Two Journals
Nita Deda
Two Journals, led by Nita Deda and edited by Rina Meta, showcases an archive of collages and notes by artist Vjosa Shala (Loca), documenting the socio-political landscape of her upbringing. Spanning from age 11 to 20, the diaries capture the tumultuous period from the late 1980s to the Kosovo War of the late 1990s. The project digitizes the diaries through photography and transcription, making them available on an online platform for annotations. This layered approach interweaves voices and perspectives into an evolving intertextual document.
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Programme
HS Fellowship
Timeline
04.01.2020
—08.06.2021
Mentors
Project Lead
Contributors
- Artist: Vjosa Shala
- Editor of the online platform: Rina Meta
- Annotations: Elida Lawton O’Connell, Rina Krasniqi, Sezgin Boynik, Toton Pllana, Vjosa Musliu
- Website: No Plans
- Digitization of materials through photography: Blerim Racaj
Formats
Time
09.06.2021
My parents tried hard to hide their fear about the turbulent situation in Kosovo at the time. Perhaps the diary, the need to document time, was an unconscious way of coping with the fear I felt. - Vjosa Shala
The journals of artist Vjosa Shala – Loca – date from 1988 to 1999, a decade marked by the loss of Kosovo's autonomy, violent protests, and the descent into war. For Loca, this period represents the transition from childhood to adulthood. She was 18 years old in 1999, when the Kosovo war reached its peak, and it was then that she stopped writing in her journals.
Almost 20 years later, Loca presented these journals to Nita Deda, who recognized their storytelling importance and decided to work with the material in a way that would make them publicly accessible.
I'll never forget the moment I flipped through the journals for the first time, because it was like a rollercoaster of the 90s, like the best movie to convey the feeling of how those years were in Kosovo. It is a material full of contradictions. One one page you have a news article about the police beating a child and n another you have flyers of parties... This is what's interesting to me, this pillar of resistance of youth through a desire to have a normal life in an entirely non-normal context like that time was. - Nita Deda
Blue book
Brown book
Pictures
Besides the practice of collecting, scraping, and sticking found material in her diaries, Loca also took photographs of her life as a friend, a student, an actor, and an activist participating in the protests of the ‘90s.