Communing and promoting inclusion with/through the arts
The 14th edition of Manifesta, the European nomadic biennial, will take place from 22 July to 30 October 2022 in Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, a non-European country. During this time , thousands of European and international art enthusiasts will make their way to Kosovo, an isolated country with no free movement of people and no free access to other European regions, in search of art.
How can we as outsiders position ourselves in an art exhibition that is situated in such a context? What types of knowledge should we unlearn, what types of knowledge have we ignored, and what do we need to reflect on through our own practice?
With around 280,000 native speakers, Albanian is the sixth most widely spoken language in Switzerland. How available is that knowledge to us? How might the arts and our artistic perspectives come across to those in our immediate vicinity and those far away from us? Could our artistic practice create common ground where the myriad of social realities in this world of ours are actually included? Or are we only concerned with the act of intervention, with our presence in internationalized merry-go-round settings of artmaking? Could this ever be more than a neocolonial gesture? How close are we to falling into the abyss that over-romanticizes art and its (social) inclusivity, thereby reducing it to merely another instrument of exploitation?
Our lab will be a fusion of theory and practice, developed in collaboration with local partners in Kosovo. In six sessions, we will explore and contribute to an “archive” by drawing on four perspectives: the local perspectives in Kosovo and Switzerland, the diaspora perspective, and the international perspective. The lab will continue in summer 2022 with a field trip to Prishtina during Manifesta 14 to bring these aspects together in a tangible form.