Between archives, landscapes, editions, projects, and the fleeting details that reveal who we are, and what we want to be — A note about the transformation of Heritage Space into an independent platform
Blerta Ismaili, Programme Director of Heritage Space
— Since 2016, Heritage Space has been a place where artists, researchers, cultural workers and communities experiment with how heritage is made, remembered and shared. We focus on heritage representations that fall outside of conventional discourses and categories. In practice, this means supporting projects that uncover hidden local histories, challenge dominant narratives, and explore new ways of documenting our shared past. Over the years our themes have touched on displacement and resistance, urban subcultures, institutional memories, feminist and working-class legacies and the ephemeral traces that rarely enter official archives.
After seven editions, we are stepping into a new era. Heritage Space Fellowship is now a two-year programme, giving our fellows more time for research, mentorship, and production under the coordination of Idila Ibrahimi, whose background in cultural anthropology and grassroots research has been key to shaping how we work with fellows day to day. Alongside it, we’ve launched In Conversation, coordinated by Diona Budima, a researcher and writer with a deep grounding in comparative literature and critical theory who brings together public talks and workshops with artists, cultural workers, and thinkers from around the world. We have also initiated Collaborations, where we aim to build projects together with like-minded institutions and cultural workers, creating space for joint research, shared resources, and long-term partnerships.
To bring all this together and share it with the public, we have launched a new website with an integrated Archive, a living institutional memory documenting all past activities. The Archive offers open access to the research, artistic productions and public reflections that have shaped Heritage Space, serving as both an educational tool and a resource for sharing knowledge.
For me, this new life of Heritage Space is about more than expanding programmes. It is about deepening our responsibility and knowledge on collective memory and documentation practices in Kosovo. In a place emerging from war, systemic oppression, and colonisation, where many histories have been silenced, fragmented or sanitized, we insist on a broader and politically conscious engagement with history writing and heritagisation. I want to believe that we are cultivating approaches that do not document to fix traditions and histories as static symbols, but to understand them as living, changing, and negotiable.
I’m writing this note at a turning point for Heritage Space. With the launch of our new website, archive, and newsletter, we are opening up the work we’ve been building for years, not only to audiences in Kosovo but also to colleagues and communities across borders. These platforms allow us to situate our practice within wider global debates on memory, heritage, and cultural production. For me, sharing these stories is not simply a matter of communication, it is about creating a larger network for conversations, where what we do here can resonate everywhere.