You enter through an opening that was once a display with metallic voices and RGB writing, behind it was nothing but everything, soon there will be life, in the meantime there is food, straw and sticks. Between the noise of the Balkans, which is his bildungsroman, and the soundtrack of New York lies the symphony of Mallorca’s nature. A other love one would say here.
Sislej Xhafa (Pejë, 1970) was distilled from this Blue blossom, the result of a two-month stay in Deja. An experience accompanied by readings that ranged from current topics to Sant’Agostino to Yourcenar, with room 15 becoming a monastic cell and a laboratory, a place of research and listening to loneliness, a gateway to relationships and questions the importance of individual and collective freedom, the social structures, the complex systems that organize life in the ecosystem, ultimately the dialogue between nature and culture.
Sislej Xhafa’s Blu Blossom project
For this reason Blue blossom It is a hybrid and alien being, a surviving form and avant-garde at the same time, a process in progress. With the ATM body – the ATM of the international circuit, which transforms the digital dimension of money into the materiality of currency, a symbol of exchange and possibility, a sign of modernity and change – which suddenly becomes a nest, an archetype of protection which is the most symbolic and moving of all places. Paradigm of essentiality, fragility and resilience, exposed to the wind and the seasons, floating and always hanging, distant but intimate, landing place of long migrations and ground zero of new buildings. Sislej sensed the codes of a secret harmony. But the poetic dimension of escape and implantation in dialogue with the ATM gate – aka money – also retains the screech of metamorphosis, the imbalance between origin and civilization, the weight of imagination, the immanence of power – economic, social and cultural.
The Hola Project, a work within a work
The radicality of the nest, a metaphor for the existential dimension, also reminds us that nothing escapes relativism, the migration of meanings and functions when they lead to different perspectives of use and exchange. Compliance with the spirit of the place and the spirit of the times found perfection in the project Hello, starting with the very white sheets of the now dated hotel. With these weavings, which were temporary nests, Sislej created Xhafa 265 squares on which he imprinted his hand with paint as a greeting gesture: Hola is a work within a work, a gift to all the people who work there, a gesture of gratitude that consolidates relationships, memory and knowledge. Because each of them, each guest, each creature that inhabits the ecosystem, seeks a nest – a radical desire that connects – the nest of nourishment and care that welcomes common life. Starting with money, we come to value.
Cristiana Colli