ANJA WICKI
The exhibition "Belgrader Post #1-16" by Anja Wicki opened on Wednesday 21st July at 7 p.m. at the Footnote Centre for Image and Text.
Belgrader Post started as a series of newsletters sent to people back home in which the Swiss illustrator Anja Wicki visually chronicled her day-to-day experience of Belgrade, through which whichshe paced and cycled over the course of her six month residency in search of motifs of interest. Every few weeks she would send a new “letter” containing a few linear sketches and pastel drawings, most commonly focusing on the city’s rugged surroundings, industrial fringes and some less picturesque neighbourhoods, attesting to the city’s recent urban redevelopments. Preoccupation with the outskirts, non-sites of construction areas, abandoned factories, vacant facilities but also small workshops and other sites of invisible economies all offer an image of Belgrade as a terrain vague, a heterotopic space in constant becoming, in constant tension with itself. Other drawings portray the city which we so often fail to notice- pastoral scenes and natural landscapes, parks and fields which defy the bitter reality of urban (mis)planning. Belgrader Post is a precious document of the ephemeral character of the city’s evolution, its vernacular language, impulsive logic, spontaneous and imposed modifications, the contrast of its aspiration and reality.
Anja Wicki is a Lucerne based illustrator and comic artist. She studied illustration fiction at the School of Art and Design in Lucerne and Hamburg. Since 2010, she and her two friends have published a comic magazine called Ampel Magazin. She self published a collection of 12 short stories titled ”The Meaning of Life” in 2015. Her graphic novel “Normale Menschen” will be published in 2022 by Edition Moderne, Switzerland. Anja loves straight lines, printing and the mountains. After her residency in Serbia she will hike back to Lucerne.
