HEDWIG FIJEN

Generazione Critica: The 100 biennial days of Manifesta 14 Prishtina in Kosovo has ended just a few months ago. The theme of the fourteenth edition was reclaiming public spaces, with the focus on rethink the dialogue with a wider audience and involve on a deeper lever the inhabitants. What were the reasons that led you to select this city and why focusing on these themes in relation to the current cultural and social context of Prishtina?

Hedwig Fijen: Manifesta 14 was the first experience of the biennial inside the Western Balkan region. This choice came from the purpose of a geographical spread of Manifesta: the idea behind was to reach new international cities and, in doing so, avoiding the risk to always end up in Western European countries.
Considering that Manifesta is a city base project, we invite the cities to send us a proposal for future collaboration: during Manifesta 12 in Palermo we started thinking about how the mafia changed and transformed the city and we arrived to the question of How could we reclaim public spaces of a city? Prishtina was inspired by this starting point and they asked us if Manifesta could help transforming public spaces inside their specific frame of a post-war and also post-Communist city. The difficult and delicate relationship inside the public sphere of the Prishtina was the context where Manifesta had to operate and act. In addition we also had to consider the influence of the turbo-capitalism that, after the war, transformed and changed the public spaces of the city. If we take in mind all these factors it is clear how for Manifesta it is crucial to build a deep and strong dialog with the inhabitants of city where it operates, with the aim of cleaning, greening and rethinking the meaning of wellbeing for young generations.

It is precisely following this approach that Manifesta differs between other biennial: we do not name our external professional curators instead we prefer to name them creative mediators. These creative mediators are an integral part of the team and are not just deciding upon the theme of the edition, but they collaborate with the local team, stakeholders, and citizens to reach a conceptual framework. During this part it is important to focus on such questions: Where are we? What does it mean to operate in political, in sociological and in ecological terms? So, we started our mission in Prishtina from an investigation of the status quo of the city: we like to define this process the pre-biennial research where we outline the conceptual framework and what we would like to do and for who. Also, it is fundamental in this process to underline what we want to leave behind as long term sustainable impact in the city and society. Manifesta is define as nomadic and we are very much looking for sustainable legacy: is not just making an exhibition but we are looking for transformation processes both on a urban scale and an artistic scale. Manifesta aims to be an incubator of changes and transformations and for being able to do it is crucial to have a strong and wide net of specialists, urbanists, architects, writers, scientists, and the creative mediators.

With Manifesta 14 we wanted to establish permanent institutions where people could tell their personal stories after the trauma of the war for a redefinition of the urban space and human connection within the city. This is the reason why we decided to focus on reclaiming public spaces and in doing so involve a quite wide number of architects. For example, we have worked with CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati, a Turin based innovative and design firm, who designed a series of symbolic interventions in order to create new meeting points for the citizens of Prishtina.

Korriku Street, 2022
© Manifesta 14 Prishtina, Atdhe Mulla

GC: Manifesta defines itself as a nomadic biennial but once the “fieldwork” has begun, a site-specific approach and a deep and constant dialogue with the entities of the place and the inhabitants become fundamental. You have mentioned the interventions of Carlo Ratti, who has made different works such as the “Brick factory” or “Green Corridor” which could reactivate and rehabilitate disused or abandoned places in different areas of the city. Which are the strategies that the team of Manifesta uses to operate on the city?

HF: We selected Carlo Ratti for his approach to participatory urbanism and his ideas on creating symbolic interventions where it is possible to show to the people how easily you can transform certain part of spaces. This approach invites communities and citizens to continue a transformation process of the urban spaces that leads to a different way of living the public dimension.

What has been done with Carlo Ratti was a real participatory process where the architects and the team of Manifesta could get in touch with the communities of Prishtina. The important of such actions was to understand what were the interests of the people and following them start a transformation in the public spaces that could fulfil their needs. To be able to do such action the team of Manifesta has made over 400 interviews with local institutions and inhabitants which made clear the problematic knots such as the privatization of public spaces during the turbo-capitalism. That brought us to implement projects which promoted free leisure time, like creating public gardens where you can sit and read or study without pay for it: the aim was to avoid commercial spaces and give the chance to the people to hang out and meet on a public dimension.
Another important element in Manifesta 14 was cleaning and greening: together with CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati, a green corridor was created that could connect different parts of the city by a system of trails and walks. In this action it was also possible to give an example of cleaning since part of the architectural intervention was made starting from materials that were already presented in the space and what Carlo Ratti Associati did was a process of re-order the space. Such simple act created a radical change in living and conceive the urban space.

This is not so much about artistic intervention, but more about architect and urbanism, and that fits pretty much with what Manifesta is: it is not only a traditional art biennial because we are nomadic and we try to get inside the society and focus on their most important issues with a geographical and social approach. Considering the specific context of Prishtina it was important to deal with the experience of the war, and maybe what we were able to do could give a sparkle of hope that after such a turbulent history and during such a contentious time with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, maybe slowly, one or two generation later, people can follow to start to tell their experiences and share their stories.

