Albania

A Place in the Sun is a hybrid video installation, where live acting, puppetry, 3D animation and an original sonic score, converge to form a fictional theatre staged in Zaum – the transrational experimental language of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, created without grammatical or syntactic rules.

The work of Genti Korini unfolds against the backdrop of a Bloodless Murder magazine and its Albanian Issue (1916), published by an avant-garde group based in Petersburg. The magazine satirized nationalistic views on Albania, portrayed through a prism of exoticism, as exemplified by Janko Lavrin’s book In the Land of Eternal War: Albanian Sketches (1914). It later became a point of reference for the absurdist puppet theater play Yanko I, the King of Albania, performed in Zaum language in a private studio in Petersburg.

A Place in the Sun, on the one hand, takes Albania as a case of a “somewhere place”, invariably defined by external and internal projections. On the other hand, it becomes a poetic expression of invisible cultures and minor languages.

The irrationality of the Zaum, explored by the artist, constitutes both the structure of the work and a possible diagnosis of the state of the contemporary world, linking the disquiet of the present to the unsettled dreams of a century ago, when borders, language, and identities were in flux.