However, there’s also something about the warm light we emanate as women. What keeps me dancing in the face of some of what I’ve seen is the power of intergenerational circles of women who’ve held me and supported me, communion, laughter, cooking, practices of conservation, that unique combination of softness and strength. A particularly feminine grace. This exhibition was made in an effort to pay homage to the small beautiful creative ways in which girls and women the world over manage to live, work, play, and exist, despite, and resisting, the parameters of a world dominated by violence.
This exhibition is about our (Kosova) napkin trading practice specifically, but it is metaphoric for our general tendency to me rrujt (guard and love and conserve) beautiful light-hearted things that are vetem per na (just for us.) This practice goes as far back as the 60s (my oldest interviewee was 89), carried right through to my own post-war epoch. Through aunties, grandmothers, sisters, friends, cousins, daughters, many collections were passed down generation to generation. Unfortunately, in my city (Mitrovica) most homes were burned during the war. My interviewees of the pre-war era talked about their collections burning, but also how they started again with helping their young daughters in the 2000s, my own generation.