The Wanderers, 2021
Two-channel video installation, colour, black-and-white, 17′ 28′′
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2024
The Wanderers is a dual video projection with each part traversing the landscape in opposite directions. One image—in black and white and filmed on deserted roads during the coronavirus pandemic—follows a gaze looking ahead, and shows a few people and animals wandering through the Albanian countryside. The second, colour image derives from footage recorded by the artist in the village of Reç, located next to his hometown, Shkodër, and known for its hiking trails. Here again, the camera looks ahead, capturing people—alone or in groups—walking along a deserted country road within a landscape enclosed by mountains, leaving them behind as the camera withdraws. Gradually, the perspective shifts and we observe the scene from above: at the head of this disjointed procession walks a woman in a wedding dress. Through these two images—so different in every respect, whether in direction, content or style—Adrian Paci stages an allegory about history, the present and the past, the individual and the collective. His wanderers remain trapped within a harsh reality. They are left behind even as they march forward, toward a future that stubbornly eludes them.
Adrian Paci’s practice is rooted in the history and traditions of his homeland, Albania, as well as its contemporary reality, which for many years has forced its people to migrate in search of a better life. Armed with ingenuity and persistence, the ordinary men and women that inhabit his work—immigrants, workers, the unemployed—confront the hardships of political instability and the logic of capitalism, which pushes them to the margins of the dominant historical narrative. In a manner that has remained central to his practice for decades, Paci culls fragmentary memories and everyday narratives from the recent past and the present to create a ritualistic poetry of the displaced, the disempowered and the disenfranchised.
Adrian Paci was born in 1969 in Shkodër, Albania. He lives and works between Milan and Shkodër.
