Letter from Kosovo

Abstract

Most prominent among them was Turkish artist Hera Büyüktaşciyan, whose intervention - a blue fabric strip that tumbled down from an invisible source within the Prizren Fortress - traced a stark blue water line across the hill on which the fortified castle stands, until it came out through the empty doorway of a house under construction situated near the river bank. The stone-clad building, which houses the Museum of Electrical History of Kosovo, seemed a fitting venue for Agnieszka Polska's mesmerising immersive film installation The Thousand Year Plan, 2021, set in post-Second World War Poland and ostensibly dealing with the electrification of the countryside by the fledgling communist state. What Kosovo arguably lacks is a purpose-built art exhibition space, which explains why the lion's share of artworks included in this third edition of the Autostrada Biennale were exhibited in public spaces and out in the open, at unconventional and imaginative venues, making virtue of necessity.

Out in the Open

The very name of the Autostrada Biennale holds the promise of a journey, such as a road trip along the awe-inspiring highways that link the far-flung corners of the tiny landlocked state at the heart of the Balkans. For the first time, the artist-run biennale that Leutrim Fishekqiu, Vatra Abrashi and Barış Karamuço co-founded in 2014 spread from its base in Prizren to two other cities in Kosovo whose names also begin with 'P': Prishtina and Peja - the three connect to form a triangle. Making good on its titular promise, 'What if a Journey...' channelled visitors from one end of the country to another along the eponymous Autostrada.

My own journey began with a ferry crossing from Bari in Apulia over to Durrēs in Albania; several hours, a broken bus and a taxi ride later, I finally made it to Prizren in time for the mid-afternoon muezzin call echoing across the city centre with i ts numerous mosques. Despite Prizren's multi-faith population, the number of mosques apparently rises with the construction of every new road that is financed by Turkish building companies - a tacit trade off. Prizren-born Doruntina Kastrati's interview-based film When It Left, Death Didn't Even Close Our Eyes, 2020, screened above the city at the Castle of Prizren, documents the plight of construction workers building Kosovo's highways, hired for a pittance by the likes of the Bechtel-Enka joint venture which reportedly operates with total disregard for their safety.

That evening, at the welcoming party held at the Autostrada Biennale's Education and Production Space located within the former KFOR (Kosovo Peacekeeping Force) Hangar, we were served flia, a Kosovar and northern Albanian staple consisting of densely layered savoury pancakes cooked for hours, often by the roadside, in a special round dish covered with a hot iron lid lined with charcoal. It was prepared for us by Fejsal Demiraj, who used to work as a souschef at René Redzepi's Noma restaurant in Copenhagen before returning to Kosovo during the pandemic with a view to opening his own place. A collaboration with the London-based duo Cooking Sections, this edible artwork started as a conversation about bread and the appeal of reintroducing local varieties of grains in a bid to foster more sustainable agriculture, one that uses fewer chemicals even if this means lower yields.

Stones used for grinding wheat could be seen in the garden of the Pintolli Mill, one of the few extant mills in the city, which has reinvented itself as a cafe. The next morning, I bumped into curator Joanna Warsza, who was heading there with the members of the Haveit collective ahead of their performance scheduled that afternoon. Warsza presented Haveit - two pairs of sisters based in Prishtina - as a Kosovar version of Pussy Riot. Photographs of the sisterhood, posing outside tea houses and other public places that traditionally draw an all-male crowd, were displayed inside the cafe in the same space in which the four women, sporting white wedding dresses for the occasion, would later ceremoniously pour out tea, freshly brewed before our eyes.

The Turkish-Polish curatorial team - Övül Ö Durmuşoǧlu and Warsza - made for an interesting mix of local and international artists, several of whom hailed from Turkey and Poland respectively. Foreign artists were often coupled with someone working locally, be it a fellow artist, an artisan, an activist or a chef in the Cooking Sections-Demiraj pairing. Sao Paulo and Istanbul-based Camila Rocha's collaboration with filigree masters from a local workshop thus resulted in a jewellery line inspired by her botanical illustrations in the 'FloriKultur' watercolour series. Facilitated by activist Edis Galushi, Polish artist Małgorzata MirgaTas's meeting with members of Prizren's Romani community led to the creation of large-scale textile works depicting remarkable Romani women, displayed side-by-side on the brick walls of a house located right by the Lumbardhi river.

Spanned by several bridges, the river is the city's main artery and its lifeblood. But Prizren once had an extensive network of stone channels that carried water to nearly every household. A number of Biennale artists engaged with the city's river, and its hidden waterways and lost springs. Most prominent among them was Turkish artist Hera Büyüktaşciyan, whose intervention - a blue fabric strip that tumbled down from an invisible source within the Prizren Fortress - traced a stark blue water line across the hill on which the fortified castle stands, until it came out through the empty doorway of a house under construction situated near the river bank. The lyrics of Bora Baboçi's polyphonic composition The Waters of Prizren, 2021, came from a book of poems celebrating the city's water fountains. The Albanian artist discovered the poems during a research trip to Prizren and then set them to song, using her own voice for the sound recording; the tracks were projected amid the hydraulic machinery alongside her own delicate pastel drawings suspended from the ceiling at Hydroelekrana.

Situated upstream of the Lumbardhi and hugging the cliffs, Prizren's diminutive hydropower station comes with a garden and artworks of its own, namely in the shape of the Kosovo Electrification Map of 1978-79, which connects the region's electricity generation points by a web of threads pinned to the stucco map designed to show the geographical features in relief. The stone-clad building, which houses the Museum of Electrical History of Kosovo, seemed a fitting venue for Agnieszka Polska's mesmerising immersive film installation The Thousand Year Plan, 2021, set in post-Second World War Poland and ostensibly dealing with the electrification of the countryside by the fledgling communist state. Installed in a dark room beneath the crenellated roof, the work was projected onto two facing screens with a bench in the middle of the space, an arrangement that forced the audience to alternately view one screen or the other. The film's minimal narrative builds towards the dramatic encounter between two couples representing opposite sides of the political spectrum: communist engineers and disaffected nationalist partisans respectively. But it soon veers into the uncanny dimension, graphically rendered through flickering veins of electricity outlining the features and faces of the four protagonists, shot through with light in the lingering close-ups.

Polska's work presented certain affinities with Rossella Biscotti's La Cinematografia e Varma piu forte (Cinematography is the strongest weapon), 2003-07, referencing the slogan with which Benito Mussolini opened the Cinecittâ Studios in Rome in 1937. The phrase was projected as a still image on the main screen of the indoor movie theatre at the Lumbardhi Cinema in the city centre. Named after the river, this beautifully restored cinema, whose modernist outdoor screen would do any city proud, hosts the yearly DokuFest, which has been going for two decades and is a testimony to the cultural vitality of Kosovo's second city. What Kosovo arguably lacks is a purpose-built art exhibition space, which explains why the lion's share of artworks included in this third edition of the Autostrada Biennale were exhibited in public spaces and out in the open, at unconventional and imaginative venues, making virtue of necessity.

Agnieszka Gratza is a writer based in Rome.

My own journey began with a ferry crossing from Bari in Apulia over to Durrēs in Albania; several hours, a broken bus and a taxi ride later, I finally made it to Prizren in time for the mid-afternoon muezzin call echoing across the city centre with its numerous mosques.