|
ART REVIEW
October 1999
“ARE YOU EVERYBODY?” |
This expression was a common first greeting to fellow Kosovan people,
when they saw each other for the first time after the war. It was
a quick way of finding out whether there was anybody lost from their
family.
Anglo-Albanian artist Lala Meredith-Vula exhibited in Damien Hirst’s
Freeze and represented Albania in the 1999 Venice Biennale, returned
to her family home in Kosova in July to work for the Red Cross and
to develop a new body of work called “Are You Everybody?”Shortly
after the liberation of Kosova by NATO troops in June, I was invited
to go with an assessment team for the British Red Cross as interpreter
and consultant. My father and half sister had spent the entire siege
in Prishtina, whereas other members of my family left their homes
burning behind them and fled to Albania.
I had mentally prepared myself before leaving to find terrible things.
Friends and neighbours destitute, dispersed or dead. All the familiar
streets and landscapes devastated. Which building would be spared?
I prepared myself to hear unimaginable tales of suffering. To see
a place that had so inspired me destroyed. I thought of media images
of Kosova and Bosnia.
The countryside looked beautiful but ghostly as I drove through Kosova
the first time. There were signs of people returning home. UNHCR tents
were being put up in shells of burnt homes. Some farmers had started
scything the fields and others had already made haystacks. Each haystack
seemed a symbol of hope. The landscape was littered with burned cars.
There was something very ruthless and systematic about this burning.
Every burned out car made me think of who the last occupants were
and whether they were still alive. Occasionally there would be a horrible,
almost intoxicating smell, which the other aid workers told me was
the smell of rotting human flesh.
In Peje I was invited to see some of the damage in different homes.
In one house, two brothers had been shot and their bodies burned at
the door, three months before the NATO strikes. I was surprised to
find in the wreckage of their house, near to where their bodies were
found, a hydrangea bush in full bloom. I sketched a view of this scene
of contrasts.
On to Gjakova town, which resembled Vukovar or Berlin in 1945. The
streets were full of rubble. I found the sites of some of my previous
images of Gjakova life: they were now in ruins. The 15 century Ottoman
library I’d pictured before was reduced to a façade,
with its windows framing the sky. My uncle’s home was a heap
of bricks and burned timber. However, when I approached the commercial
area I saw that it was business as usual. Some people had set their
stalls up outside their bombed out shops, using burnt timbers and
projecting wires as places to hang their bananas or clothes from.
I was overjoyed to see a people that had suffered so much and whose
community had been shattered and traumatised, resilient and getting
on with things.
I would discover amazing positive events through all the wreckage.
On approaching a burned farmhouse I met the family living in a tent
at the back surrounded by white geese. In the offensive all their
animals had been slaughtered and thrown down the well to contaminate
the water, and the family hid five weeks in the mountains. When they
returned one of their geese, that had survived all the shelling in
a brook near by, returned with ten goslings which were now grown up.
In another burned house the grape vine covering the terrace had been
spared and was laden with fruit. Every living being, every intact
object, was a monument of survival against all odds.
We visited many primary schools to assess the damage and maybe propose
a reconstruction programme for the British Red Cross. The first school
in Koronicë village had had the library and the headmaster’s
and secretary’s offices burned. It had been the site of atrocities
and there were many clothes and other evidence littering different
rooms - even Yugoslav Army boot marks against the doors. The headmaster
and his son had been shot dead there, and the village itself had 73
men missing. Mass graves were found but left untouched for outside
observers and the UN to identify and bring bulldozers.
When I reached the next school, at Babaj Borkes, a chilling pattern
of systematic destruction was revealed. School after school, even
if not totally destroyed, had had books and learning equipment and
documents burned. “As if cutting the head off an animal”,
said one teacher. Many people gathered around the schools. As we looked
at them they were touchingly grateful and asked for nothing more than
to be visited.
Each day brought dramatic changes to Kosova. The landscape became
increasingly populated and buzzed with activity. Electric cables were
put up. Roofs repaired. Burnt out ruins and rubble gradually disappeared.
Commerce returned bit by bit to the devastated streets. Some land
was being ploughed and crops planted, late as it was in the year.
The schools were transformed first, and it was moving to see that
communities would start with clearing primary schools before their
own homes, as they were significant public buildings and a sign of
the future. “We are starting again from zero”, said one
villager. When he was questioned about his anxieties for the oncoming
winter, with his house burned, no crops secured and a family of 21
members to feed, he replied: “Now I can sleep without fear of
being killed at each moment I have no worries. We are privileged.
This joy is the product of extreme suffering. We are the privileged
ones. We have survived.” He addressed me from an old car seat,
the only thing he had salvaged from the wreck of his farmstead.
That villager symbolised for me the whole paradox of Kosova –
so much destruction, so much resilience, so much hope. Yet killings
still continue. Neither side is innocent. I have seen the terrible
things people can do to each other, but also how the human spirit
can rise above adversity. I believe this will have a lasting impact
on my work.
Lala Meredith-Vula
|
|
