Wherever I Go), turns towards Belgrade, constructing a personal cartography of absence, movement, return and belonging.

This inquiry continued with My Window into the Book (2011), presented at the Ivo Andrić Museum in Belgrade. Here, the artist’s book expanded into the architecture of the exhibition through scenographic interventions: inscribed fabrics covering existing bookshelves, video projection, windows, doors and suspended elements of Japanese paper.

Text, image, transparency, sequence and movement could now be encountered physically as the viewer moved through the exhibition. My Window into the Book marks an early and significant moment in my practice in which the artist’s book became a point of departure for spatial and scenographic thinking.