I was born in '86 in Kosovo,
so the beginning of the nineties,
it is filled with fears and memories
also of a kind of apartheid
that we went through
as the Kosovo Albanians.
'99 was a war between Kosovo and Serbia.
The sounds of battle
could be heard from miles away
at the Serbs want to
capitalize on the defeat
they inflicted on ethnic
Albanian rebels.
Villages are thought to have fled the fighting.
This is a kind of Orwellian scenario
of attempting to deprive
a people and a culture
of the sense of past
and the sense of community
on which it depends.
Once they get to the border,
thousands of refugees begin
living in tents,
rationing water and food.
Many have lost everything,
including their ID,
their personal history
stolen by enemy troops.
Education was less and less accessible.
Cultural events were totally absent.
So anything that would approve
that you as a being would kind of
share your culture or your identity,
this was censored.
What we see here in exhibition
magnified in scale
are fragments that come from
these 38 drawings
that I did for Giacomo Poli,
the psychiatrist that I met
in a refugee camp in '99.
He came to bring a programme to us
kids, and the programme
was not to make therapy
through language,
but to find some tools
that would go beyond language.
And he chose the drawing
as a way to communicate with us.
They were telling about the experience
we just had in Kosovo in the war.
The reason why I came back to these
drawings was shaped
by the events of today,
and that has to do with, kind of a failure
of the change of position
of different countries in a
diplomatic level.
We started the conversation
by analyzing them as complete drawings.
What we realized that the drawings
were not only one way, like seen
as evidence of war and coming
only by the reality.
The drawings also had the imagined war
or war scenes, and
that was coming from the biggest fear
that I had in the war
of how we would end up.
Or the scenes that I saw
in the media that were iconic images
of massacres or events.
The other side was imagined landscapes
and also places in the same time
that I have seen or the birds
that I've never seen.
I started to cut them more
and more like things
would start to happen.
There were figures
that I would recognize, or things
would become just as silhouettes
or would go more in the
direction of abstraction.
I'm interested to bring
together the soldier
and in a way, a peacock
and, and why
and how one changed each other
and how this is a not a one way
conversation in a way
kind of free this personal history
and also collective history
from a static framing of it.
So this was the Runik house
before it was burned.
And then when I draw, actually, the
the house that was burned,
which is this - it's
I draw it, as I imagined
that it was burned because we just heard
from the neighbours that they burned it.
And when we came back,
I was impressed how similar it was
like this, this smoke that
comes out of the windows and that paints
basically the walls with black.
Like, looking back after 20 years
like, and analyzing all of this,
it was just really crazy
to see how actually
inside the drawings, both the reality
and the imagination were present,
Well, we were trying
as a kid to understand
the mess that adults brought us in,
if I think about the precise moment
when I did this interview.
It was when I and
my family left the border,
but my, my father
and all other men were other side.
And so many other people
were inside the war.
So in a way, through the drawings
and through the interview,
I knew that he was looking
to the drawings as evidence.
And as a kid, I really thought
it would be amazing.
In a way,
the international community
and people knew what
was happening in Kosovo.
I trust on a combination
of different systems
and different groups
that not necessarily are all agreeing,
but that art can be
this very important bridge
as a meeting point.
When two groups of people
fail on seeing the same thing
or actually see exactly
the opposite things of the same story.
This requires a long time
to heal and to change
those visions, you know,
and to to bring new visions in a way
that people see something new again
to accept one another's space
that is needed.
These oppressive powers
and, like powers that
were trying to keep certain systems alive,
I think that's what they failed.
They failed to see the beauty
and the diversity in a way.