freeshop

FREESHOP was performed few months after the NATO troops entered Kosova.
Peja, one of the oldest cities in Kosova, as most of other cities was destroyed in a large extent during the war. The old bazaar of Peja, with a long history behind it was set a light by the Serb forces, too. Few artists, under the initiative of Sokol Beqiri, were gathered in this market and performed their work. We were given each a burned shop, to work on them. I had big doubts to work in this place, I felt that it may not be right to make a work out of that place. I tried to find an appropriate concept, sitting on toilet, a day before the event. I made an intervention, only renamed the place and gave the name to the actual situation in which the people who survived found themselves after the war. FREE! Burned out but FREE. There many stories connected with this work. One of them is that as I was working on it, a man in his sixties approached me and asked me what I was doing. I said: "you know art or something like that". He said that the place looked better now that it did before! It was a strange statement. As my prejudice made me think that he didn't really understand what I was doing there. I latter found out that he was the owner of the shop!

I worked around four hours in cleaning the burned remaining's of what once used to be a shop. I painted a continuous frizz with the word FREESHOP across the shop. I also painted a number of white clouds in the middle of the shop. I saw it as an ironical redefinition of a new reality that the place was in.

Albert Heta

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