The List: People who change Belgrade

Belgrade, a city with a soul, where every street and every person tells their own story. Throughout this city’s history, people have left their mark and influenced its appearance, architecture, gastronomic offer, and the habits of the people of Belgrade. But here’s the thing about being influential: it’s not for everyone. It takes a certain kind of person to stand out in a crowd and be heard. Let’s take a look at some of the men and women who have made their mark on Belgrade, in a feature column by Duška Jovanić, which is out each month.

NOTE: The list is made in alphabetical order

When he was leaving Belgrade, he believed that he would never return. Marko Krunić. Forty-two years old. As an art photographer and visual artist, he deals with the best ideas every morning. In his spare time, he is a passionate hustler for finding everything that exists online. He is an ardent devotee of verbal communication and throwing his head in the right direction. He dreams with open eyes and open ears. It is authentic and eclectic, while wearing the artist’s expression, shoes and jackets, which are not really that. He’s always on his bike. In New York, for ten years, he worked professional- ly with many world stars and the greatest artists of our time, such as Jeff Koons, Marina Abramović, Naomi Watts, Boy George, Chloë Sevigny, Cate Blanchett, Dita von Teese... At the same time, he diligently photographed precious stones as his ‘bread and butter’. His return to his hometown was because of the inimitable Marina, an icon of conceptual art. Despite everything that had changed in the meantime, Belgrade did not disarm him. Today, he works for a large company that improves the quality of life on the entire planet. He’s ready to push this city forward whenever he gets the chance.

She is Marta Jovanović. A performance artist. In the silence of these activities, she feels at home. She will never tire of this form of expression, even though she is already teaching students this antidote to reality. If she had to choose only one adjective to describe herself, it would be “unpredictable”. Everything she does seems to make her original. In her performance titled “Motherhood”, she pounded on golden eggs representing fertile days. With the conceptual project “It is My Body” she exposed her body, and in “Love” she allowed people to throw pig hearts at her. At one opening of the October Salon, she was “Belgrade Mer- maid”, lying down and waiting for the audience to pour water on her in virtual reality and bring her to life. Why did she choose art that happens now and never again? She likes to serve herself on the plate as a message for feminism and activism. She once sold her entire fashion treasure to wear the same outfit for a year because of “The Uniform” as a concept. She shot the documentary film “Born Just Now” about herself in Belgrade. The script envisaged her walking across the entire city. Her Gucci loafers were full of blood. Always dressed in black, she only believes in red lipstick and shoes that hurt feet.

The golden boy of the theatre, a young man with a renaissance personality, one of our most popular directors, who has worked in Munich, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Vienna and Ljubljana in the last ten years. Hardly anyone can sleep peacefully after seeing one of his works. Miloš Lolić has an undeniable sense for conjuring a multi-layered fresco of his characters, who seem real to us, and yet we experience them on the edge of fantasy. Although he is seductive as a director, he does not deceive us, nor sway us. Despite this, his performances are classified as special and different theatre concepts. There is an old joke that he studied directing to one day stage Shakespeare. He was most successful as the director of “Othello”, “The Jour- nal about Čarnojević”, and the plays “Martha Stewart” and “Casper” in Belgrade. And then he threw himself into “Yankee Rose”, his first musical, and blew it out of the park. This wild, witty, but also deeply tragic piece with dancing and crying was seen as the saddest joke about a blonde. Lolić is not only the darling of Europe but also of Belgrade, where he keeps coming back for the culture, two cafés, ćevapi and landline phone. Only those who don’t know him think he’s fragile because he doesn’t swear even in rehearsals, except when he’s very angry. Although he is not looking for short-term pleasures, he has great fashion control. Every time he is about to be presented with an award, he fastens the button on his jacket first.

The young playwright and writer Vida Davidović was nineteen years old in 2017 when Belgrade’s curtain was lifted in front of her and very soon Belgrade bowed down to her. It remains to be seen whether this was all a trap. She was born in East Sarajevo and grew up in Banja Luka. She believed that life in Belgrade is lively and vibrant, as in all big cities, where bars are open until late at night, lights reflect on the asphalt, and girls in high heels carry equally high expectations, but also broken hearts. The orientalism she brought from Bosnia and the astonishingly precise identical reflections of dreams about happiness made her fall in love with Belgrade even before she

5 could call it her own. The author of several theatre pieces, screenwriter of five films and laureate of the Sterija Theatre Award for original domestic drama script, she dedicated her first novel “Nausea: About not Growing up” to Belgrade. Her heroines change places - one young woman left a big city, and another came to that big city. Vida writes about it as if she always knew it all already. Her words rhyme harshly to the rhythm of intellectual dynamism. When it comes to Belgrade, she didn’t stick to any strategy, especially not the desire to heal it. Go ahead and read Vida Davidović’s novels because “she will infect you with desire, pain, truth and beauty”.

A prominent member of the capital’s circle of avant-garde connoisseurs. The city’s first hipster hedonist. A tireless gourmand and stylish revolutionary, who doesn’t skimp even on vacation. He has the grandmaster intuition of the owner of atypical cafés. When he graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, he decided to intern in the kitchens of New York and Boston. As soon as he returned, he founded Zaplet, a small factory of forgotten but also new flavours. Although he still has infantile bouts of gastronomic snobbery, he has become the big man among the café owners. Even those who don’t eat at restaurants know about him.

He has been changing this city for years, by first changing himself. He is always as well dressed as if he slept in front of a mirror, he has two daughters and a girlfriend. After ditching his motorbike, he now only uses trolleybuses, and in addition to being tightly wound up, he also manages to read. Lucky bastard, the naysayers will say, who also rejoiced when he closed his restaurant Dijagonala. He took refuge in Baudelaire’s kitchen on time. At its new address, his restaurant Flowers of Evil is a place where gourmet poetry is on the menu. And there is an invisible inscription hanging on the kitchen door that says – “Quiet! Genius at work!”