Me N'êr me Thonë: Alternative Experience of Space
Diona Kusari
Diona Kusari is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and researcher, cultural and arts mediator based in Kosovo. She creates performances, video and sound art, installations, short films and participatory works. Her work is concerned with illustrating the 'unseen' in terms of ideology and faith, folk practices, public expression of vulnerability, and challenging the apparent dichotomies and delineation of private space (the individual) and public space (the state, society). She's part of the Potpuri Collective, which focuses on experimental research, self-organized and decentralized knowledge production. She is also part of the first collective which creates and runs cultural and arts mediation programs for cultural institutions in Kosovo.
Amalia Koleka is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer and project manager with a background in psychology, cultural and conflict mediation. She has conceptualized and led several artistic research projects, and created and facilitated workshops on various topics.
We are a modular, participatory platform that creates alternative tours, performative walks, and curated events rooted in oral histories, niche cultural practices, and the political dimensions of space. Through gamified experiences and mediation methods, we explore and reimagine cultural identity, truth, and memory, especially in forgotten or overlooked spaces. Our practice brings together community storytelling, personal narration and body-as-subject, intergenerational exchange, tools which are disruptive and/or embodied to explore critical memory and activate places in new ways.
By situating ourselves between tourism, social entrepreneurship, models of collective ownership, participatory and performative artistic practice, systems thinking and psychocartography, we act through interactive site takeovers, heritage “smashing,” urban geotagging, collective performative rituals. We utilize critical discourse around private ownership and property in public and critical engagement with public spaces through sensory and embodied exploration in private. We critically engage with the boundaries of public and private space and bring ephemeral and no-trace artistic creation to cultural-spatial terrains. We've created moving interventions, joint choreographies and films on public space design and its discourse, and held conceptual tours and workshops across art institutions in South and Central European countries, in rural and mountainous landscapes, and urban streets - working translocally, across disciplines and geographies.
Through a co-op model participants are collaborators and cocreators, interchanging the roles of visitors/nomads and local inhabitants. We've been working individually and among collectives in the past three years and are currently preparing a set of tools and methods conceptualized over the years in service of launching tours and curated experiences through a new brand.