Letters from the South~Milena

Collaboration with Nevena Aleksovski & Pedro Maia

March 04 — March  08, 2026
ARCO Madrid, ES

TEXT 
Angels Miralda

A wall of pink. Not as flatness, but as chromatic abundance. A surface that only appears
singular until proximity reveals its stratified complexity. Letters from the South
(2024–present) is a collaborative installation by Nevena Aleksovski and Maja Babič
Košir that operates less as fixed composition than as accretive archive: drawings,
paintings, found photographs, textiles, sculptural fragments, and vitrined objects
accumulate into a mutable curtain that reconfigures with each staging. First presented
at NADA Villa Warsaw and subsequently reimagined for Cukrarna Gallery in Ljubljana,
the work refuses the logic of singular authorship or of static objectivity. Instead, it insists
on a feminist methodology of accumulation. A layered, provisional, evolving, and
resolutely collective artwork that speaks to the impossibility of singularity through its
constantly shifting and healing forms. 

With each iteration, new elements infiltrate the composition; the arrangement develops
organically on-site, guided by intuitive constellations rather than a predetermined
schema. The result is a densely woven field of associations both personal and
historical, that reads like an intimate read through a collective self. What can, at first
glance, be read as monochromatic or monumental, quickly destroys both associations
through its layered fragments and bold appearances of black, white, and frames within a
larger frame. The work's apparent lightness is contradicted by the weight of the subjects
it contains: traces of displacement, the cultural debris with which we are still surrounded
that points towards tumultuous and violent pasts, and annotations of precarity under
neoliberalism's enduring reign. 

Both artists work from the specificities of biography, both with their own experiences of
migration, and inheritance. The work, however, is not autobiographical in a traditional
sense, but appeals to the abstract sense of constructing empathy towards the
contemporary human condition. It constructs a language of hints and clues that might
become useful strategies for building empathy within societies, of understanding vague
and small details as an expression of parallel timelines of violence, trauma, and healing.
The collaboration’s strength lies in absorbing its own potential for diverse expression -
the directness of text sits alongside the silent significance of found objects. Each object
and image references an experience that triggers the imagination of the viewer to
imagine its source as well as its destiny. 

A white coat becomes a hieroglyphic, elsewhere, a photograph of the sea (that wine-
dark inevitable horizon without a visible end) floats beside quilted domestic textiles,
beside faces half-obscured. The logic is the fragment that makes the whole, associative,
and embodying of a philosophy that sees the condition of the world as a fragile ever-
mended healing being. The cracks and layers are the essence of the work, the
complexity of entangled open-ended stories that represent an interminable now, always
mutable and indefinable. 

What emerges is not a synthesis but a form of careful coexistence, an aesthetic that
finds beauty in opacity, valuing the unknowable particularity of each fragment while
insisting on their necessary relationality. The installation's formal language appears
minimalist in palette at first sight, despite its maximal accumulation, enacting a tension
between fragmentation and continuity that mirrors the artists' inquiry into belonging.
Home is a splintered country of shifting borders, solidarity is necessarily not with a
community that is all the same, but with the other who shares a parallel journey of loss
and repair across incomparable scenarios. 

This work was made possible only through the act of sisterhood and collaboration, the
medium is both method and motif. Within this collaborative spirit is a vision of optimism
that is enforced through small acts of refusal signalled through the word neću in Serbo-
Croation - the first-person singular form of negation. A refusal of isolation, of singular
heroic gesture, of the nation-state's territorial claims on identity. Letters from the South
stages correspondence as survival strategy, a discipline of healing work urgently
needed in the world, an act that, like any work in culture, can never be done alone.