ArcHitecture, DISPATCHES Art, muSic, ArcHitecture, Film, SHoPPing, newS And tHingS to mAke And do… Art, muSic, ArcHitecture, Film, SHoPPing, newS And tHingS to mAke And do…
under tHe inFluence
Anri SAlA on gAPS
portrait tim gutt
GrowinG up in AlbAniA, my very first contact with art was very different from what you might expect.
Politically, the environment was closed – anything after Post-impressionism was forbidden, and all the
books that represented any period beyond that were banned. when i was between ten and fourteen, i saw some
of these forbidden things. At that time my mother was director of the national library, where they had
what is called – in French – le font noir, the ‘dark store’, in which they would store anything that was
banned. Although it was highly illegal, when you had a connection (like my mother’s), you could see these
things. And then you had banned books that were ‘going under the table’, smuggled from one house to
another. very often, if the book in question was about art, images would be missing, because somebody
liked them so much that they had cut them out. Sometimes text about an art piece would be missing too.
You could read a very interesting text but about something that was not there, and this led you to imagine
what might fill the gap. For me, art is all about trying to fill the void and the fiction this can create.
i am influenced by ruptures, like the sort that happened in Albania at the end of the cold war, when there
was an immediate change in values and perspective. when you’re used to these ruptures, you constantly have
to dance with them, and be it a political change or the jump from baroque to country music [as in Sala’s
video Air Cushioned Ride, 2006], the things on either side are different enough but ultimately very much
related. Intervista (1998), a piece i made very early on, dealt with footage of my mother at a communist
Party meeting in which the sound was lost. the only way for me to find out what she said was to take the
tape to a school for deaf/mute children. they understood everything except for the only words that i could
understand myself: marxism/leninism. this thing (marxism/leninism), which is highly abstract, meant
nothing to them but a lot to me. i feel a closeness to all meaningful/meaningless gaps. How do you jump
from point A to C when B is not given? You have to replace it with fiction, but not with fiction that has
to reassure or force some meaning. when i talk about filling in the gaps, i don’t mean to say: ‘let’s fill
the gap because i can’t stand the void.’ i kind of like that the void is there, be it political,
grammatical, accidental or created.
Anri SAlA iS An ArtiSt living And working in Berlin. HiS moSt
recent london Solo SHow wAS At HAuSer & wirtH
ArTrEvIEw 30
Dispatches_Anri Sala.indd 30 5/12/07 09:36:00
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