La vita è un caos con poche oasi e qualche momento comico. W.A.

Adrian Paci (Albanian artist born in 1969) won this year’s Rome Quadriennale. I recently saw his work at Mart in Rovereto in the show Eurasia curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. Among (few) other moving pieces his recent video Temporary Shelter Center worth the view. This time again the artist from Albania, now living and working in Milan, is dealing with the representation of peculiar human’ conditions. The staged (and digitalised) story reproduces a pretty common experience for travellers: people standing up in line to get on a plane. But as soon as the camera widens the view the reality becomes wierd and unique. There is no plane at all. And the queue is made only of male immigrants standing still at the end of the stairway.
In Paci’s works there is often a new definition of the identity both of individuals and population (usually marginalised), and often the issue of migratory processes is implied. There is an unspoken sense of threat that brings together people in the need to move from their homeland in search for opportunities. (Or even, more frequently, emigrating in order to survive.)
The artist reflects and expresses concepts linked to a certain sense of home, human relations that become personal details as well as parts of a common experiences of life. In Temporary Shelter Center he takes the idea of immigration, and he explores it thorugh evocative (and provocative!) moments of the actual journey toward the “promised land.”
Through his works the artist is telling us his personal story as an immigrant. In some way through the aesthetics of his characters he is searching his roots, and reproducing momoires he is recovering from his parting.