The book MAGI:JA, published by the Belgrade-based Makart, brings us the letters of the band's legendary keyboardist, which have survived to this day Catherine the Great Margita Magi Stefanović (1959–2002), addressed during the eighties and nineties of the last century to her eternal boyfriend, lover, faithful friend, personal photographer and lifelong admirer Srdjan Vejvoda.
In one of the selected letters, Margita Stefanović declares: "I can't believe it until I see it." And having heard her very well over the decades, Srđan and the playwright Katarina Pejović - Maga's wonderful friend from the time when our main heroine with the band Katarina II first stepped on the SKC rock scene at the end of December 1982 - made, in collaboration with the designer Željko Serdarević, a poignant pilgrimage to a romantic relationship without borders.
photo: srđan vejvoda...
Maga's fresh and direct sentences, full of harmless rapture, but also shrewd thinking, enter into a passionate dialogue here with Srđan Vejvoda's original recordings, mostly created in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that utopian homeland of the local new wave and cradles of countless authentic girls and young men, who really changed everything with their talent in the euphoric era of the 1980s. Margita and Srđan were exactly like that.
Margita Stefanović, an offshoot of the esteemed piano school of professor Miroslava Lili Petrović and an excellently educated architect - stands here opposite Srđan Vejvoda (b. 1952), novelist, translator and inventive photographer, who immortalized her in her, without any doubt, most brilliant days. Both marked by giftedness and physical beauty, these two special people met quite naturally in new wave Belgrade, turning - thanks to Srđan's virtuoso photo skills - the time of mutual love into a series of expressive scenes of Maga's maturation as a person, astonishing sensuality, dynamism and modernity, as if they came from the future.
Photo: Bojana Pejić
At first, in Srđan's photographs, Margita is still only his bewitching girlfriend, a magical twenty-year-old, fatal woman, gamen and irresistible nymphet at the same time. Soon after, Magi was about to become a key member of the famous EKV line-up, which would happen not long after. Her astral metamorphosis - recorded in the book MAGI:JA - from a child-woman, through a very French chic lady on the Parisian boulevards, to a sensual black-haired Belgrade version of Niko from the band The Velvet Underground, as we as fans mostly remember her from the music stage - is the special quality of this collection of visual and poetic memories, which seem to emit sounds that each reader hears for himself in his imagination all the time.
Aside from Maga's language twists and puns, which also show us a talented poet, in addition to an extraordinarily gifted pianist and a promising architect of rare art culture, as well as a rock and roll superstar of this area. Her elegant visions expressed in letters, apart from spreading unconditional love, also contain that premonition of a certain metaphysical threat that looms over an entire generation, warning the young city dwellers, through mystical sleeplessness, of the impending tragedy.
And it's as if through his small lovely lines he senses the very imminent collapse of the great illusion of freedom, equality and solidarity among people - Magi writes to Srđan: "these are not messages. this is not penkalo. this is a sleepless night; a sleepless night; Belgrade without a dream; reality - without - without - without".
It was real. Horror in brestova street in its Belgrade variant.
In the book MAGI:JA, all of Maga's faith is clearly visible through word and image. Visible, we say, for those who have enough kindness to recognize in her epistolary poetry - created through nurturing an emotionally and intellectually extremely intense, and probably the most significant relationship she has ever established with someone - the light and enthusiasm with which Margita approached herself and reality, with Srdjan Vejvod as the ideal interpreter.
photo: srđan vejvoda...
Hence, when Magi tells Srđan: "it's beautiful when the sun is shining and when and when and when and when it's beautiful", you are enthroned in front of that lovely childishness that hides a much deeper meaning. Margit's longing for beauty and to simply be beautiful to everyone, then when the sun shines on some small daily feat in this city that she never left, whose streets she walked zealously to the end, on the road of tears that she passed without regret and without complaining to anyone... she would have to shame all those who tarnished her reputation on many ill-intentioned occasions by falsely presenting themselves as her intimates and admirers while still expressing extreme the unsavory, alleged details of Maga's brief and glittering sojourn among us.
Here we see Margita bent over the table studying something carefully, with beautiful fingers and so much unrestrained hair, while the words flow: "I like to draw, doodle and play - piano player...", which is a typical sign of her joking minimization of her own talents. But, when only a little later these naive rhymes turn into a disturbing nightmare of imagination that attacks her fragile child's being from everywhere, outside and inside, you almost freeze before the following statement: "The lines curve, and the letters somehow become more and more... as if they become independent from the words, and the words become somehow... as if they become independent in relation to me, first the pencil, then I, then on the paper words, then in the hands of the papers, before the eyes of the words".
Or when she says: "No love, no truth, no happiness, no friends. No money, no job, no future except the one I invent and with my crazy strength I don't realize", you have no choice but to think how the sun sometimes really knew how to set in her thin soul, that she patiently fought for every ray of light.
photo: srđan vejvoda...
Because for Margita: "Happiness is a word from letters, movies and unframed photos. OR just a puzzle-dream in which you laugh." Although in another place he claims with optimism: "This under the letters is our house, and in front/under our house - is the ship with which we will conquer the world".
Whenever these records were created, they represent a kind of testament of a sacrificed generation, gambled away and then brutally exposed to the coming times in which man was definitely a wolf to man. But in fact, there is no pessimism in them at all. Margita was a proud warrior who stepped into the unknown with her very birth, firmly believing that her own life can be spent in art and finally become one with it: "Spinoza believed that all things want to persist in their being - a stone forever wants to be a stone, a tiger - a tiger... I must remain... in myself? if I am".
And that's why, when on page no. 43 you see the written words: "new no letter yes", you suddenly think of Viktor Shklovski and his Letters not about love. It's just that these letters are absolutely yes about love, about a love relationship, about love for the city, for the interior of rooms that could be home, about love for your band, for carefree wandering in the streets, for the whole world, humanity, every single person, as well as how it looked, loved and lived here without a trace, in some, now long gone times.
