When you point a finger, three are pointing back takes its title from a proverb of blame, and its subject from a moment of public spectacle. After losing the FIFA World Cup final in 2018, Croatian football player Mateo Kovačić sang a nationalist song back home in Zagreb; for Croatian-born Lana Mesić, the scene mixed sorrow with recognition. She had watched the war-torn past of former Yugoslavia seep freely into everyday life, and she treats that unease as a starting point rather than a conclusion.
The book is less a photographic monograph in the usual sense than an assembled record. Photography by Sanne van den Elzen is joined by newspaper clippings, television clips, rumours, whispered conversations, written stories, and small relics built from matches and matchboxes. Across 488 pages, the complex history and contested borders of the former Yugoslav countries become the ground on which Mesić sets new, personal narratives, and the enemy image is studied for what it does as much as for what it depicts.
As Europe’s political weather has shifted, the question the book poses has widened. It asks readers to recognise their own experience in these materials, and so to counter the nationalist narratives that dominate so much current debate. The design and editing by Jeremy Jansen give the volume its momentum: in a flush-cut flexible hardcover of 155 by 210 mm, with text editing by Rosie Heinrich and supervision and final editing by Frank van der Stok, the book holds disparate documents in a single sequence rather than merely illustrating an argument.
For a collector, the interest lies in that method. Mesić is credited with artwork and text, van den Elzen with photography, and the publisher records a complete production credit: lithography by Marc Gijzen, production by Jos Morree (Fine Books), and print and binding by Wilco Art Books (NL). Supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Tijl Fonds and Jaap Harten Fonds, and issued in a first edition of 600, the result is a work of collage and memory that treats private recollection and public rhetoric as one field of inquiry.
