Pariska Komuna No. 20 / Komuna ë Parisit No. 20

2005

Photocopy of both sides of 16 postcards that were sent to Prizren (Kosovo) from Belgrade (Serbia)

In the beginning of January 2004 on behalf of the organization I was working for at the time, I sent an official invitation letter to a Kosovar writer to come to Helsinki on a two months’ residency. He received the letter and with that he was able to apply for visa to Finland. Three months later I sent him a music CD to the same address. It was returned to me in Helsinki a month later with the Pristina post office stamp declaring the address unknown. The reason for the Pristina post office to reject the letter was either that it was addressed to Ex-Yugoslavia, which had just weeks before been announced not being the politically correct term anymore, or that the street name was written in Serbian, or the cause was sum of the two.

In February 2005 I visited Belgrade and wanted to send a postcard to the abovementioned Kosovar writer. In order for him to receive my greetings from Belgrade, I wrote 16 postcards, with each different variation of the address I could think of – in Serbian and in Albanian, to Yugoslavia, Ex-Yugoslavia, UNMIK, Kosovo, Kosova etc. I photocopied the postcards before sending them.