ADRIAN PACI
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ADRIAN PACI
Adrian Paci began to pave his way on the European contemporary art scene with works which were very much based on a socially problematic narrative. His first video work is all about a story, a very simple one, a tale more precisely. It is a strange story, almost fiction coming out of the small mouth of a child, no beginning and no end. The artist’s little daughter tells the story of their family, the story of a troubled country, an intimate aspect of it, with no big words and TV sensations, which media do not go for because it might not be of interest. The day he heard his daughter tell the tale to her dolls, he felt his country’s story was compressed within her unintelligible words. Another work by Adrian Paci, Behind the Wall is an attempt to construct an interface between what happens every day on the liquid surface that divides Italy from Albania and what we get to know of these events. The action is very simple: the artist sails on a motor-boat, collects water from the Otranto canal, talks to the sailor, is questioned by the police and continues his journey back. There’s like nothing special in all of this. But this action by Paci has a strong symbolic content. Can one stage death, or even play it? We first saw the video Vajtojca by Adrian at the editing studio where it was produced, inside an advertisement agency, and I won’t forget the reaction of the people working in the big office space. There’s an overt thing in the song of this lady, her words, their weight and sound are beyond human reach; when hearing it, even if one doesn’t understand Albanian, your mind is taken by some old gruesome spirit which seems to sweep over the whole place. I don’t know what her relation to Death is, as a professional lamenter, but what I know for sure is that her voice and words bridge the gap of the human incapability to experience Death while being alive. All this Adrian manages through offering himself to the lamenter, putting on his “death shroud”, lying down on the bed as dead people are laid out, calmly listening to what the voice of old might say about him. When he finally stands up again, and shakes hands with her, the viewer feels the necessity of taking a deep breath, and feels so grateful that it was nothing but a play. Excerpts from: Edi Muka, “Behind the Wall or Stereotypes of Barriers”, published in the catalogue of the exhibition Short Stories in Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano, 2001. |