Solitude and Multitude
Ekrani i Artit
I was invited to contribute to Ekrani i Artit festival at the Art House in Shkoder, Albania. The theme of the festival was Solitude and Multitude, and I decided to present a short film program. Here is the text from my introduction to the program:
It’s been 20 years since I made my first short film Memories, a work I made as a student; it was my version of a family history. I presented it at the Art House, in a retrospective program five years ago. In the 20 years that I’ve been around as a filmmaker, and traveled to different places, I’ve never seen a place quite like the Art House. It is special, unique, idiosyncratic, and it’s inspiring to see how it is evolving.
The event, Ekrani i Artit, translated as the Screen of Art, is put on as a labor of love, as a way to return and pay forward to the local Albanian community. It is also a way of raising a family – not just in the biographical sense of the notion – in that the art house is founded and run by Adrian Paci, his wife Melissa, and curated now by their daughter Tea. It’s housed in the former family home of Zef Paci, cousin of Adrian. Zef, also as a labor of love, translated books by Western philosophers into Albanian for the first time, to make them accessible when Albania was still emerging, after the fall of communism. I stress the aspect of raising a family precisely because Ekrani i Artit seems to operate beautifully in the expanded sense of family: in the committed labor of volunteers, friends of the family, and in the notion of friends as family.
Once a family home, a space that harbors its own history and stories, it opened up, not just symbolically, but physically as an art institution. It’s beautiful to see how it is expanding, growing, and nurturing the individuals who seek it out, pass through, and choose to return. It’s beautiful to observe how it supports the up and coming artists, how artists who were emerging five years ago have fully grown into themselves as renowned artists.
The Art House fosters and strengthens an existing network. But beyond the local micro unit, beyond the family home, the local community, the city, the country, the Art House reaches out into the world, to return with new connections, bringing them full circle, only to extend out again – in resonant feedback loops. It is these feedback loops, that seem to grow organically here, that any art institution should hope to foster.
It’s my honor and pleasure to be back at the Art House, five years after I was first invited, to revisit and observe, to participate and contribute. I return with a carte blanche, a program titled Personal Narratives, Family Myths.
Family is what we are born into or what we choose intentionally. Family is who we are related to by blood or who we choose by intellectual, emotional, or in some cases, artistic kinships. Family is a basic unit of society.
Family narratives, in the broadest sense of the notion, shape our identities as individuals. Family histories are constituted by the experiences of relatives and ancestors, but also of those who we select by affective relation, as chosen kin. They are the stories told, whispered, and handed down; but also those erased, obscured, forgotten; and those retrieved, reconstituted, reimagined.
These films don’t deal with family history in any strict, literal, or any conservative notion. They oscillate between fact and fiction to varying degrees: by staying as close to oral history as possible, by intentional use of prose, by forging imagined relations, or navigating internalized myths.
These films may show us that these family narratives, whether true or imagined, inform the way we perceive ourselves and the stories we tell.
Kicking the Clouds, by Sky Hopinka
Into the Violet Belly, by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Off White Tulips, by Aykan Safoglu
Oh, Butterfly!, by me.
With Thanks to the artists for letting me contextualize their work this way, to Tea Paci for inviting me back, and to the Goethe Center Albania for bringing me to Shkoder.
All documentation photos below by Gys Vela, except for the last two photos.
