Zarko Radakovoc's ERA

First the package: visually fragrant with roses and carnations between the doves and angels bearing "good wishes" from Germany. Inside, a copy of Zarko's newest book. On the title page he has written a note: "For my friend Scott, words from the times that possibly were just a dream. your, Zarko   27.11.2010, Cologne."

The book's cover shows ERA, legs wound so tightly with string or rubber bands that he's lucky not to have lost them to gangrene.


The book's subtitle promises "The History of the Tortoise," tortoise being the name of a performance Zarko was involved in in Belgrade in 1973.


"One evening I was in the apartment of Slobodan Milivojevica," the book begins. Its last sentence is "Or is this the same as the history and story of the turtle?"


In between is a narrative that documents and plays with the performance and the people and ideas so potent in Belgrade at the time -- the place and time whose fermentings and fomentings produced, most famously, the "Balkan Erotica" and later work of Marina Abramovic.


How long, my friend, were ERA's legs bound up like that?