First Apparition

Notes

// Excerpt “A stage for fiction within ones own domestic space is reminiscent of the presence of dreams. In fact, living with a fiction does start with the dream. Saccadic eyes. Rapid eye movements. Like cinematic productions filmed in the studio, fragmented sets disappear as soon as the scenes are filmed. The space of dreams makes sense only in real-time, it will never be able to reconstruct itself into a solid archi- tectural blueprint. However, this disembodied stage is not an oneiric space. The space is real. It has been carved through the wall. Now the window frames a fragment of reality in the adjacent room that can constant- ly change based on the angle of vision. More than self-healing, this break seems like a wound that needs to stay open. To mend a broken sequence, do I need to perform a backward looking gaze? The back- ward looking gaze, is like the nostalgic aftermath that follows any rupture. Like the reflex that make our sight switch to the opposite di- rection of a rapid turn of the head so as to retain the continuity of an image. While the body moves forward rapidly, the reflex is dragging the past along.” Excerpt from the text First Apparition by Bora Baboçi -- 1 of 1 -- --- // Full First Apparition, Article and Intervention, 2023 Apartment and studio of the artist First Apparition is an intervention in the studio/apartment where I currently live, a famility appartment in my childhood neighborhood where I returned after years living outside of Albania. Commissioned by the magazine This is Badland Vol. 6 “The Untold World” , the intervention meant taking down a walled up window in the appartment that used to be an exterior window pre- vious to the informal construction that happened in the area in the 90s which found this exterior window overlooking the yard, circumscribed by newly con- structed rooms and for the past twenty-five years serving as a painting frame in the living area. A frame within a frame always reminded me of an altar, a reverence to a hanged painting, an iconographic image through which to see the world. The taking down of the wall was a symbolic gesture of replacing this alter- piece with a kind of threshhold, a possible space of fiction, a composition that could serve as the stage, where depending on the different angles of site, a variety of scenes could be seen by the viewer. Ficton here, more that fantasy, means the narratives that surround these environments, while these theatri- cal tools, as means to explore and have a critical engamenent with the themes of home, return, nostalgia and the more grounded realities of a city in fluxes. The intervention was also acompanied by a written article, that concluded in the presentation of a theatrical script piece - which also served as the first performance in the space - The First Apparition. Impossible to be seen as it was suggested that it was happening outside the composition, in the article of the magazine, the script was introduced as the possibility to image how a performance would look when delived in published form. The article served to introduce this newly crafted space, as located within the home and studio, in its yet dormant condition, awaiting to be activated as a stage for theatre. -- 1 of 1 --