Sandorf Passage

Plants are the protagonists in Soiled With Earth, Drunk On Air, Sibila Petlevski’ s self-translated poetry collection written between 2019 and 2020. This collection is a libretto for whispering to magical herbs and listening to the voices of silence. In many ways, these poems predicted the fear and isolation of the global pandemic lockdown, while also offering up a strategy to overcome these hardships through understanding people as a part of nature. These are verses for the ecology of the spirit.

As the frequency of air-raid sirens sending an apartment building’s residents to the basement increases, the neighbor children block out reality with the toys at hand—some imported from Western Europe and North America, others regional knockoffs or questionably improvised. Maša Kolanovic’s Underground Barbie brilliantly captures the vagaries of childhood as innocence gives way to the horrors of the news and the intrigues of sexual curiosity. The idealized glamour of Barbie and Ken on an endless honeymoon morphs into make-believe scenarios that reflect the splintering social structure brought about by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s: politicians campaigning to define what it means to be a “real” Croatian, a refugee ball with “disgusting” dolls that are lesser than “genuine” Barbie products, the discovery of a mass grave filled with headless corpses thought to be Ken’s mistresses. Underground Barbie deftly renders how the power of imagination is used to overcome hardship, alongside a sharp critique of consumer culture, made even more stark against the shredded backdrop of a great socialist experiment.