Green Corridor, 2022, CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati
© Manifesta 14 Prishtina, Ivan Erofeev

GC: As you are pointing out, Manifesta has its identity in being nomadic. This is an incredible characteristic that makes Manifesta unique in its genre, but it is hard to deal with different realities and cities. What is helping the biennial in its approach and action avoiding the risk to impose its own state of mind or manners?

HF: It is important to underline that Manifesta is giving a structure to local energy, therefore we try to create a team with the majority of members coming from the local context in which we are working.
What we can offer is a system, a model in which local specialists can work. It is not like: Manifesta flies in and takes control. We became mostly an incubator to connect different voices whilst building relationships with the key stakeholders and politicians in the Host Cities in which we operate. These relations are crucial in terms of investment: culture is also an economical factor and investing in sustainability, in institutions, in libraries, in mobility, in public spaces is not only benefit the citizens but also the economic system of a country. An event like Manifesta has multiple effects on the city and the society that goes beyond the cultural field and in this aspect Manifesta can be consider as a creator of narrative practices.

The Centre for Narrative Practice is to bring change but also leave a legacy and invest in the city, like we did with Manifesta 12 with Teatro Garibaldi in Palermo. Generating a permanent change that can continue also once Manifesta is over is the core of such approach. In Prishtina for example the Brick Factory will potentially develop in a museum and many artworks by local Manifesta 14 participants will be part of its future public collection. It is important to underline the different impacts that have occurred during Manifesta 14 because most of the time you lose them while you are in the process, but this is defining what a biennial can be and what culture can do in a period where we are facing the pandemic consequences, mobility problems, ecological issues and even a war. What can art do?

GC: Being nomadic means to be open to a constant grow and change, learning and teaching. In relation to the previous editions what are the bridges that Manifesta continues to maintain? What traces are still visible and above all what can still be experienced?

HF: What we never realize is that you need to include the legacy inside the biennale itself. The Teatro Garibaldi in Palermo remains an example in this: once we opened it to the public it was the perfect space to connect all the different participants, both from an artistic point of view and also from a politically and economically one. Manifesta 12 created a general transformation of the city under different aspects, in a material way (new spaces for culture or tourism were opened or restored) but also immaterial way (Palermo started to be seen as a profound city of culture for its cultural heritage but also for its importance inside the contemporary art scene on an international level).

What we did wrong in the experience of Manifesta 12 was that we didn’t secure the Teatro Garibaldi as a permanent cultural space. Now Andrea Cusumano, the head of Culture at that time, is trying to secure that space because there is a need of independent space where young artists or curators can make exhibition or interdisciplinary events. We do make mistakes and we learn from them, and it is right to say that Manifesta needs to listen to the needs of local communities, professional or not professional.

Another learning experience is that we don’t want to work with the typical curator anymore: we changed our curatorial criteria, and we are looking to somebody who is willing to work in a participatory way by listening to the needs of other people involved and not only in the context of art. This doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in autonomy, but this is the type of engagement we would like to pursue. These cultural aspects must be accessible not only for who has been educated in culture but also for those people who never go to cultural events. If you really want to change certain policy in the cities or transform cultural and artistic practices, you need to collaborate with the political and administrational figures inside this specific context.

CG: Which are the new aims for Manifesta 15, happening in Barcellona? Considering the many differences that can occur between small cities like Palermo or Prishtina and a bigger city like Barcellona, where you would like to focus your action and attention?

HF: What we are working on and investigating in Barcellona is the dialog between the museums and cultural institutions and the need of the inhabitants, not only the tourists one. The main questions are: Who owns the city? Who owns the cultural institutions? Ada Colau, the major of Barcellona, invited Manifesta to create a project that could involve the metropolitan areas where the people might not have a large access to cultural institutions or don’t have a mobility system that helps in connecting. With Manifesta 15 we aim to create a more fruitful collaboration between the city and the citizens, implementing the infrastructures and understanding the need of the people living in the metropolitan area.

What can happen if Manifesta creates a model of cure and care that can be extended from the city centre to the metropolitan areas? Following this question, we would like to invite collectives to work with the different communities to be able to understand which are the needs and the biggest issues inside the culture field and the ecological framework of Barcellona. In this sense Manifesta 15 is focused on theme of cure and care: reach a wellbeing in the social and cultural framework but also include an implementation of the green and sustainable environment in which it would be possible to find alternative way of living.

GC: Manifesta, thought the past experiences and the new aims for the future projects, establishes the importance of curating and caring inside the cultural context as the starting point for a bigger operation on the city and inside the society. In this sense the biennial can be identify for its interests in an emotional dimension of what art and culture can do?

HF: Education and mediation models are the core and the heart of our system: for Manifesta listening and storytelling are crucial because only by doing so you can create different relationships between humans and spaces. Cure and care are therefore fundamental. Cure what might have been gone wrong in the last years and care about a new system of interconnectivity between the city and the human beings but also the human beings themself.

Carlo Ratti, director of CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati
© Photo by Brendan Zhang