‘A Film In My Purse…’

A flat plain and a signpost at a crossroads marks Albania. There have been 389km of unfamiliar road between Sarajevo and the city of Tirana.

It is evening. I experience an  alarming shift in scale, and complete disorientation. I  walk to the site of the Enver Hoxha Pyramid, simply because it sounds strange and intriguing, and cannot get my bearings.   I walk around this a huge structure,  its white marble tiles now covered in graffiti and dirt.  I am told that it was built as a museum  to honor the late communist leader,  then becoming a NATO base in 1999 during the Kosovo war,  and in 2001, an Albanian TV station. It is  now part of a site where a wall monument  and  Peace Bell that has been forged out of melted bullets has been placed. It feels like a disused playground.

The rest of this space is a parking lot and a bus station. This space is surrounded by grand boulevards, wide roads, and the ghosts of rolling tanks. I cannot ‘read’ it and neither can I project on the pyramid. The graffiti covered tiles rejects the light.  I am being left alone though…

I wander around the wall, beneath the bell, across a ramp. And here I project whilst walking, whilst the image becomes a  torch. This performance become one of searching. I have also slipped out of my four minute ‘structure’.   I glimpse dark figures and they glimpse my movement.  I become more aware of my fleeting presence, of watching and being watched,  focused glimpses. It stands for something.

I start to notice an eroticism in the shifting pace of each city…

I begin to rely on repetition and the pulse of the city…

‘Between originality and repeatability, between boredom and excitement, and between the now of performance and the longed for, not yet, or never again’.

(On Repetition, Performance Research vol 20 issue 5)

Walking from the library stairs to a bridge across the Miljacka River, I pause, watch the water flow from east to west, and choose a low wall.  I seemingly attract boys on bicycles…

127 km by road from Mostar…24 hours in Sarajevo…

During the Seige of Sarajevo in 1992, the library was destroyed. Most of the 1.5 million volumes, and 155 rare books and manuscripts were burnt. People tried to rescue the books whilst under sniper fire…

Earlier that day, a man tells me that it is now the city hall, that the library sits somewhere within its new walls, that they still have some books, that the shelves are still more than half empty…

At 8pm, when the building is closed, and in an act of temporal remembrance, I decide to mount the steps to the reconstructed  building. With my back to the river, passing buses and a passer by, I kneel and project onto the front of the building. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see CCTV  cameras.

I inhale  skin/paper/ash/. Memory adoption.  Positioning my body seems crucial, slightly unstable, so I have to work hard at keeping still, and not lose the sense of myself in the space.

Paper becomes  symbolic of endeavour, echoes, chaos and collection.

‘Exilic patterns of repetition, reconstruction and release, exilic identity’.

I must have read and copied this into my own notebook before leaving,   and it now plays on my mind…patterns?

And here I am, at these doors, a small memorial act…

Tonight, a greater sense of blurred boundaries, together with the slight of hand that documents intimacy…

A twenty minute walk to Spanish Square, a peace  garden, open space as monument. An act of remembrance after the civil war. Looking for re alignment in unknown place, positioning myself in places of cultural and political shift, and listening…

Inviting delicate glances, and slips of passing conversation.

A curves wall and grass. This time I recorded sound. This time I was joined by a curious spectator, who leapt off his bike, and joined me whilst I projected… he asked many questions, and this second voice became a player in the performance. He said ‘ behind the curved wall you are projecting on,  is another, real staircase that virtually mirrors the one in your film…’

Some delight in fleeting research and following instincts. And we talked for 15 minutes…

Repetition. A woman walks up a stone staircase, but new parameters set. A projector that I cradle in my hands. A torch. New rules. 4 minutes of ‘exposure’, 20 repeat presses, 20 small gestures. Memory disruption/memory interruption. A fleeting personal ephemeral archaeology.

My screen,  a fallen stone from Stari Most (Mostar Bridge)  that was destroyed during the civil war. It lay below the new, huge and heavy, by the waters edge. The first projection. The first audience to witness. Breath slow, counting and still. Witnessing ‘repetition’ in a new way. Yet I saw nothing of this witnessing… I was as if I was blindfolded, and this took me by surprise, raising the volume of my body…

And I decide here, after the four minutes,  to close the film, and  to let the blue screen lead the way, like a torch, past the audience, up another staircase and into the crowd.

‘She walks (projection) She sits (performance) relying on repetition and the pulse of the city. Its visibility and invisibility. Its sense of place. Its geographical intricacies, and the space within her body’

How to be stark and invisible…