How to Cite: Stempka, Thomas. "Balkan Eyes: Surveying Pristina through queer eyes". Dearq no. 40 (2024): 64-72. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq40.2024.07
How to Cite: Stempka, Thomas. "Balkan Eyes: Surveying Pristina through queer eyes". Dearq no. 40 (2024): 64-72. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq40.2024.07
Thomas Stempka
thomas.stempka@student.bau.cat
BAU College of Arts and Design of Barcelona, Spain
Central University of Catalonia, Spain
Translation by Thomas Lampon
Received: December 15, 2023 | Accepted: June 14, 2024
This paper explains and discusses the experience and process of a workshop held in Pristina, Kosovo, with the theme of Queer Urbanism. Six participants from different backgrounds were tasked to explain their personal stories relating to their city. Comparing historical antecedents from art and architecture while discussing various lines of queer theory, this workshop constituted a laboratory of methods and practices that weave through the possibilities that Queer Urbanism can generate.
Keywords: Kosovo, queer urbanism, performative architecture, tactical urbanism, storytelling, artistic research.
SCHPLAT! The globule of unexpected expectorate crashed into the sidewalk one meter from our feet, seeping into the crack in the asphalt road surface. The assailant? An unassuming 70-something man dressed as one's grandfather would on a Sunday walk in the park. We had just asked him if we were going in the right direction to the Corso (main plaza) of Peja. Two dissident bodies who would stick out in most environments, let alone a provincial regional capital in Western Kosovo: a 2-meter-tall entity with a penchant for clashing patterns and dangling jewelry, and Vanessa, a slightly shorter goth-tinted transwoman. We were used to the stares of the local populace in this town abutting the Accursed Mountains, feeling their eyes on us as we tracked down out-of-the-way mosques and converted Serbian Orthodox churches on the side streets. Having visited rural areas of the Balkans many times before, I was more than accustomed to the stares of passers-by. Shopkeepers refusing us Wi-Fi passwords and walking away after taking our order in a café: strange but not unheard of. However, at first this elderly gentleman appeared to be a much kinder soul than the rest. Asking him a simple "Yes/No" question in Albanian should not have been a problem. He stopped and listened, looked us up and down and then, raising his weathered eyebrows to meet our eyes, violently spat at us and crossed the street. Vanessa shrugged it off and kept walking, but after some steps, I turned around and saw the man pointing at us and chatting with a neighbor. A few minutes later, we found a sign pointing us towards the Corso, a buzzing plaza where the stares and glares were tempered by the punchy cocktails.
After our Sunday jaunt to Peja, on our sunset-soaked bus ride back to Pristina, I remembered my first meeting with Vanessa. I had asked the Pristina-born glamazon for travel tips, and she recommended Peja as the best option for a day trip from the capital. As I was in the Balkans alone, I asked her to come along as a partner-in-crime/interpreter. "Of course! You are big and foreign. If I go with you, they won't bother me and I can finally take pictures of my buildings," she gushed. Big and foreign? Yes. Ready to accept the role of private security in rural Kosovo? A step out of my comfort zone, but, recognizing my bodily and geographical privileges, it was an unmissable opportunity to see the country behind the gloss and glassy towers of burgeoning Pristina.
My current PhD research lies at the conflux of queer theory, queer bodies, urbanism, and how we read/change public space. Whether it be a walk to the supermarket, performative artistic actions on a busy sidewalk or physically hacking urban features to create new uses for them, each pedestrian has the potential to remake the city as they see fit. The only way I see a possibility to explore these links with queer eyes is to embody queer by weaponizing its latent power. Queering urbanism by queering the research itself.
The colonnades and corridors that make up what we now call Queer Urbanism have their foundations in 1994's Queer Space exhibition at the Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York City. The creators and curators of the exhibition asked about the spaces we inhabit: "How can minorities define their rights to occupy spaces within the city? How can such space be legitimized, given a history and a future? Is it even physical space that is in question, or is it the space of discursive practices, texts, codes of behavior, and the regulatory norms that organize social life?" (Storefront 1994). Some 15 years later the phrase "Queer Urbanism" (Goh 2011) would materialize, after several organizations in New York (such as FIERCE, Q-Wave, Queers for Economic Justice, and the Audre Lorde Project) started to fight against the heteronormative hierarchy of city planning.
