The film was exhibited on a continuous loop for 72 hours at the rear of The Palace of Youth and Sports, overlooking the parking lot and train station—sites where people were gathered and forcibly deported to Bllaca during the 1998–1999 war in Kosova. The installation was curated by Donjetë Murati.

Film poster, designed by Gëzim Ramizi.

Installation announcement poster, designed by Gëzim Ramizi.

The installation on loop for 72 hours, from July 7 to 9, 2021.

Photography: Majlinda Hoxha.

Moments from the public gathering.

Photography: Majlinda Hoxha.

The following text was written for the HS Edition V Catalogue (2021).

Genc Jakupi
DUR GUR MUR

by Diona Budima

Translated into English by Ron Krasniqi

DUR GUR MUR by Genc Jakupi is a short film that follows a little boy as he wanders around an abandoned train station. Using a surreal and non-linear cinematic language, Jakupi explores the relationship between difficult heritage and memory, taking his own memories of experiencing deportation to Bllacë during the war in ‘98-’99 as a starting point.

The Kosovar audience immediately understands the reference to the exodus, during which Serbian forces violently expelled almost half of the Albanian population, though the film never addresses this history directly. Curated by Donjetë Murati, the project is shown on loop for 72 hours on a large screen installed on the western face of the Palace of Youth, opposite the parking lot where people were gathered during the expulsion before being sent to the train station. “The installation operates as a thread that connects non-linear memory processes as it expresses one of the common ways of violent deportation,” writes Murati. “[W]ithout referring explicitly to the location of the crimes committed, the piece explores dark heritage and the ways in which it operates on a physical and sensory level.”

This refusal to make an explicit reference, on the one hand, and the emergence of the body and affect as frames of interpreting dark heritage, on the other, go hand in hand and construct an essential productive tension upon which the film stands. A series of images, gestures, and words are brought together under a common denominator, but the latter is covered over—present, but inaccessible. This, in a way, becomes the film’s thesis on the effect that a collective traumatic event exercises on individual bodies and on memory processes. The film unfolds as anti-narration and anti-story—but always in a dialectical relation with these two.

The audience is thrown into the scene like in a vacuum—we do not know who the characters that appear are, where they came from or where they are going. There is a measured resistance against linearity and purpose. Through the little boy’s movements, the film outlines an inventory of objects and linguistic articulations that are empty, obsolete. Objects to which something has happened, which something has transformed and of which only a shape remains. The film opens with a scene in which we see a girl grasping an onion tightly, squeezing it and removing its layers as if she wanted to draw out of it something that isn’t there, while at the same time repeating the pronunciation of the word “porsi,” which carries no meaning, but only leaves a trace as a sound. Afterwards we see a clock that does not work, whose hands the little boy moves as he pleases; we see some mannequins dressed in railway workers’ uniforms and some clothes hung over the railway tracks (this being perhaps the most reminiscent image of the exodus that we see in the film); and, at the end, the train and the station itself are empty, non-functional, and frozen in time.

In his work, Jakupi investigates “how memory lives in motion, how it spreads from one body to the next.” He is interested in the ability of movement to transport one in time and to unlock memories that survive in the body, a survival that is unconscious, intuited and unrepresentable. By repeating on the stage movements that are linked to hazy memories, Jakupi thinks that we can discover access to some sort of liminal and temporary space that carries the signs of the past on the body and the affects. “What is needed is repetition,” says Jakupi. “The body remembers.” Indeed, the body remembers and repetition is the way in which memory manifests on the body.

In Freudian psychoanalysis, at the origin of repetition lies the repression of a traumatic event. “Repetition happens in place of remembering,” explains Alenka Zupančič. Traumatic events are not just repressed experiences, they are something that “could never register as an experience in the first place” (Zupančič 107). Trauma pierces a hole in the symbolic order—in language and in the subject’s placement in time and space—interrupting in this way the ordinary processes of creating meaning through language. Though it has real and tangible consequences, trauma cannot be understood and calibrated by means of consciousness. In the film, for example, the interruption in language appears overly straightforward in the way reading shifts from a horizontal alignment to a vertical one:

DUR TRUNI

GUR or DRUNI

MUR GRUNI

What creates sense is not the ordinary meaning of words, but their formalist and phonetic elements; the effect of language’s materiality on the sensible and the body.

This alternative form of meaning-making, apart from being a sign of an interruption in consciousness, serves simultaneously as a tool for transformation and, ultimately, play. The little boy, played by Ersin Muhaxhiri, reminds us of the children in the films of François Truffaut ("The 400 Blows") or Albert Lamorisse ("The Red Balloon")—he inhabits the same contrast between personal freedom and the harsh reality, the sincere sense of adventure and curiosity. The little boy plays: he climbs on the train, explores objects and rooms, draws; the train station turns into a playground, language into a code to be deciphered. Thus, playing expresses itself as recuperation, appropriation, and transformation of a dark heritage. “Playing… is adapting, it is the possibility of turning things into a positive,” says Jakupi. “I do not want to view [the expulsion] as a bad period; I am enriched because I have lived that experience.”

Works Cited

Zupančič, Alenka. What Is Sex? MIT Press, 2017.