Press release
DRIANT ZENELI
How deep can a dragonfly swim under the ocean?
18.10 – 23.12.2022
opening 18.10.2022 | 4 – 9 pm
Giorgio Persano is happy, for the first time in the gallery, to host Driant Zeneli, an Albanian artist who represented his country at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.
With the video How deep can a dragonfly swim under the ocean? screened in the interior garden space of Via Stampatori 4, the artist recounts the metamorphosis of a dragonfly (insectobot) that, despite being able to move its wings, is condemned never to fly. Amidst the meanders of a spectral labyrinth of water and concrete, the insect depends on an octopus to survive, but at the same time is held by it, with no possibility of escaping from its captivity. In the form of a fable, the dragonfly becomes a metaphor for the true experience of an Albanian boy, Rilond Risto, who in 1999 was convicted of a crime to serve twenty-one years in solitary confinement in an Albanian prison. Following his passion for art and technology, during his imprisonment Risto managed to build robotic insects with makeshift means.
The film was shot inside the Pyramid of Tirana, built by Enver Hoxha’s daughter in 1988 as a commemorative mausoleum for the dictator. Over the years, since the fall of the regime in 1991, the building has served as a cultural centre, private television station, discotheque, nightclub and meeting place for young people. Today, the building is losing its original form, to be transformed by the MVRDV group of architects into a renovated multifunctional space for the country’s cultural life.
Zeneli’s work is part of the trilogy The animals. Once upon a time… in the present time, set among Balkan Brutalist buildings: after the project at the National Library in Prishtina, Kosovo, No wise fish would escape without flying (2019), in which a group of children made a mechanical paper fish caught in the glass and steel domes of the building and chased by an inflatable shark, Zeneli – in collaboration with Risto, to whom he commissioned the dragonfly – made the video in the Pyramid of Tirana (2021), to close the trilogy with the final work, The firefly keeps falling and the snake keeps growing (2022). Filmed in the Skopje Post Office in North Macedonia and co-created with the students of the local Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, the video was produced by the In Between Art Film Foundation and commissioned by Manifesta 14 Prishtina Biennale.
Zeneli’s mechanical animals embody profoundly human fears, conflicts and hopes and, laden with the weight of our struggles, they move their fragile gears in symbolic places in the Balkans, whose recent history, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is marked by chronic political instability. In their attempt to free themselves from a society that – like the octopus – nourishes but imprisons, the protagonists of these contemporary tales are lost but stubbornly continue to fight: My wings used to be human hands. / Nothing human is left on me, but weight and guilt. / I have lived at the depth of twenty-one meters. / Every meter is as long as one year. / I went through it all, inch by inch. / My wings are a perfect mechanism. / They climb the ocean maze. / They touch the light and still whisper: freedom.
Artworks of exhibitions