The past three years of my life have been spent exploring, examining, and dissecting the theme/possibilities of a Queer Design (Voss 2020) of the built world around us. Queer Urbanism brings forth notions of fantastical urban environments, inclusivity, and futurity. Ever since I read Olivier Vallerand's (2020) Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space, it has been a thorn in my side, a constant drip of dopamine and/or consternation in my skull and a vigorous five-finger squeeze encircling my heart. This book scraped together various artistic and architectural projects of the past few decades, weaving them in and out of the more theoretical bases of queer theory. The book opened my eyes to the notion of place in academia, but it still seemed to follow the classic form of research, citations, and quotes. It seemed only natural, then, that I would use this realization as a stepping-stone to explore various forms of research which would question and prod the subject at hand…. The only way I could do the word "queer" justice was to queer my research methodologies. As sociologist Patricia Leavy succinctly put it, "sometimes a conventional methodology comes up short" (Leavy 2009).
As a three-time architectural school dropout, I was never a fit for the icon-adoring ways that have historically dictated architectural education. The iconoclast within found much more inspiration in the trouble-makers and enfants terribles of the visual and performative arts. Late to the party though it may be, even the Old Boys Club that is Architecture is starting to raise the topic of queering (Jobst and Stead 2023) as the patriarchal hierarchy is being slowly but surely dismantled by a younger generation eager to create a more equitable, open future. After I finally graduated from an art school, my PhD research was informed by artistic practices-as-methodology. I dove headfirst into personal artistic projects on the streets of my adoptive home of Barcelona, taking part in absurd parades in costume, playing with and falling in love with urban infrastructure and public spaces: activities that were interspersed with performative interviews with local thinkers and creators. Performing architecture and weaving interviews into the streets. Creating poetry not just about the city, but creating poetry with the city. Artistic research methods not only give us a new perspective on the data we collect but also question the methods of how and why we collect it. A heterodox methodology of generating what Donna Haraway refers to as "situated knowledge" (Haraway 1988)—epistemologies that place the standpoint of the subjugated over the singular objectivity of the oppressor—regarding the city and its queer bodies can serve to "overcome the notion that there is a single observable truth [which] has of course been used to silence and marginalize lesbian and gay lives and experiences" (Binnie 1997, 229). Combining artistic and ethnographic research methods seems to be the most comprehensive form of navigating the topics at hand. And their own history of questioning traditional methodologies could be construed as quite queer itself.
In December 2022, I was invited to give a presentation at the IPAU 2022—the International Platform in Architecture and Urbanism in Pristina, Kosovo. While living in Austria, I had visited Pristina yearly between 2016 and 2019 for various artistic events and workshops. An off-the-radar art capital of the Balkans, this young city was a never-ending supply of inspiration to me. From a "professional" architectural perspective, it was a hot mess: sidewalks that abruptly threw the pedestrian into maddening traffic and open sewage pits next to chic boutiques with nary a batted eye from passers-by. To my eyes, it was the epitome of how a city can be seen as queer: disheveled and chaotic, with too many layers to make a succinct description of the streets possible. Naturally, while presenting my research into Queer Urbanism there, I couldn't help but pose the question to my audience of whether or not they viewed Pristina as a queer city.
Following conversations with friends in Pristina, I began to talk with Shtatëmbëdhjetë (17 in Albanian), a cultural center that focuses on Art & Education, Cultural Activism, and Space. It has filled Pristina's clogged arteries with art talks, workshops, and performances since 2018. To get my desired variety of perspectives, we posted on social media to find an intimate, diverse group of citizens within and outside of academia. In our conversations, we decided that a two-week intensive workshop to explore the idea of Queer Urbanism in the context of urban Pristina would be the best method to examine the duality of the topic at hand: the role of queer bodies in the city and queering the city, in a more architectural sense. A design workshop has its drawbacks (Elsden, Tallyn, and Nissen, 2020), but we envisaged a flexible format, affording us wiggle room in this wily city. And thus, "Trouble-making Place-making: The Workshop" was born.
