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.
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.
Adrian Paci, Albanian Stories, 1997. Photo © Manifesta 3 / Cankarjev Dom.
The Albanian-Italian artist Adrian Paci worked with so-called "boat people" from Albania who had had to flee in panic from the terrors of the 1997 war. Paci described Albanian Stories as a kind of readymade film, a simple recording of his three year old daughter telling a series of improvised fairy tales. In her telling, folkloric characters like a cow, a cat and a rooster, meet soldiers and “international forces”. The half-fictional, half-real worlds conjured by the innocent narrator convey the traumatic experiences of war.