Trailer, Video, 1’03”
A fish is trapped in a net while trying to escape from a shark. The net is part of the architecture of a National Library of Kosovo. Zeneli asks a group of children to collaborate with him to work out how to release the fish from the net and escape from the shark. They play a game, and they succeed: together they compose a narrative that will make us perceive the brutalist architecture of the National Library as something we can transform into malleable matter and the nature of the fish like that of a bird. The young team are members Bonevet: a non-profit institution established in 2014 in Prishtina which considers technology as a method to learn science, understand life and increase imagination.
The film offers us a story where the art of being wise is entrusted to children and the architecture of the National Library in Kosovo becomes a network of possibilities which are there for all of us to imagine.
Seating in the middle of the University Campus, The National Library of Pristina, Kosovo is composed by a Brutalist architecture and holds inside different identities. The decision to build it was taken in the 1970 and since then, until its final version in 1981 – with the design of Croatian architect Andrija Mutnjaković – the building changed its name three times, for almost a decade it was transformed into a Serbian orthodox religious school, and then, during the NATO bombarding, the Jugoslav Army used it as a command and control centre. During the occupation, more than 100,000 books and rare volumes were stolen or burned. Most of the 600,000 volumes survived and are kept in the best means possible. The National Library is now opened to the public and used by the students and yet.
HD Video, 2019, 07’10”, color, sound.
This is the I Chapter of the trilogy: The Animals. Once Upon a Time … in a present Time. (2019 – 2022)