In the spring of 2022, a Serbian singer stood on the Eurovision stage in Turin and washed her hands in a basin while chanting in Latin about health, beauty and the absence of health insurance. The performance was strange, clinical and utterly hypnotic, and it carried Konstrakta, born Ana Ignjatović in Belgrade in 1978, to a fifth-place finish that felt like a victory for anyone tired of polished pop. She was 43 years old that year, an architect by training and a veteran of Belgrade's indie scene, not a manufactured star. Yet her song 'In corpore sano' did something no Serbian entry had done before: it became a global meme, a viral hit and a piece of performance art broadcast to millions. Konstrakta was born on October 12, 1978.
From architecture to Zemlja gruva!
Konstrakta had chosen her stage name at twenty, a word that fused her profession as an architect with her love of constructing rhymes like mathematical equations. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Belgrade, and for years she built songs the way she might design a building: with structure, tension and a clear load-bearing idea. Her real fame in Serbia came as the vocalist of Zemlja gruva!, a Belgrade band founded in 2007 that mixed funk, jazz and local rhythms into something playful and sharp. She wrote several of the band's songs, and she learned how to hold a stage without ever chasing the mainstream.
The song that changed everything arrived on 8 February 2022, when 'In corpore sano' was included in Serbia's national selection for Eurovision. Konstrakta wrote it with Milovan Bošković, known as MC Milovan, and the lyrics turned a meditation on bodily health into a deadpan critique of social pressure and state neglect. A month later, on 5 March 2022, she won the Serbian final with 31.34 percent of the combined jury and audience vote, beating acts that followed the usual Eurovision formula. The choice was bold: Serbia was sending a middle-aged architect who sang in Latin and Serbian about the absurdity of wellness culture.
Turin, points and awards
At Eurovision, Konstrakta performed 'In corpore sano' in the second semi-final, where she finished third with 237 points, and then in the grand final she took fifth place with 312 points. The jury gave her 87 points, but the public gave her 225, a sign that viewers across Europe had connected with something they had never seen before. She won the Marcel Bezençon Award for artistry, and Polish media gave her a prize for the most creative entry. A Eurovision jury member described her as musically interesting, a little strange and atypical for the contest, which was exactly the point.
The aftermath was unlike anything in Serbian music. By May 2022, Konstrakta had become the most-streamed Serbian artist on Spotify in a single month, with more than 1.3 million listens. 'In corpore sano' became the first Serbian song to enter the Spotify Viral Global Songs 50 chart, starting at number 23 and climbing to number 7 by 19 May 2022. The song's text spread through social media, parodies and sketches, its deadpan phrases becoming a shared language for people who felt exhausted by the performance of health and happiness. Serbian critic Petar 'Peca' Popović said her success came from originality and erudition, a sharp contrast to the pop, folk and turbo-folk that dominated the region.
Konstrakta herself admitted she was afraid of the absence of negative criticism, as if universal praise felt suspicious for someone used to operating on the margins. After she became a pop star, soap and shampoo companies offered her advertising contracts, a strange twist for an artist whose Eurovision song mocked the beauty industry's empty promises. Nedeljnik magazine named her Person of the Year 2022, and the Association of Belgrade Architects gave her an honorary award for Architectural Event of the Year, a nod to the fact that she had never really left her first profession behind.
What made the moment matter was not just the points or the charts, but the fact that Konstrakta had smuggled a piece of conceptual art into the most-watched entertainment show in Europe. She was not a young hopeful or a returning diva; she was a woman in her forties with a day job, a family and a long history in a band that had never broken through internationally. Her victory in the Serbian selection, her fifth place in Turin and the viral life of 'In corpore sano' proved that a strange idea, executed with total conviction, could cut through the noise. The architect had built something that millions of people wanted to live inside, at least for three minutes.
The architect had built something that millions of people wanted to live inside, at least for three minutes.