When the weather is nice in Belgrade on weekends, the approach to Kalemegdan from Knezmiška is full of fair crowds. I avoid it by turning from Studentski trg Uzun Mirkova to the place where the Constantinople road once began. I rarely come here, but today I intend to hang out with Margita Magi Stefanović.
I learned from the media that on the plateau that leads to the Art Pavilion of Cvijeta Zuzorić, a photo exhibition "When I go to" is set up. Keyboardist Ekatarine Velika Magi and her band meant a lot to me about forty years ago. Besides Azra and Haustor, it was the only new wave band that touched me with its unique synthesis of dark, cryptic lyrics and urban sensibility. While turbofolk foreshadowed the victorious coup that would later become the "sound of ethnic cleansing", EKV was the sound of urban resistance and despair. It was my sound, from the late eighties, when I lived in one of the two towers of a student dormitory in Karaburma. And Magi was the beautiful face of that sound.
Already from Pariska, I saw a series of three-sided panels with photographs, which ended in front of the facade of "Cvijeta Zuzorić", an exhibition space built on the initiative of Branislav Nušić in 1928 and named after the Dubrovnik beauty and poet from the 16th century.
I smile at this association - two charismatic women, Magi and Cvijeta, are in cahoots here. During their lifetime they were separated by centuries, but now they are in a dimension where time does not exist.
The living face of a dead woman
Some people pause in front of the photos. He reads the legends, goes around all three sides of the triangular supports. I'm in no rush. The life of Margita Stefanović, whom everyone called Magi, is not told here. Those 113 photos concentrate on her activities in the band that started in 1982 as Katarina II, but changed its name already on the second album to Ekatarina Velika - EKV. The band's decade of activity left - time will tell - an extremely deep mark. Now the musical legacy of Milan, Magi and the other members of EKV seems much more significant than the importance attributed to them in their time.
I stop in front of a photo that shows Magi in the apartment of her then-boyfriend and photographer Srđan Vejvoda - in Paris in 1981. I spent that year in a barracks in Zagreb, dreaming of a Rolling Stones concert in Vienna. In that photo, Magi is an ordinary Yugoslav girl, naturally beautiful, without excessive make-up. She has not yet been caught by the wheel of crazy new-wave history. She is twenty-two years old. Architecture graduate student. For her, architecture is "frozen music". As a student, she won the third prize at an international competition in Japan for her work on the design of the Montenegrin village of Reževići. When she was 11 years old, she received an offer to continue her education in Moscow, together with Ivo Pogorelić, as one of the most talented classical pianists in the former Yugoslavia. Desanka's mother does not want to be separated from her daughter's unit. The father, the famous television director Slavoljub Stefanović Ravasi, also preferred that his daughter, whom he adored, be close to him. Magi remains in Belgrade. After high school and secondary music school, he still gives classical music concerts. She performs at the piano together with the philharmonic orchestra in Kolarac - Shostakovich's concert is her last performance in that role. Enrolls in architecture.
For me, the real discovery is the photos that show the spirit of the era. Prote Mateje Street 1981. Srđan Vejvoda clicks with a camera. Magi is in the company of a number of small, white cars. Behind it is the entire fleet of Zastava's bestseller - "Fiće". There is also a photo showing Magi walking past a propaganda window of the Soviet embassy in Belgrade, celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union. Or the photo that Srđan Vejvoda took probably by accident. The street sweeper looks into the lens as Magi crosses the street. Color photographs, such as this one, are underrepresented.
The girl who had absolute hearing entered the world of rock and roll in 1982, after she first met the members of the band Električni orgasam, and by hanging out with them, Milan Mladenović. He recognized the prodigious talent and invited Magi to join his group Catherine II. The group was named after the unrequited love of Dragomir Mihailović Gagi, the guitarist. Magi first goes on a three-month trip to Latin America and then joins the band.
Flight of the Black Angel
She shows charisma on stage, the audience and the cameras quickly fell in love with her. Novotalasni temple - the Student Cultural Center - becomes the stage that will mark the rise of the band.
