NAME: Aleksandar Macasev
LATIN NAME: taedium habeo
AGE: 35

According to Aleksandar Macasev, most Serbian designers are “doomed” to work in advertising agencies because this is the only choice available to them. “I escaped advertising sweat shops almost three years ago to set up my own design firm,” says Macasev, who lives and works in Belgrade. “At first it’s hard to find clients—local clients in Belgrade still don’t recognize the importance of high quality design and they don’t take very seriously designers who are not with the agencies.”

Most of Macasev’s clients and collaborative relationships come from the fine art world, therefore, rather than from corporate culture. Macasev feels comfortable working with galleries and artists, mainly because his own work crosses and recrosses the line between applied and fine art. “I get an idea that ‘itches’ so much that I have to communicate it to the rest of the world,” he says of his self-initiated projects.

In the case of the Joseph Goebbels campaign, for example, the thing that “itched” Macasev was the extent to which people “swallow the shit served on their media plate.” Working from the assumption that Dr. Joseph Goebbels is the ideological father of contemporary mass communication, Macasev created a portrait of the former Nazi Minister of Propaganda composed of media and communication company logos. The power of the cropped, close-up image of Goebbel’s face is magnified in intensity through its repetition on billboards and hoardings; the project is funded by the City of Belgrade, and has proven controversial. Residents of Belgrade have been disturbed by what they see as menacing imagery of a war criminal staring at them in the streets. They started to file complaints, and the project was subjected to a police investigation. After a two-hour “interview,” however, “the police became my fans,” says Macasev.

For another effort from 2006, called “Family Projects,” Macasev’s inspiration came from looking at old family photographs, especially one he thought was particularly telling of his relationship with his mother. He realized his personal story was actually applicable to a more general “Serbian phenomenon in which mothers are very possessive and people in their 30s live in a kind of suspended adolescence.” And so his project transcended personal psychotherapy to become a kind of public awareness campaign in which the message was, “Serbian mothers, don’t strangle your children.”

“My friend told me: ‘Jesus, this is heavy,’” says Macasev. “It’s true. We should look inside at our own drives and desires and be honest about them. That’s the only thing that will be unique.” Alice Twemlow

(TOP): Macasev has designed this series of personal business cards for friends and people he meets. He’s interested in how little visual information one needs to create a recognizable icon of an individual.