Figure 1_ Workshop Poster. Source: The author.
On the first day of the workshop, we did a round of introductions: from 20 to 45 years old, a poet, a zine writer, a stripper, an architecture student, and a cultural curator. All had a deep interest in architecture/urbanism/Pristina and were intrigued: "What do you mean by Queer Urbanism?", was their first question to me. "If you want a quick definition, you came to the wrong workshop, my dear, we are here to explore what it could mean." Following our first roundtable on what "queerness" meant to each of us I presented my personal cannon: clips of Ocaña walking the streets of 1980s Barcelona, Divine traipsing down the sidewalks of John Waters' Baltimore in the 1970s to more contemporary art/architecture/performance hybrids: Allan Kaprow/Fluxus Happenings in New York, Allen Wrexler's mobile architectural units mounted on his body, and Willi Dorners "bodies in urban spaces" performances twisting human bodies around urban infrastructures. Presenting my own works alongside these old standbys, I raised a few questions: What did they have in common? As the participants discussed the subversive and boundary-challenging aspects of each work, the light bulbs began to flicker above their heads: "They question their surroundings," came out of the air, perfectly timed to end session.
Our debate centered around the basics: How can we queer a street? Can we queer a street? What is more potent: temporary performance or static structures? With participants from various generations, the ideological space between personal definitions of "queer" came to the forefront, as well as a questioning of whether we can use the term for something that happened in the past (Preciado 2015).
Not wanting to follow the well-trodden path of an architectural workshop by asking them to pick one site in the city for a project, I gave them 5 prompt questions to expand how they look at their city:
Given two days to contemplate these sites, everybody sent me coordinates without further details, and I mapped out a route to walk around the city. It would be an incredibly intimate and personal tour of Pristina, an opportunity for them to showcase their city to this foreigner. What followed was a 5-hour walk full of incredibly poignant and touching stories of first love, childhood memories, accidents, violent attacks, the first spliff, and the best ice cream.
Figure 2_ Walking through Pristina. Source: The author.
We finished on the footsteps of the National Library, my personal favorite space in Pristina: a landmark with galactic architectural styling and striking lights floating above the surrounding park. We discussed everyone's spots, commenting on similar stories of our own, drawing connections between strangers in this small city commenting on the importance of site specificity and innate genius loci to the learning process. Informally chatting on the steps of the library, surrounded by the teenagers in the corners smoking weed in the shadows, and the couples discreetly holding hands on the benches between the oak trees, we had a front-row seat at the ballet of the urban realm. We parted ways, slinking back into the concrete corridors of the city.
I deliberately dropped the word "queer" from my vocabulary for the entirety of the last session. I did not want the workshop to be about beating them over the head with these words I hold so dear to my persona, to my artistic and my academic work. Quite the opposite, I felt that if I wanted them to tell stories that they felt queered their personal narratives or to pick a place they wanted to queer or felt could be considered queer, it should come from them. Some of the older participants sensed the direction the workshop was taking: "This is the old printing plant which was a nightclub when I was in my 20s, and it's been abandoned for the past 10 years. It's been vacant for years, crumbling to bits, but we still go on the rooftop to watch the city lights… I guess this is a place that I would consider queer…isn't that what you want?" I feigned confusion and said, "No comment. Today it's you who are doing the talking."
Figure 3_ Abandoned Printing Plant. Source: The author.
