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.
- a
- b
- c
- d
- e
- f
- g
- h
- i
- j
- k
- l
- m
- n
- o
- p
- r
- s
- t
- v
- w
- x
- y
- z
Driton Selmani, RKS
Love Letters, 2018 – ongoing, © Driton Selmani. Photo © Manifesta 14 Prishtina / Majlinda Hoxha.
“I wish you were a plastic bag so that you could be eternal”. Coined by Driton Selmani, this epigram is one of hundreds to fill the pages of his notebooks. At the moment he transferred it to a plastic bag, it became a love letter, one of the multitude of missives to everyone and no one the artist has been composing since 2018.
The idea for this expansive body of work emerged out of the realisation that love is to be found as much in the shopping lists your partner sends you – buy four aubergines, a bottle of olive oil and something to go with the tea – as it is in a poem, a letter, a text or sext message.
Covering topics from politics to ecology, from art to philosophy, the plastic love letters function as a kind of journal to last ten thousand years, as an ongoing documentation of everyday epiphanies and postulations, desires and anxieties.