Your facades are peeling off like red onions

Coming from a background in visual arts Miletić started wondering whether words could be our new images. And what could then the role of poetry be in this word of appearances? Could poetry be an ally, or “a barking dog to a revolutionary reconfiguration of human society –
a revolution which would destroy all social roles, that of the poet included?”
With this attitude Miletić started editing a collection of photographs that she has made over the years of amateur graffiti on the city walls in Zagreb. Documenting and editing these ‘writings on the wall’ helped the artist to understand what is at stake on a (micro)political level in her hometown. At the same time this writing is often articulated as poetic wordplays and aphorisms. By isolating the words from their usual environment and by expanding them onto the pages of a book Miletić is able to amplify their more basic qualities. Therefore the book resembles a volume of concrete or minimal poetry.
The title of the book, Your façades are peeling off like red onions, refers to Irena Vrkljan’s experimental autobiographical novel Svila, škare (trans. Silk, Scissors), from 1984, in which she describes a recognizable visit to her same hometown, Zagreb, after years of living abroad. In here Vrkljan, famous for her feminist writing that mixes the poetic with the documentary, focuses on perceptible, material signs of time gone by like a façade that is peeling off.

Risograph,
edition: 70, 2015