During a four-day break between classes I offered my services as a guide/mentor/friend in case the participants wanted to discuss some projects or issues with the city. I texted them individually with some personal highlights and a follow-up for the next session, asking them to send pictures and bring items to make a collage. Now it was time to bring back the good word "queer". For many queer people, the term is a minefield of personally held beliefs and an onslaught of what others perceive it to mean. For some of us, it's a badge of honor, used to network and find a sense of commonality on this strange rock we inhabit. At other times, it feels like it's just another way to pigeonhole humans: "they dress queer", "they act queer", etc. There is no right or wrong way to go about being queer: it's a choose-your-own-adventure novel. "Above all else," I ranted to my newfound friends, "to be queer is all about the personal." It's about embracing all the nooks and crannies and hidden muck involved in being human. Self-discovery, self-hate, self-love: it's all there. At this time, some of the participants told stories about coming-out, family issues or their own musings on "queerness". They discussed whether they felt they wanted to be called, or if they felt, queer. This again produced a range of responses. The lone cis-heterosexual in the group opined that he joined the workshop to open his mind to another perspective on how to see the city.
Obviously a well versed academic, he read queer theory, but never felt that the real-world examples connected to him or to his story. Within our sharing circle, discussing the Pristina tour and how we view the city or feel towards it, he was gaining a new perspective on using queerness not only as a signifier but as a tool. It was clear the workshop was not going to end with the grand finale I had hoped for. Despite a feeling of failure to fulfil the initial promises I had made to the women who run Shtatëmbëdhjetë—wasn't this exactly what I wanted? I hadn't come to Pristina just to complete a four-day academic workshop, ending with a classic gallery exhibition, had I? These talks and one-on-ones with the participants became more intimate, each one feeling more comfortable than the previous day as they told me their stories. One participant had saved up for weeks to attend the course, which meant a two-and-a-half-hour journey involving two bus transfers from their small farming community to take part in something in which they could fully live out their non-binary existence and be called by their chosen name. Another told me about their walks around the city where—as in most of the world—to be an openly trans individual was to come under constant threat. But this workshop was about giving participants the power to see the city as a product of their own creation, through their movements and actions, as opposed to a handed down map of buildings and streets.
With two days left before the last meeting, the entirety of our time was spent conversing/questioning instead of creating objects for a final show. The planned gallery exhibition at the end of the workshop was canceled. Most of the participants were taking part in the process after school or work and felt pressure to complete some sort of output by the end. I told them that it was not the spirit of the workshop—the spirit of queerness—to demand some pre-determined outcome. If they felt their idea was best explained in person, by a poem, a poster, or future actions that could not be completed in two days, that option was also open to them. This is the other great power of using a queer perspective to examine your surroundings: you are not held to society's or to any institution's imposed viewpoint. Queerness is freedom to act according to your own fragmented calendar, to act in your own time and on your own wishes. As Jack Halbestam (2011) enjoins us in The Queer Art of Failure: "Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures." When I started this ramble, I started to lose the participants a little. I saw the confusion in their furrowed foreheads: "But let's meet Thursday and work some more and see what we can make together," almost in response to their unasked question: "why should we come anymore?". As it turned out, only two of the six showed up on the last day. The bevy of responses made it clear that perhaps my loose reins did not meet everyone's needs correctly or—in heart of heart's hopes—that they listened to my advice and went out to disrupt their quotidian lives and are now living their best queer-ed lives.
For the two that showed up to our final workday, their engines were in overdrive, with each telling me they really wanted to show me something before the day was over. Being my best helicopter mom/art teacher, I floated around the room watching them grab pens and pencils with such joy, unneeded scraps of paper being stomped under the busy footsteps of creation.
The first person's project was a take on a public library/bookshelf in the center of Pristina. Talking with this artist, they liked the idea of a communal bookshelf but felt it could share more than simply books. Pursuing the path of queering objects and the uses of everyday items, we talked about how we could make small changes to the structure, adding to the uses to which it could be put. Referencing the give/take aspect of the library, they decided to use the unused sides/back of the bookshelf as a local bulletin board to inform locals of underground cultural events which are difficult to find unless you are in the know. Placed under the shelves, in a drawer, would be a collection of local wildflower and vegetable seeds, allowing passersby to take the seeds home or, in acts of guerrilla gardening, plant them around the city, making the streets of Pristina even more delectable.
