The in-betweens are further examined in the work of Anita Muçolli, born in Switzerland to Kosovar parents. Muçolli considers the effects of a constant, limbo-esque state and the growing sense of distance from the idea of home. Her newly commissioned installation stages a room covered in green upholstered velvet, printed with scans of various documents and their abstracted fragments. Amongst them is a letter addressed to the Swiss migration authority, responsible for matters of asylum and residency, confirming that Nefise Muçolli, the artist’s mother, was pregnant and expected to give birth on October 5, 1993. The doctor requests a delay in deportation (Ausweisung) by approximately three months, to allow her to give birth and recover safely. The child was Anita.
Often associated with ceremonies and award backdrops, the velvet carries connotations of value and reverence. Here, it bears a precarious bureaucratic plea, one that existed at the intersection of staying or being deported. The softness of the fabric resists the cold neutrality of the administrative language. In this dissonance, Muçolli creates a warm ‘home’, with soft walls that invite the visitors to lean in while listening to the accompanying sound piece, producing a tension between institutional erasure and embodied experience. The sound piece, composed by Julia Sharifullina, uses videotapes recorded by Muçolli’s father during their early years of migration in Switzerland: birthdays, New Year’s celebrations, and city views, intended to be sent back to relatives in Kosovo. These ambient sounds are overlaid and mixed with added, artificial sounds to create a cinematic soundscape.The work probes how visual narratives of migration are preserved and circulated while sound is often omitted. It asks: which sounds are collectively associated with the past, and who determines which ones are worth remembering? The green velvet recalls the color of the family sofa Muçolli grew up with. She reflects on the constrained process of homemaking faced by many immigrants, whose sense of belonging is often alienated by systemic bureaucracies that deny them agency over how and where to live. In such conditions, furniture is often inherited or found in pre-furnished apartments, making home a temporary arrangement, a state of limbo. The social ecosystem and its familiar codes, inscribing themselves onto the histories and bodies of those who migrate, often remain incomprehensible to a bureaucratic system built on statistics and formal categories. She questions what is meant for her parents to inhabit a country not as guests, but as undocumented individuals?
Muçolli grew up hearing stories about animals in Kosovo, told by her father as a way of connecting her to his homeland, an abstract place in her head. This formed her first imaginary bond with another homeland, blurring the line between fear and desire. Inspired by memories, archival family photographs, and inherited stories, such as the spider crawling from the ear of a misbehaving child, or her mother’s fear of snakes. Across the gallery, Muçolli’s sculptures reflect on the intergenerational knowledge and the desire to maintain cultural specificity while navigating estrangement. Motifs of snakes, an ever-present figure in Mucolli’s life, appear in these sculptures. Despite her mother’s dread, she always felt drawn to them, observing how irrational fears survive over time, even in environments where this fear is not justified. She suggests that there is a heightened baseline for anxiety amongst those who migrated that persists even when material stability is achieved, a fact often unacknowledged. She does not attempt to resolve these tensions. She renders questions tactile, creating a temporal zone of endurance and illegibility. In doing so, her work asks how the body remembers what the system forgets. Hana Halilaj, curator
