Fry, Të frysh, Frymë – Double channel video and Sound installation, Albania, 2023-2024
Fry, Të frysh, Frymë – Video and Sound installation, Albania, 2024
Rituals are symbolic acts that bring forth a community without communication, argues Byung-Chul Han in his book The Disappearance of Rituals (2020). The Korean-German philosopher explains, without succumbing to nostalgia that rituals and symbols are slowly fading from the modern world, and consequently, our earthly life has lost some of its durability: “Rituals transform being-in-the-world into being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.”
As a place of assembly, a church is one of the last places that exist in our world for attention, contemplative rest and silence, in the era of the immediate, the online and the transient. It is the site for that silent community that emerges out of the repetition of rituals. The 16th century St. Jodokus Church in Bielefeld, part of a former Franciscan monastery, and renovated in 2011, is home to Kunst-im-Kreuzgang, a platform for exhibitions and interventions by contemporary artists. This exchange of art and ideas raises questions about the boundaries between speech and silence, between symbol and signifier, and ultimately between different modalities of time — the absolute present, contemporaneity, eternity, and the now.
Erdiola Kanda’s exhibition “fryj, të frysh, frymë” (It’s Just a Touch), brings into the church the reconstitution of a ritual of purification performed by her Albanian grandmother as an uncanny form of oral transmission: It is a multilayered spell, using Albanian, Turkish and Arabic which the speaker doesn’t fully understand but that is dutifully remembered and repeated, bringing us from linguistic intelligibility into the world of enigma.
The artist’s practice stems from a richly-layered post-Ottoman past: Mustafaj’s grand-parents came to Albania as refugees from Greece, in the wake of a violent ethnic cleansing campaign that displaced nearly all Ottoman-era minorities from the Epirus region in Northern Greece after World War II. The region historically known as Chameria, ethnically mixed and overlapping Greek and Albanian identities, alongside other minorities no longer exists. It has been completely Hellenized, following the practice of other newly formed states in the Balkans that prioritize single, continuous national identities.
In the eponymous video, based on a recording of the ritual, and a double-layered performance of purification through water and fire, different memory pathways and temporalities are juxtaposed. The nebulous sound, reverberating through the church, immerses the visitor into a porous boundary between speech and silence.
Born in Albania during the blurry period of transition from dictatorship to democracy, with all its discontents, prior to her immigration to Italy, the artist associates the sounds of Cham Albanian and the hermetic purification ritual, with a memory-land: Remote, shapeless, ungraspable.
In a second video, the ritual is reversed and interrogated: Attempting to light a fire on a body of water, using a natural source of gas foaming up from the depths, the artist recites a poetry text, in an effort to connect across time with her grandmother’s multilingual incantations. Two different moments in time overlap, but remain undecipherable and mysterious, disconnected from chronological time, but ultimately form an indestructible bond across generations. An iron sculpture at the end of a passage in the cloister inverts the logical sequence of the ritual: A faint light emerges from the water at the bottom of the piece, and gently lights up the faces of those who activate it closely.
The different motions and movements in the exhibition, “fryj, të frysh, frymë” (It’s Just a Touch), from restless waters, to the shapeless pathway of sound within the sacral space, to the continuous force of the hand, create an irregular rhythm, a disjointed time. It is a continuum between permanent places and ephemeral phenomena.
This synesthetic experience serves as an analytical model for the complex and elusive structure of memory. In her work, the artist has frequently explored visual topologies of complexity in different landscapes and soundscapes, connected with the psychological dispersion of memory that takes place through displacement. In the words of the artist: ”Of this prognosis of forces, all that remains are fragments, which automatically end up in the process of constructing a new memory, and perhaps save the ancient one from oblivion.”
Text by Ari Akkermans
This project was first shown in Bielefeld, Germany, at Kunst im Kreuzgang (“Art in the Cloister”) a series of exhibitions and installations by contemporary artists at St. Jodokus Church. This project was made possible thanks to Audrey Hormann, Lars Hofnagel, Anne Middendorf and the following sponsors.
Visit site: https://www.kunst-im-kreuzgang.de/
