In July this year, we entered the Grand Hotel through the square-metre damp and dark parking lot, built in , which, like the hotel itself, has been left neglected ever since. If you follow a GREEN dot from this parking lot, it leads you to a half-hidden narrow corridor where you have to open heavy drapes, and so present your family with their first encounter of Manifesta.
In the imaginations of my and year-old kids, Manifesta was built up to be some sort of feast, as festa in Albanian means, literally, a feast.
They are revolted and protest that this is not their idea of art, and start mentioning how hungry they suddenly feel. I understood that Manifesta, a contemporary art installation in 25 different locations in Prishtina, reflects the post-Covid mood that is dominating contemporary art in other biennales, such as Venice, where the Italian pavilion looked similar to the Rilindja building.
In this frame of mind, the lynchian, creepy, isolated and hardly used corridor of the Grand Hotel behind the drapes is an incredibly imaginative setting to place the artwork of a collective of artists and cultural workers from Kosovo, Albania, Romania and Germany who devised the video installations in the early stages of the pandemic, filming the abandoned, but normally overrun by tourists, Albanian resort of Radhime.
I suddenly start falling in love with corners of my hometown which I normally try to avoid, and I understand that is exactly the trick that Manifesta is trying to pull on all of us locals who have experienced a trauma with some parts of our city.
