A PAUSE, A ROSE, SOMETHING ON PAPER
Gerta Xhaferaj

A PAUSE, A ROSE, SOMETHING ON PAPER

Every memory is an opening. We work tirelessly to cover them up, to forget, to obscure, to repress. And yet. “A Pause, a Rose, Something on Paper” features videos that Gerta Xhaferaj started making at the age of five, when, in 1998, her parents brought home a video camera. 

A spiral is the shape of a progression of circles. 

Shot over fifteen years and capturing the mundanities and celebrations of life—weddings, friends, beach holidays—the videos were surreptitiously edited by Xhaferaj’s father, who decidedly covered up sequences he disapproved of (shaky shots, zooms into obscurities) with moving images of his garden. Roses silently enter the scene, unknowing censors. 

Memory is the money of my class. 

Before encountering these overwritten videos, visitors to Galeria e Bregdetit find themselves in a landscape of concrete gestures. Here, decay is also imposed, laid on top of photographs that Xhaferaj has taken over the past three years. Sticky bitumen waves splashed across images we’ll never know, the strokes are violent, heavy, yet fleeting. 

Enormous boulders perpetually gliding upward. 

This time, it is Xhaferaj doing the covering up. But how could she not? Since she can remember, the spaces around her have been surfaces for paving. Modernization has meant the removal of dusty roads through the smearing of concrete.

I in my chronic ideas return.
Life has become smoother, the pauses are strokes instead of jump cuts, and yet. Layers are spread over layers. Condensing, compacting, cutting off. But stilling a word, an action, a memory does not quiet it. Life in these not-so-silent terrains persists, but in pain. While working on the exhibition, Xhaferaj visited bitumen mines and the workers who have spent their lives in such spaces. 

There is tension in the connecting string. 

Her experience there was heavy, like the material, it’s weight pushing everything down. How to translate the oppression of life? Bring it to the surface, knowing that it’s always covering something else up.

* All quotes from Lyn Hejinian, “My Life”