The history of misery and the latest touch on the Milky Way, 2019

Artist: Fatmir Mustafa Karllo

Venue: Prison

Through the use of many diverse media, Karllo’s practice intends to comprehend the social and political paradoxes of the society around him, by creating explicit situations that imply rigid conditioning. Places have great importance for the artist: they preserve the memory and energies of everything they have seen in the past, and continue to reflect that history in a fixed form in the present. Prizren’s former prisons open their doors to Karllo’s work. They convey dramatic events, with their walls that preserve fragments of darkness experienced by others, but that now reach us. Walls that are symbolically at the center of current political events. The history of misery and the latest touch on the Milky Way is a complex project which focuses on the experience that visitors make of a place. An electro-static Van de Graaff generator is activated as the public approaches, and direct contact makes your hair literally stand on end, thus manifesting the latent energies of the prisons. But there is another part to the project. Two separate books will be produced, the first documenting the experiences lived by visitors during the exposure, while the other will construct an epidermal memory of the place. By using the frottage technique, the artist will make copies of the surfaces of the walls of the prison, whose traces, printed with the linoleographic technique, will make up the pages of the second volume.

Beatrice Ciampa

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