“Let me put it to you this way, my friend: some say this is Serbia,
some say Albania. The Lord only knows which of the two it really is.
So who owns this accursed plain where we spilled our blood, the
Blackbird Plain, as they call it? It was there, my brother, that the
fighting started – a hundred, maybe even two hundred years ago.”
from Three Elegies for Kosovo
Ismail Kadare
An architectural commission for the Filigran craftsmen of Prizren
The symbolic power of the land in territories fractured by war generates a frenzied urbanism and architectural expression that bears witness to the traumas of a population. The political dynamics of Kosovo have been associated with oppression, expulsion, violence and genocide, as the country’s name conjures in the minds of many who remember the Balkan wars of the 1990s. In fact, it has long been a contested territory, sitting at the threshold between the Ottoman lands and the Mediterranean; its soil, rich in minerals and metals, the prize in tribal battles that have swept the Slavic lands for centuries.
Kosovo has been a United Nations administered territory for the last decade, since the NATO bombings which drove Serb forces out in 1999. Having recently declared independence, the country of ‘Young Europeans’ is having to equip itself with the organisational mechanisms that will allow it to develop on its own terms. With this comes the responsibility to develop sustainably, in environmental, social and cultural terms.
This Urban Tooling project combines the necessity of economic development with the importance for weaving a true social coherence into a society that remains, under the surface, divided. It proposes metabolisms of vocational training, apprenticeships, guilds and cooperatives – as alternatives to a ‘paper education’ – which focus on crafts, trades and hand skills, and in this way seeks to instil the art of making as a vehicle for binding diverse peoples. It ‘en-tools’; it will suggest potentials for urban alterations while handing over the mechanisms for realisation to its inhabitants. Prizren becomes an urban workshop, within which is embedded and interwoven a human, urban and ecological infrastructure.
hi crystal, your project looks great. I was in prizren in 1998, so have different memories of the place. what struck me then was the huge difference between the rural albanian and serb cultures only just outside prizren and the modernised urban elite in the town. Also interesting is that a short donkey ride over the hills (one of the most porous borders in the world) gets you to the lawlessness of northern albania. yet many ethnic albanians in Prizren owe their lives to that short route over the border over a decade ago. chrs pete
ReplyDeleteHi Pete,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, and sorry it's taken me a while to respond; somehow the Free Unit links and my own blog (which I update more regularly) are out of sync.
Have you been back since 1998? What were you doing there then? You must have witnessed Kosovo at such a critical period; the repercussions still so palpable in many ways now - understandably.
I was in northern Albania, travelling on my own, last summer; it wasn't the easiest, and it was actually a relief to get to Kosovo away from 'bandit country' (Koman, Bajram Curri, Shkodra), beautiful as it was.
And the rural-urban dichotomy is also one that persists; the scorn with which my Kosovar friends refer to the 'village people' borders on the vitriolic. I think I might write something on this in the blog.
By the way, you can follow the updated blog here - http://crystalwhitaker.blogspot.com/
Cheers
C