Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.
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Adrian Paci, AL
The Wanderers, 2021, © Adrian Paci. Photo © Manifesta 14 Prishtina / Atdhe Mulla.
Adrian Paci has spent many years examining and re-examining what it feels like to wander the earth. Predominantly working with video and painting, he has probed what it means to leave and return, to want to leave and be held back, to leave and be lost, to stay behind, to walk on the spot, to meander.
Set in rural Albania, The Wanderers contrasts two modes of walking, two modes of moving and being. Whereas the black-and-white video shows people and animals entering and leaving the frame randomly in slow motion, the colour video features a staged procession of people purposefully striding in the direction of the viewer: towards an unknown goal, an unknown place.
The tension between the two temporalities and sets of imagery transcends the work’s Albanian context. It invokes the literary or philosophical figure of the wanderer, a human being adrift in the cosmos, as much as it does that of the migrant.