In her long-term project Weird Fish Is You, progressive Serbian artist Milica Macanović explores the intimate topography of relationships formed and sustained within the digital sphere—a space where presence is not measured by physical proximity, but by the intensity of communication, projection, and desire. Built from fragments of her own visual and textual self, the project traces a narrative of vulnerability and the elusiveness of contemporary connection, where emotional closeness unfolds in a realm that is both real and imagined.
In a digital environment where nonverbal layers disappear and communication becomes an aesthetic form, Macanović uses self-portraiture, graphic interventions, and excerpts from private correspondence to map relationships that resist clear definition. Her works emerge from a liminal space—the zone between the internal and the external, the present and the absent, the real and the projected. In this in-between, the illusion of closeness is not a deception but a constant of modern experience: a way of being with another, even when the body is elsewhere.
One of the messages that appears in the work opens an intimate window into the emotional landscape of the project: “The poetry of the walls under your look… I’m a little high to write to you and risk writing things that will make you believe that I am crazy… but I’m happy to be a little bit with you on this night walk.” This fragment reflects the type of communication at the heart of the project—spontaneous, fragmented, and deeply revealing.
Weird Fish Is You becomes a visual diary of the contemporary emotional condition. Within it, digital intimacy takes on physical form, shifting the question of authenticity away from the binary of “real vs. unreal” toward something subtler: recognizing the ways others shape us—despite, or perhaps precisely because of—the fact that we encounter them in the space between screens, thoughts, and images.
About the Artist
Milica Macanović (1990, Srbija) is a multidisciplinary artist and photographer whose work investigates the relationship between body and space, presence and absence, duration and transformation. Trained as an architect, she later turned to visual art and photography, merging analog and digital processes, drawing, and installation to translate spatial logic into poetic visual narratives. She is the Grand Prix winner of the Tivat Photo Days (2025) and has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. Her long-term projects weave together intimacy, memory, and architectural sensitivity into a distinctive contemporary visual language.
