Through the sleek and cold forms of her geometries, Kastrati’s sculptural installation “The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin” offers a penetrating glimpse into the complexity of the female condition in the post-war context of Kosovo.
In the aftermath of the war that devastated the Balkans, the massive employment of female labor in Kosovo’s light industries gave women the illusion of financial independence and equal social participation. In fact, the workers found themselves trapped in a system that perpetuated traditional gender roles, leaving them economically vulnerable and politically marginalized. Through the clear and cold forms of her geometries, Doruntina Kastrati’s sculptural installation, titled The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin, offers a penetrating look into the complexity of the female condition in the country’s post-war context. Specifically, Kastrati’s project reworks the experiences of twelve workers from a lokum (Turkish sweet) factory in Prizren, the second-largest city in Kosovo and the artist’s hometown.
Due to the grueling rhythms and many hours of standing work, many of them have undergone knee replacement surgeries. The metal sculptures reproduced in the Kosovar space, modeled on the nuts used as ingredients in lokum, resemble the metal implants in their knees, carrying a symbolic meaning that alludes to their precarious and exploited worker condition. Hannah Arendt’s thought echoes in Kastrati’s work. In her 1958 essay The Human Condition, the German philosopher argued that the moment an environment is created where issues of justice and injustice do not arise, or if they do, are immediately eliminated, we are no longer in the realm of human affairs, but in a social organization where things are merely supposed to ‘function,’ an organization that, instead of men and women with their unpredictable and manifold capacities, only requires trained ‘workers’ confined to a limited number of functions.
With her installation, which the Jury of the 60th Biennale Arte awarded a special mention, calling it “small but powerful,” Doruntina Kastrati reminds us that feminism is not simply a matter of gender; it is about changing the power dynamics that have left women economically dependent on men, relegated to secondary roles in society, and too often victims of the consequences of male violence.