Figure 4_ Seed Library Location. Source: The author.
Pristina Doll Haus was the second showcased project. Taking its inspiration from one of the oldest (barely) standing houses in Pristina, the structure has been a bakery, café, and workshop over time and is now a squatted shell just a few paces from the main boulevard. Its original pink was to be returned to the façade, highlighting the details hidden by years of decay. Pristina's first strip club would be owned by the Pristina Dolls—a collective of transwomen in the city—who would also be its performers. Provocatively designed to provide a safe space/community for the LGBTQ+ community on the ground floor and a decadent strip club above, this would be an in-your-face statement in stone.
Figure 5_ Pristina Doll Haus. Source: The author.
From the start of the workshop, I had grand plans in my head to invite members of the creative community and those behind my residency to an exhibition of some sort of architectural project. What I got out of it was so much more. It ended up less a workshop than an architectural and mental health therapy session. Each participant shared their inner secrets and anecdotes giving me a fully fleshed immersive installation of what it means to be queer in Kosovo. Writhing years of relatively traditional art and design education, I had been through my fair share of workshops. Most of these were some kind of ivory tower, knight-on-a-white-horse experience, some neo-colonial power telling the students what was right and what was wrong, good or bad, architecture or not architecture. Looking back on these experiences, I told myself that this workshop existed beyond the restraints of academia: no grades, no receipts to prove how "successful" the output was. In short, the workshop had been queered.
Reviewing the projects and musing over the workshop, I was reminded of Jack Halberstam's "Unbuilding Gender": "the use of queer as a verb, a process, a method of investigation is what seems to be at play here" (Halberstam 2018). During the workshop, when someone asked if the abandoned printing plant was a queer building, I stayed quiet for this very reason. It is difficult to say something is queer (in the present tense) because it brings an idea of completeness with it. The goal of the workshop was never to create queer objects, it was to use queer as a method of investigation, a process to come to some form of realizations, conclusions or inconclusions.
"Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete" (Darke 1996), and the Pristina Doll Haus relishes the subversion/reimagination of a historic café. Challenging the building's previous uses and the current conservative cultural climate of Kosovo, it stands as a proud prospect of a more inclusive city center. The communal bookshelf/seed library attends to the other, more ecological and communal aspects of feminist design: using local seeds to foster ecological sustainability and locally-produced posters to bring the community together, a safe posting place for marginalized groups. By listening to and acting on these young artists' ideas, we can identify them not just as creators, but as 'facilitators' who design "conditions for unheard voices to find their place in the urban environment" (Ottaviani and De Marinis 2022).
With an ever-raging battle between queer's penchant for self-destruction (Edelman 2004) and utopia-focused futurity (Muñoz 2009) it seems that to expect a queer outcome to a queer workshop is foolhardy. While it remains difficult to qualify the workshop as a resounding success in such an environment, the process that was followed/ignored serves not as a destination, but as a moving, twirling guidepost for future endeavors. Would a stricter schedule and planning method have created more concrete outputs? Indubitably. But this would have caused us to miss out on those precious hours spent with hearts and ears open, hearing those innermost secrets we whispered between the library columns.
Months have passed since I left Kosovo, but I have stayed in touch with the participants, following up on their personal works. The Doll Haus creator still stomps the Pristina pavements with aplomb, rattling the heteronormative bones of the citizenry, and the Seed Librarian is still pumping out zines across the country, infecting every Balkan eye which reads them. They had both been involved in such activities before the workshop, but I asked them what, if anything, had changed in the six ensuing months. "Sure, before I did this because I wanted to ignite change within my community, but now I realize I am that change." These Balkan eyes are fixed on a queer future.
*Erasmus+ Short Stay Research Grant: The workshop discussed in this article was funded by a short stay PhD research grant from the EU's Erasmus+ program. The grant supported a one-month research residency in Prishtina, conducted as part of Shtatëmbëdhjetë's Rezidenca 17 program. Translation by Thomas Lampon-Masters: info@thomaslampon.com.