Endri Dani Turns Body into Point of Contact with History, Ideology

KOCHI:
It was during a visit to a wedding celebration in 2012 that Endri Dani hit upon the idea for a new photography exhibition. Or, rather, it hit the lanky Albanian artist after he smacked his head on the building’s entrance.
“I could not enter through the door standing upright because it was as tall as I am,” Dani said. Over the next four years, he found 20 such entrances in apartment blocks across 11 cities across Albania. “When I was researching the story behind the entrances, I found them all over the country: Shkodra, Burrel, Fier, Korça, Elbasan, Pogradec, Lezha and Tirana,” he added.
That research lead to the photo series CM 182, his artwork for the ongoing third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Housed in TKM Warehouse, the exhibition features 20 pictures with Dani standing in the entranceway. The title refers both to his height, 182 cm, and his claim to be the “outcome” of Albanian politico-cultural legacy.
“I found and visited the architect. He told me that he designed some buildings for the outskirts of the big cities after the then Communist leader of Albania Enver Hoxha decided on a whim to make the entrances of the buildings as tall as he was,” Dani said.
The project was thus also a way for Dani to interface with the homegrown Communist ideology and architectural nationalism. “The slogan of Albania’s Communism was ‘Building a new human’. Because I am the generation that did not live under the regime, I can be this intended new human. I co-exist with the inheritances of the past in those apartment blocks. My body became an archive for memories, histories, solutions of the past that became an avenue to enter into the deepness of reflection,” he said.
Likening this fitting to an “anthropological exercise”, Dani said the coinciding of human and architectural height is momentary but the result of separate, yet natural processes. “Body and building follow a natural process. I am very interested in this ‘momentality’. How can the body become a moment to reflect about the past, about today?” he said.
The exhibition is accompanied by a diary of the trip, which contains critical texts from cultural theorists, architects, ‘urbanists’, among others involved in its production. It also has notes of his travels across Albania, Google Map printouts of the routes and even includes X-rays Dani had taken at each site to show how his bone structure is introduced and then integrated into the building.
“It is not uncommon to find that buildings constructed in Eastern Europe after World War II share some commonalities. They were pre-fabricated technology to solve housing problems. At the time the apartment blocks were built in Albania, we had a good relation
ship with the USSR and so the technology of building is connected with the redrawing of the map between the West and East,” Dani said.
The ongoing project will next see Dani take his search for common building traits to other countries with ties to Communism. “In fact, I even looked for anything familiar in the buildings in Kerala,” said the artist, who was in Kochi during the Biennale’s ‘Opening Week’.