Anita Muçolli | The Blue Hour

A spider crawls into your ear at night if you are a misbehaving child. A snake appears not only as an animal, but as a synonym for fear. Her father would tell her that animals in Kosova could speak. For Anita Muçolli, tales became a way of imagining Kosova. Kosova not as a place outlined on a classroom globe, but as a place built through stories, warnings, images, and affects. Told by her parents as a way of connecting her to their homeland, such stories and tales formed for Muçolli an affectionate early bond with another home, one shaped as much by desire as by fear, by intimacy as much as by distance.

In her essay ‘Far Away, From Home: The Comma Between’, the opening chapter of her work Elsewhere, Within Here, the filmmaker and post-colonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha notes that ‘tales often read like profound strategies of survival’. In the story line of such tales, she shows, ‘divergence and inequality, if not conflict, are often set within the framework of a patriarchal economy. The human condition and its dilemmas are featured in the fate of an individual who is likely to be poor, unfortunate, rejected or plainly stupid, but whose honesty and goodness usually lead to a rewarding ending.’ The tales, she argues, thus essentially hold a message of hope: 

"Hope is, however, always kept alive in the tale – hope, and not expectation, for it is through fairies, deities, and genies, or as in the case of the tale told earlier, through the forces that exceed the lifetime of an individual, that people who knew the lore of survival seek to solve difficult situations and social inequality." 

In the context of Muçolli’s work, tales have been a way of preserving cultural memory but also a way of transmitting forms of knowledge that outlived the conditions in which they first emerged. Stories became a channel through which belonging could be transmitted, even when the place they evoke remained distant or partially known.

Situated between the inherited memory and lived experience of a second-generation diaspora artist, Muçolli’s work reflects on the ways histories of displacement are carried across generations. Beyond narrative, she looks to absences, embodied gestures, family rituals, and the silences that often surround experiences of violence and migration. Her latest research unfolds as an unfinished process in her most immediate environment, her family archives. It is a process shaped by the continual negotiation between personal biography, collective history, and the desire to locate oneself within both. As the philosopher Oxana Timofeeva has written: ‘If we detach, a part of the nutritive soul that once took root in the place will not die off; it will travel with us as a memory of the homeland, even if it is a memory of something completely forgotten, which does not keep any representation but only the form of the plant’s sensuality, something like a kernel with no further determination.’

Despite all the tales, legends, and stories that we grow up hearing, memory does not always pass from one generation to another. Nevertheless, what cannot be easily spoken about may still be transmitted through the textures of everyday life. It may be through domestic arrangements, repeated fears, inherited rituals, or emotional codes that shape family relations. In this sense, silence does not necessarily signal absence: it can become one of the forms through which history continues to inhabit the present. The comparative literature scholar Marianne Hirsch names this state ‘postmemory’, which she describes as "the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right." Muçolli’s experience mirrors precisely this space, where the past is not remembered directly, but encountered through fragments, affects, images, objects, and inherited emotional landscapes. 

Muçolli’s family history forms part of a broader trajectory of migration from Kosova to Switzerland. The labour migration from Kosova began in the 1960s and 1970s, when many Yugoslav citizens arrived in Switzerland, among other European countries, as Gastarbeiter or guest workers seeking employment opportunities. A second, larger wave of migration followed the political and economic crises that were a result of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 and the political upheavals of the 1990s. For many families, including Muçolli’s, migration was a decision forced by instability, political repression and the eventual war in Kosova (1998–1999). Today, Switzerland is home to one of the largest Kosovar diasporic communities in Europe. Muçolli approaches this history by digging into intimate traces and expanding to collective statistics, revealing how political processes become embedded within a person’s upbringing. She reflects on the effects of a constant state of limbo and the growing sense of distance from the idea of home. 

Her installation Permis de_____(2025) stages a series of panels covered in green upholstered velvet, engraved with scans of various documents and their abstracted fragments. Amongst them is a letter addressed to the Swiss migration authority responsible for matters of asylum and residency, confirming that Nefise Muçolli, the artist’s mother, was pregnant and expected to give birth on 5 October, 1993. The doctor requests a delay in deportation (Ausweisung) by approximately three months, to allow her to give birth and recover safely. That child was Anita.

Often associated with ceremonies and award backdrops, the velvet carries connotations of value and reverence. Here, it bears a precarious bureaucratic plea, one that existed at the intersection of staying or being deported. The softness of the fabric resists the cold neutrality of the administrative language. In this dissonance, Muçolli creates a warm ‘home’, with soft walls that invite visitors to lean against them while listening to the accompanying sound piece –  so producing a tension between institutional erasure and embodied experience. The sound piece, composed by Julia Sharifullina, uses extracted sounds from videotapes recorded by Muçolli’s father during their early years of migration in Switzerland: birthdays, New Year’s celebrations, and city views, intended to be sent back to relatives in Kosova. These ambient sounds are overlaid and mixed with added, artificial sounds to create a cinematic soundscape. The work probes how visual narratives of migration are preserved and circulated while sound is often omitted. It poses the dual question: Which sounds are collectively associated with the past, and who determines which ones are worth remembering?

The green velvet recalls the colour of the family sofa Muçolli grew up with. She reflects on the constrained process of homemaking faced by many immigrants, whose sense of belonging is often alienated by systemic bureaucracies that deny them agency over how and where to live. In such conditions, furniture is often inherited or found in pre-furnished apartments, making home a temporary arrangement, a state of limbo. As Trinh T. Minh-ha writes: 

"The irreversible sense of “losing ground” and losing contact is, however, often suppressed by the immediate urge to “settle in” or to assimilate in order to overcome the humiliation of bearing the too-many-too-needy status of the homeless-stateless alien. The problem that prevails then is to be accepted rather than to accept." 

The social ecosystem and its familiar codes, inscribing themselves onto the histories and bodies of those who migrate, often remain incomprehensible to a bureaucratic system built on statistics and formal categories. Muçolli questions what it meant for her parents to inhabit a country not as guests, but as undocumented individuals. 

Across the gallery, Muçolli’s sculptures reflect on the intergenerational knowledge and the desire to maintain cultural specificity while navigating estrangement. In these sculptures, motifs of snakes, an ever-present figure in Muçolli’s life, appear. Despite her mother’s dread, she always felt drawn to them, observing how irrational fears survive over time, even in environments where this fear is not justified. Muçolli suggests that there is a heightened baseline for anxiety amongst those who migrated, which persists even when material stability is achieved – something often unacknowledged. She does not attempt to resolve these tensions. She renders questions tactile, creating a temporal zone of endurance and illegibility. In this way, her work asks: How does the body remember what the system forgets? 

Curated by Hana Halilaj

[1] Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Far Away, From Home: The Comma Between’, in: Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 17.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Oxana Timofeeva, How to Love a Homeland, translated by Maria Afanasyeva, Amman & Cairo: Kayfa ta, 2020, p. 38.

[4] Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29, no. 1, Duke University Press, 2008, p. 106.

[5] Steven Mihajlovic, ‘Yugoslav Gastarbeiter: The Guest Who Stayed for Dinner,’ Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business 8, no.1 (Spring 1987), p. 181-182 (scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1224&context=njilb.

[6] Nada Boškovska, ‘Fleeing to Switzerland,’ Swiss National Museum Blog, 24 March 2022, accessed 25 May 2026.  (blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2022/03/fleeing-to-switzerland/

[7] Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Other Than Myself, My Other Self’, in: Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 29-30.