The story of a restaurant turned into a gallery space int he '90s.

"...Hani i Dy Robertëve was born out of a desire to create a space for artistic expression, an alternative space for the times, but it became a mission. During that time we organized over hundred exhibitions. It is there that the '90s generation made itself known and exhibited. Had it not been for Hani, most of Kosovo's renowned artists might not have been around today. This is the generation of Mehmet Behluli, Sokol Beqiri, Zake Prelvukaj and Gani Gashi, whose works were burned down together with the Hani, a bit before the end of the war. Hani as a space was an intersection between diplomacy and arts."

Photo here.

By 1991, after Slobodan Milošević’s legislation making Serbian the official language of Kosovo and the removal of all Albanians from public service, Albanians were excluded from schools as well. The reaction of Albanians was to create a parallel system of education hosted mostly by private homes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uRPbkrspO4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7r9KUdP3Zg

http://www.huckmagazine.com/places/huck-indies-bikes/pristinas-youth-writing-destinies-kosovo-2-0/

http://oralhistorykosovo.org/the-story-of-post-pessimists-1993-2007-seen-from-my-perspective/

Ode to My Mother

The friend (the spider - why the spider?) because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and as useful as a spider. She could also defend herself, and me, by refusing to answer "stupid," inquisitive, embarrassing, personal questions.

Drawings of the spider - Ode to My Mother.

Source: Louise Bourgeoise, Deconstruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, published by MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.326

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is a 1979 book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in which Gilbert and Gubar examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar draw their title from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife (née Bertha Mason) is kept secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband. Context provided by Wikipedia

Jane Eyre: "In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure run backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not... tell: it groveled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face."

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, New York, 1960, p.295

Erëmirë's comment: The dwelling of Bertha Mason's madness is the attic, the dark nonproductive space of her mind, a space commonly inhabited by spiders and their webs. Both Bertha and Arachne have been removed from the sphere of power, demonized and rendered marginal. The pairing of Arachne and Bertha is not accidental, Arachne's art of weaving was qualified as nonproductive because it told stories that contested larger narratives produced by gods [such as the rape of Europe], while Bertha Mason the not-quite-human-Other, the white Jamaican Creole who is not-yet-European, she destabilizes the narrative of white Europe. So, removing the distance between her and animality - discursively - is easier than bringing her closer to europeaness.

Like a true oral historian, Arachne refuses to weave narratives as told by the gods [accept the dominant narrative]. Through her political praxis i.e. weaving, she resurrected a narrative that remained below the radar and thus told a story which seems to have destabilized normative criterion of knowability and that infuriated Athena.

Here's a great oral history interview sequence: http://oralhistorykosovo.org/hava-shala-interview-sequence/

[unlike linear] nonlinear temporality is a feminist proposal to resist liberal individualistic modes of doing politics. Organizing politically in a nonlinear temporality involves creating situationist feminist politics; nonlinear activism is one that does not construct origins but mobilizes different political consciousness and creates many subject positions.

Women are the "sex" which is not "one." Within a language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable. In other words, women represent the sex which can not be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity. Within a language that rests on univocal signification, the female sex constitutes the unconstrainable and undesignatable. In this sense, women are the sex which is not "one," but multiple.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Routledge, p.13

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm5vZaE8Ysc

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There were many problems