Endi Tupja & Klodiana Millona

Polyphonic singing intertwines with personal narratives in a collaborative work by Endi Tupja and Klodiana Millona. Using the voices of women from the Greek minority in Dervican, a village near Albania's southern border with Greece, the artists trace voice as a medium through the topography and materiality of sound. Through their recordings, interviews, and the careful transcription and translation of the sung texts, the work investigates how music and language are deeply rooted in place, migration, and the tension between motion and rootedness.

On the verge of a perpetual shifting, migrants experience what Algerian-French sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad calls a life of “double absence”, a state of in betweenness. The question of belonging crystallises an experience of unsettledness. In the film, the performers’ bodies are seen as both repositories of cultural memory and conduits for its transmission, reflecting a history of interrupted yet enduring trajectories. The ongoing act of preserving and reactivating these traditions becomes a testament to resilience and adaptation, allowing new forms of commonality.