‘Existoj’
Edona Kryeziu
In the centre of Kosovo’s capital Prishtina, there is a place in- between haunting decay and the promise of a nascent future. This place acting like a natural mise-en-scene and an a reflection of a society in everlasting transition, lies between the ‘Newborn’ monument cherishing Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, and the Palace of Youth and Sports ‘Boro Ramiz’ once commemorating ‘Brotherhood in Unity’ during the Yugoslav-era. In the present, between history and future, the hall remains burned down and the Newborn monument fades away.
In this in-between-place, conversations on daily struggles, borders, isolation and migration took place in the spring of 2020. Existential contemplation on whether to stay or migrate, resist in the name of the collective or seek individual ‘freedom’ in the West. Words accompanied with gazing at the immediate object, - the back of three disaffected billboards. While contemplating on whether migration makes sense or not, the billboards were imagined as windows with a better sight.
On the 30th of April 2020, ‘windows without exit’ took their material shape, one day before the artist left for Germany with her E.U. passport.
Performing ‘windows without exit’ worked as a conversation in itself; almost seeming like one is furnishing their own home, a personal space created within a public realm, albeit of fleeting permanence. Layers of fallen off wall papers are ripped down and replaced with white pigment. Behind each layer, scraps of previous papers, written words and graffiti, expose outworn intimacy and persistent worry. The remnants quarrel with each attempt of regeneration. At the end of the process, the instilled message of the artist becomes neither completely intangible nor unarticulated. It’s liminality lies in the suspension of a specific content voiced by the artist while the spoken words stem from a young Kosovar. They are a testimony of the routes one takes fighting for the right to exist, in one’s ‘own’ state or illegally elsewhere.
(Video & Audio: 9 Minutes)
Edona Kryeziu
Edona Kryeziu is an artist, researcher and writer. Working with multiple media such as video and photography, her installations deal with the topic of migration, identity, nationalism and representation. Her interest lies in breaking away from hegemonic ideas of Europeanness and non-Europeanness to question the status-quo in the E.U. as well as at its peripheries. Re-narrating the story of Europe and its Other(s) she explores new means of creating postnational art and culture.
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