ENDJE, or wander-weaving…
Endje is an Albanian word that encompasses two meanings: “weaving” – the process of interlacing threads to create fabric or patterns – and “wandering” – the act of roaming physically or mentally, without a fixed destination. These concepts are metaphorically intertwined: one can literally “weave a wandering” or “wander away in thoughts” while weaving. Both actions inspire creativity. Endje thus captures a unique blend of wandering and weaving, or a of wander-weaving, a concept that I believe to be idiomatic to Anila Rubiku’s artistic process. Along the years Anila Rubiku has created a body of work that is vast and versatile, evolving around themes from her own life-journey and roaming freely between different mediums without being defined by them. Yet, the needlework and the thread remain a constant that she often returns to.
The Wandering
Anila Rubiku began her artistic education with traditional oil painting at the art school in Albania. Being a young artist and a woman in a time when the country favored neither, she felt quite restricted in terms of access to education and possibilities for growth. Albania had just come out of a long and strict isolation and was living through chaos. The art scene during communism offered no role models of women artists, while the art education she was attending offered little to nothing in terms of knowledge of contemporary art. Determined to expand her horizon and see the wider world, she decided to leave Albania. However, one should not see this as a desperate act in search for a better life, but rather as an act of rejection of the stale situation she was faced with. Despite the many hurdles and restrictions, she succeeded in getting accepted at the Brera Academy in Milan and obtained the right to travel there. Then, on October 1994 she arrived in Milan, a big foreign city, at a time of shifting reception towards Albanians, which made it difficult for someone to make oneself at home or even find a home. This longing, or the quest for “home” as the place of belonging would become a key theme in her artistic repertoire. Despite these survival struggles, she immersed herself in research and reading, and in encounters with art, old and new. But especially she took the opportunity to travel to countries, museums and exhibitions, to get to fulfill the dream she started her journey from Albania with. The encounters with the classical and modern masters pushed Anila to rethink her approach to art making, shifting at first towards works on paper. On the other hand, the research on the history of feminist movements helped her reformulate the many quandaries about gender inequality and the women’s position in society, themes that would become another cornerstone in her practice. I would suggest that it was at this point that her Endje as wandering really started. These first years of physical and mental journeys seem to be important, not so much in deciding on what and how her art should look like, but to rather formulate questions and issues that would come to shape her artistic identity.
The Thread
These newly formulated issues combined with the need to rethink her practice, amalgamated in 2004 in the group exhibition Colors of Albania, at the National Gallery in Tirana, where Anila was invited to participate. This was the first opportunity for her to return to Albania as a visitor but also as an artist. In a spontaneous, yet deeply reflecting act, instead of presenting an existing work, she decided to revisit an old family tradition, that of embroidering on a loom. She invited her mother, a former tailor by profession, to join her in a performance in the exhibition space where they sat and embroidered on a traditional loom that had been in the family for three generations. With this radical jump in the choice of the thread as her artistic medium, Endje as weaving in its literal sense makes entry in Anila’s practice for the first time. The embroideries show a couple: a woman and a man, at times naked at times clothed, connected by the contours of a flying house. Short text snippets between them present unanswered questions that the characters seem to pose both to each other and also to us, the viewers. The work is about an act of balancing and negotiation of relations that constitute everyday life. Until this moment Anila had felt a strong need to have full control of the creative process. The entry of the thread and the collaboration with her mother unlocked new possibilities for her. It is here that Endje comes full circle, with the thread giving body to Anila’s wanderings through places, times, thoughts and themes. As she herself recounts: “I decided to use the thread to connect the Albanian Anila Rubiku of the past and my family history, with myself at the present and possibilities about the future. I also like the meditation and the time it takes to complete the weaving, and that you can do it together and learn by others”.
Ain’t I a woman?
A cluster of silky, white handkerchiefs hangs as if suspended in the air. They resemble both a flock of birds and a dreamy cloud. The floor is covered with beans, making movement challenging with the visitors having to negotiate their balance and their way with every taken step. The title of the work is borrowed from one of the most famous speeches by anti-slavery and women’s rights activist, Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), delivered to the Women’s Convention in Akron Ohio in 1851. Upon closer inspection one can notice that the handkerchiefs are embroidered with threads of different colors and shades. Miriam Makeba, Musine Kokalari, Shirin Ebadi, Tony Morrison… the embroideries are names – the names of 100 women pioneers that fought for women’s rights, social justice, scientific inventions, cultural movements and more. The handkerchiefs were embroidered in 2004 by a group of Roma women – a very vulnerable group that suffers from poverty, racism and discrimination – in Durres, the artist’s hometown in Albania. At the heart of the project is a wish to acknowledge, but also to empower through exchange and sharing of knowledge. The Roma women were employed by the artist to embroider the names of the pioneers, but she also shared with them the story of each of the pioneers, so they could get to know the hardships of the women whose names they were embroidering. Upon revisiting the project Anila felt a lack: aside from being part of the anecdote, the Roma women that collaborated with her were still missing from the picture. Therefore she decided to engage herself in embroidering the names of all 51 participants in new handkerchiefs adding them to the dreamy cloud. By elevating and placing their names among those of the pioneers the artist engages in an act of giving back and of acknowledgement of her collaborators and of the untold story of women and their often-overlooked contributions throughout history. The project continues to evolve and grow with each new iteration. The handkerchiefs have come to form a sort of silent choir singing praise to aspirations, failures, desires and dreams. The threads of lives entwine with the threads of embroidery, while the beans on the floor mess with the visitors’ feet, metaphorically reflecting the complicated paths the women in the cloud had to tread through in their lives.
The Inner Door
A poetic intimacy spreads through abstract patterns of nearly one hundred canvases of various dimensions, patiently embroidered with silk threads. Several of them remind me of Paul Klee’s paintings. The inspiration for the project comes from real objects – the inner doors of residential Milanese buildings, known also as “citta Meneghina”, designed by known architects through the span of the 18th, 19th and 20th century. After the first years’ struggles, Milan became Anila’s second home. She got to know the city in all its nooks and crannies and, in her wanderings she discovered the inner doors. Fascinated by them, she took to documenting them with a camera, not knowing at first what she was going to do with those images. The word “door” in the title hints undoubtedly at the idea of a house, a form that is often present in Anila’s work, whether as a sculptural object, or in drawings and embroideries, often with its interior depicted on the exterior. This collapse of interior and exterior, domestic and worldly, presence and absence, builds on a double consideration of the house: as edifice and architecture and as “home” – a safe heaven and comfort zone, the place where one belongs. The inner door builds on the same tension, yet it takes a different path: figurative representation has given way to abstract form and to the poetry of color, light and texture. But as Paul Klee’s paintings are not mere abstract forms, but abstractions of forms and light that he encountered during his travels (read “wanderings”), so are Anila’s canvases: abstractions of forms and light that she has encountered during her wanderings in Milan. The title is both an indicator and a metaphor. Those beautiful objects are processed and recast anew in a different texture and sensitivity, and the boundaries of architecture and emotion blur into delicate embroideries of memories and experience. The project becomes a sort of love letter to the city, written not in words but woven in threads and colors. The silky forms in front of us do not simply represent the inner doors of the Milanese buildings; they become also the inner doors that lead us to Anila’s threaded universe.
Edi Muka
