{"id":3159329,"date":"2021-03-08T08:58:32","date_gmt":"2021-03-08T08:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webalkans.eu\/celebrating-female-creatives\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T11:08:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T11:08:06","slug":"celebrating-female-creatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webalkans.eu\/en\/celebrating-female-creatives\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating female creatives"},"content":{"rendered":"\nMeet Donika, a visual artist from Tirana who is preserving the memory of an old house and its defiant owner who refused to give in to the relentless tide of urban development.\r\n\r\nMyslym Shyri is one of the busiest streets in Tirana, the capital of Albania. For decades, it was a quiet, residential neighbourhood with no shops or coffee bars. This changed after the fall of communism in the 1990s, when almost all houses and apartments turned their ground floors into commercial ventures. All except one.\r\n\r\nThis is an apartment building like many others, but on this ground floor, no shop or caf\u00e9 has taken over. Many people pass by every day, and one of the commuters who passed the building regularly was Donika \u00c7ina, a visual artist living in Tirana. She was inspired to incorporate the apartment into her performance art.\r\n\r\n<h2><strong>\u201cThere were and are so many rumours about Bia: her life, her intentions and her mental state. Her decision to never sell or rent her home for commercial purposes seems significant.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n\r\n<h3><strong>The memory lives on <\/strong><\/h3>\nDonika was particularly interested by an old lady, the owner, who regularly cleaned and painted the exterior of her ground floor flat. The lady\u2019s name was Bia. \u201cThere were and are so many rumours about Bia: her life, her intentions and her mental state. Her decision to never sell or rent her home for commercial purposes, as many others have done on Myslym Shyri Street, seemed significant,\u201d Donika says.\n\nIn 2017, when Donika started work on her performance, she found out that Bia had passed away. The house was still there, but she was not sure for how long it would remain. \u201cI needed to take action,\u201d she says, \u201cto keep the memory alive, before the house was turned into another coffee shop.\u201d\n\nAs part of her performance, Donika repeated Bia\u2019s daily cleaning rituals in front of the house. The performance was recorded by three security cameras and live-streamed on a monitor at the Zeta gallery exhibition space in Tirana.\n\nHer performance aimed to reflect on questions related to Bia\u2019s daily ritual of cleaning in front of the house: was Bia fighting the city&#8217;s perceived neglect as an act of protest? Did she consider the space in front of her house to be an extension of her private space? \u201cWe cannot ask her these questions. But we can continue questioning our involvement in public space; the meaning of our conscious actions; the impact on us of our walls, concrete and trees all being whitewashed,\u201d says Donika.\r\n\r\n<h2><strong><span lang=\"EN-GB\">&#8220;<\/span>The performance will preserve the cultural memory of the city and Bia\u2019s gesture as a fragile but significant individual protest.\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n\r\n<strong>About the project<\/strong>\n\nThese residencies are conceived within the long-term project, Beyond Matter, which is an international, collaborative, practice-based research project that takes cultural heritage and culture to the verge of virtual reality.\u00a0One of the goals of the project is to develop novel solutions for the accessible digital documentation and networked presentation of exhibitions that currently exist, or previously existed, in physical space &#8211; including artworks, artifacts, and educational materials. The project is supported through the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.\r\n\r\n<h3><strong>Standing her ground<\/strong><\/h3>\n<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>The exterior of Bia\u2019s house is still intact, even now, five years after she passed away. However, it needs some additional work in order to look as it did when Bia was alive. Recently, Donika took the initiative to build on her artistic project, by working on the exterior of the flat, and video recording the exterior in 3D, before the flat is turned into a business, like other ground floor flats in the neighbourhood.\n\nFor the follow-up work on her project, Donika applied for support from an EU-funded artist residency in Tirana. \u201cThe performance will preserve the cultural memory of the city and Bia\u2019s gesture as a fragile but significant individual protest,\u201d says Donika.\n\nThe call for residency was launched by Tirana Art Lab \u2013 Center for Contemporary Art, Tallinn Art Hall and the ZKM I Centre for Art and Media, inviting European art practitioners or theoreticians to apply for one of the three production residencies taking place in Karlsruhe, Tallinn, and Tirana.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Meet Donika, a visual artist from Tirana who is preserving the memory of an old house and its defiant owner who refused to give in to the relentless tide of urban development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3159330,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[694],"tags":[],"area-of-cooperation":[420],"country":[245],"opportunity-type":[],"class_list":["post-3159329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","area-of-cooperation-art-and-culture","country-albania"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - 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