Alban Muja, Family Album, 1999 Taken at Hamallaj refugee camp, Albania Photographed by: Skender Muja © Muja Family, Courtesy of the Artist
I have seen war and have been a refugee. However, I wasn’t really aware of what that history meant at the time, and it is only now that I have come to learn more. I come from Kosovo, a place where 20 years ago, we couldn’t talk about art but only about our own existence. Here, the past taught us how to be grown-ups even though we weren’t. I often think about those who had to escape their homes and those who never returned, and those who helped us to get where we are now as Kosovars. I think about what we have experienced as individuals and as a people, and how that has shaped the country’s history.
In this light, the Kosovar writer and activist Jusuf Gërvalla has left a deep impression on me. He once wrote bittersweet poems to his mother in exile from Yugoslavia. In the 1980s, he had sought political asylum in Germany along with his brother to escape the attentions of the feared Yugoslav Secret Services (UDBA) at home. While abroad he had attempted to advance the rights and freedoms of Kosovar Albanians whose status in Socialist Yugoslavia had long been precarious. His ‘Do të kthehem nënë’ in Albanian translates as ‘I will come back, Mother’. His poem moves from aseasonal torment to a hopeful future of filial legacy exhorted by a speaker who paints a warm prospect. But the voice hints at uncertainty – unsure about its own presence in that imagined future. Gërvalla never did return to his mother. In 1982, he was found dead in Stuttgart – assassinated allegedly by the UDBA to silence Kosovar Albanians whose activities abroad were seen as seditious.
Gërvalla’s goal of a free Kosovo finally came about in 2008 when the country declared its independence to the world and began the painstaking effort to build a nation from scratch – a new country emerging in the wake of the war in Kosovo that had lasted between 1998-1999. But these eventual gains were hard won by Kosovar Albanians who have faced numerous existential crises on the path to freedom. In the 1990s, the right to use the Albanian language in certain spaces was curtailed by the remaining vestiges of Yugoslavia under Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, who had ended Kosovo’s political autonomy in 1989. As such, the region lost sovereignty on various matters including education. Kosovar Albanian students were virtually banned from public educational facilities, instruction in Albanian at secondary and university level was in effect forbidden, and media broadcasts came to a halt whilst publications were shuttered. Now considered a form of cultural genocide – this was all part of a longstanding and systematic policy of repression designed to weaken Kosovar Albanian identity and culture – which had sort of felt isolated already.
My name, their city, 2012, courtesy of the artist
You have to understand that for quite some time we were unable to travel to Communist Albania because of the country’s self-imposed isolation. Still, the country was seen by many as a sort of utopian motherland, spurred no doubt by rosy Marxist-Leninist depictions of the country on Albanian state TV that many of us watched illegally in the 1980s and ‘90s. It was a compelling way that enabled us to remain connected to our language, albeit an exercise steeped in myth as we would learn later when we arrived in a very poor and starkly different Albania as refugees at the end of the war. Even our names revealed a yearning born unsurprisingly out of nostalgia and the impossibility of direct contact with Albania: many were named after the country’s towns and cities as a form of agency. Similarly, in spite of the restrictions placed on our language in education we developed an ‘illegal’ parallel educational system that became the acme of resistance against Milošević. Committed to our language, we taught ourselves elsewhere; we squeezed into private homes, garages and basements which became ersatz copies of actual schools and universities.
Growing up, we weren’t surrounded by toys but by protest and news. Our parents were thrown out of jobs because we thought and spoke differently, but wanted to be treated equally. Goodbyes with friends and family became almost an hasta la vista – unsure of when we would see each other next, as people tried to escape elsewhere, if they could. That was the only future for some. My family decided to remain in Kosovo to raise me and my siblings, — still far from a normal education, far from child’s play, far from a normal life and far from basic economic conditions, but at least we grew up in my city and that was a consolation. When the war arrived, we were forced to take drastic steps and leave. I became a refugee.
Still from Free Your Mind, video, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.
Three years ago, I chanced upon some images of myself in a family album, in which I am shown at the Hamallaj refugee camp in Albania. What really surprised me, is that in all these images I find myself — and my cousins too —looking very happy. So, even though we were living in a refugee camp, we were still strangely happy. I guess, it also comes down to an element of relief. We had tried to escape our home in Mitrovica several times, sometimes walking for days to find shelter. During one attempt, my father was sent to prison by Serb forces that had been arresting men over the age of 18. To avoid the same fate, I lied to the soldiers and told them I was 16. The images at the camp reveal a sort of a reunion, an acknowledgement that we were all alive and had survived. At the time, I didn’t know what I might do with these images but I thought enough time had passed for me to work with this history, and not just through my own personal history, but those of others too.
My project Family Album at the Venice Biennale is the first time I’ve directly addressed the history of Kosovo. Previously, I tried to keep a distance from the experience of the war, or of what I, and my family, went through personally, choosing instead to focus my work on the consequences that followed in its aftermath. A while ago, I tried to talk with my father about his experience in prison. He was locked with over 100 people in one small five-by-six-metre room, and kept there without any explanation. This conversation for me was an attempt, one that I wasn’t sure how to progress further. Family Album, on the other hand, is the first work that addresses history including, indirectly, my own family’s experience.
It’s been twenty years since the end of the Kosovo war. If you and your family survive war, after a while you begin to see it as a very good lesson in how to treat people equally — I grew up in a place where we weren’t equal. War for me is a lesson which I hope no one experiences. Now, I try to think about all that has happened – quietly, critically and without emotions.
Family Album is up at the 58th Venice Biennale, Arsenale, Sale D’Armi, Venice, Italy from 11 May until 24 November 2019