Looking at Culture: some remarks on Shifting Borders
by Ian Jeffery

We are aware of the existence of tradition. At least we remember that our parents had a certain way of doing things and that their lives were structured differently to our own. It is, though, hard to grasp that tradition properly, and hard to see it in other than sentimental terms. Normally it is presented as no more than tradition, as picturesque recollection. Lala Meredith-Vula, taking pictures in Kosova and in Albania – areas with a surplus of tradition -, has decided to make use of the idea and to apply it as a template for the present. We know, when we think about the past in which our parents lived, that it is in some respects better than the more complicated present which we inhabit, but we usually leave it at that and get on with our lives.

She invokes the old world in the simplest way possible, by means of a traditional dress – of the kind you see on postcards and displayed in folk museums, and still worn from time to time at special events. An actress, sometimes the artist herself, then appears in contemporary venues, in a street by a shop façade, in a ruined building or just down on the farm. Thus she juxtaposes old and new, and we are able as a result to think about the life of bygone villagers in contrast to the culture of contemporaries exposed to satellite TV and all the ingredients of the contemporary scene.

There is a lot more to the project, however. The pictures, in reality, amount to a test. They make up an experiment involving the actress and her associates, plus the scene itself with its contemporary inhabitants. There are certain venues, you will notice, where that traditional dress does not look at all out of place – especially in one picture of a domestic scene where an older woman prepares a child for bed. The elements cohabit naturally, as they do in a series of pictures which show the gathering of persimmon fruits amongst a complex network of branches.

Preparing for bed and gathering fruit are timeless activities and you would expect them to be compatible with traditional costume. It is likely, too, that the actress herself recognises that these are part of the traditional fabric of life and that her responses needn’t be out of the ordinary. Harvesting fruit, for instance, you have to look for the item and carefully detach it, which entails an unselfconscious act of attention. There is another interesting picture in which two people sweep a street whilst the artist and an assistant make preparations in the foreground. It is probable that street-sweeping is another of these timeless acts of attention which we can only take for granted as somehow part of the way that the world fundamentally exists. So there is no need to respond to the sweepers and the acting duo go about their work quite normally.

Sweeping a street and washing a car aren’t so very different, you might think, but they call out quite different performances from the actress. Confronted by a car-wash site in the Midlands of England she looks thoughtfully into the distance, and well she might for these sort of valeting services are manned by Albanians and seem to be part of a national franchising system. The actualities of washing vehicles, that is to say, count for very little in comparison to the social and economic significance of the practice. She is reflecting as she sits there, not just on that particular place but on everything that it might represent: business arrangements, social mobility, immigration and emigration, economic opportunity.

The photographer, performing as she does, comments on the place of the individual in culture.  At the most comfortable level, which involves the portable and tangible things of the world, there is no need for histrionics – or at least they are not elicited. At the next level, which is that of abstractions, there is, however, no natural response, for abstractions can’t be apprehended and encompassed. There is a beautiful picture here of the preparation of raki in an alembic arranged in a farmyard. Chickens dominate the foreground, which they investigate for foodstuffs. It is a natural and practical scene to which the photographer simply bears witness. In another set of pictures two of her assistants, also in folk costumes, present themselves in front of an extensive landscape, made up of a valley with a river and distant mountains. Landscapes (understood in this instance as a view across an extensive piece of ground) may belong to actuality but they participate too in the great idea of the nation. We have our being in a particular place, usually somewhere like the farmyard, but when we think of the nation we think most likely of lakes, mountain ranges and of the larger features of landscape seen from a distance. Confronted by such large ideas, however, we may well become uneasy for unless we are truly heroic and constructive the idea of the nation is too much for us to act on.

The photographer makes judgements on what might be called a range of existential possibilities. She recognises a paradigm which takes into account the near and the far, with intervening stages. Here around us are the things that we can touch, and with which we are comfortable – and in whose presence she acts normally. Out there though exists society and the nation, in which context we don’t altogether matter as individuals. In one poignant image she searches amongst the fragments and debris of a ruined building, looking for evidence. She is consulting history, which is not just a big idea but so complex as to be incomprehensible. History, represented by those shards, has reduced her, almost to the level of the fowls in the farmyard. But at one point she achieves equilibrium, standing in the rain in front of a memorial to a group of dead villagers, men and women. They had been killed by the roadside and the memorial, on a platform of rough concrete, does them honour one at a time. At some level they may represent history and the nation but the memorial remarks on them as individuals, fellow citizens and identifiable. Thus the relationship with the witness is symmetrical and homoeostatic: like greeting like. The memorial scene stands at the mid point in the paradigm, for, although it touches on both nation and history, the rain, the unfinished concrete and the commemorative pictures themselves refer us back to actualities, to the kind of environment in which we are most at home.

On the evidence of Lala Meredith-Vula’s experiment she and her fellow actors are most at ease amongst materials which come to hand. Faced by bigger and bigger ideas, though, she (and ourselves by implication) becomes more uneasy, more aware of acting or of having to find a response to circumstances which are impersonal. It is likely that we already know that this was the case, but it is as well to be reminded of it. And not just that: the pictures may be at first sight about Kosova, Albania and the predicament of the people of that region, but after a moment’s reflection it turns out that it concerns everyone. And what good judgement to do the acting oneself, for trained actors might have gauged their response to there changing scenes. As it was, the photographer and her friends could only improvise their responses, taking the citizen’s point of view: comfortable, composed, uneasy, hysterical – and believable enough to make it seem a reliable experiment.