On the first album Katarina II, the eighth track is entitled "Kad krenem ka". It's the only band thing Magi sang. Psychedelic reggae - that's how I've always seen it - is way ahead of its time. And the text, with its complete dislocation, was the complete opposite of the mostly cheap rhymes of the usual production: "When I go to... to go to... I ask for... to see with... then I wait for in... and I think that... they say that... they don't recognize me".
The fragmented text instinctively reflects an era that is beginning to fall apart. This sound originates from the first Yugoslav cracks.
At the same time, rock is mostly a man's business. The instruments on stage are mostly played by men. The authors of the exhibition, music critics Zorica Kojić and Dragan Ambrozić, already had several similar settings - the new wave eighties and the wartime nineties of the dying Yugoslav rock are their theme. In the announcement text for the exhibition about Magi, they stated: "As the first woman to occupy a permanent, long-term position in the line-up of a group, otherwise in this case very influential on the further trends of our rock music, Magi became a symbol of a completely different role of ladies in rock and roll in compared to the previous one, opening up new opportunities for all girls who wanted to take it seriously".
Along the way, Magi became a true pop icon. I don't know who called her "The Black Angel", but that nickname is more about the way she left.
I can't shake the impression that the Magi from these 113 photos exhibited at Mali Kalemegdan live their afterlife in moments frozen for eternity. Those moments are photographically torn away by the famous "Angel of History" who mercilessly pushes the present into the past, leaving behind the ruins of our lives that we call memories. The moments of her life were captured by analog cameras. Through the eyes of photographers such as the Vejvoda brothers, Goranka Matić, Aleksandar Kujučev, we can peek into a multi-talented human being, into his fears and hopes, which still live on in the photos, even though Magi has not been with us since 2002.
Nowhere, not even in the photos from the early nineties, could I recognize a foreboding of the terrible end.
Sorry for the hot day
I visited the exhibition twice. I kept coming back to the faces of dead people. Drummer Ivan Vdović Acting was the first to go back in 1992. He was HIV positive. He was thirty-one years old.
Milan Mladenović died in 1994 - cancer of internal organs. He was thirty-six years old.
Bojan Prečar, bass player, died in London in 1998 from a heart attack. He was thirty-eight years old.
Margita Magi Stefanović died in 2002. She was forty-three years old.
I'm looking at the photo showing the three dead members of the band with the drummer who survived - Srđan Žik Todorović. The brilliance, the energy, the joy of creating and performing music, the quiet youth before that, I recognized all that as my own generational story. The members of one of the biggest Yugoslav bands died in the decade that followed the death of their country.
I return home thoughtful. Knez Mihailova is teeming with the world. On the corner of Rajićeva, trumpeters decorated with banknotes exaltedly play "Đurđevdan". A young woman, similar to the Magi, raises her hands and dances to the music. The trumpets beat the melancholy.
While I'm writing, I'm listening to EKV. I repeat "When I start to" more than once. Then I listen once again to the interview that the late Alek Budimlić conducted with Magi in 1987. So I'm listening to music again.
I ask myself, how is it possible that a human being who possessed such inner beauty, modesty, education, intelligence; that such a talented woman, excellent in every way, ends up in the Center for the Homeless. Of course, we know the banal truth - by all accounts, an exceptional musical heroine, like many before her, was taken away by the evil heroin. Couldn't she get away with it? Dušan Vesić's book "Magi - like it used to be" gives some answers. Authoritarian mother who separated her from music, never treated epilepsy, futile search for salvation in Indian spiritual practices, never treated addiction. Peca Popović correctly wrote that Magi is "the most beautiful and tragic requiem written on the Belgrade asphalt".
At the Kalemegdan exhibition, I saw lovely and shining moments of that life. Between them, through the deep shadows in the park, darkness crawled here and there, sucking in the Magi. Or was it just a play of light and shadows on a May day.
Bonus video:
