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It Would Not Be Possible to Leave Planet Earth Unless Gravity Existed
by Driant Zeneli
2017, 13′
Presented at Lo schermo dell’arte 2021 in occasion of the exhibition Directing the Real: Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010s
The film is part of VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images – 6th edition
COURTESY: the artist, MAM Foundation Tirana and Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Milano/Lucca
Mario is a man who always had the passion of flying and building airplanes. Metallurgjik is the place that hosts an abandoned factory with a surface of around 250 thousand hectares, where 12 thousand people used to work during the 70’s in Albania. Mario today became a master in assembling flying machines and he has the persistent desire to reach a faraway place, in the outer space. Metallurgjik emptied from its workers, exposes its ruins as a tangible proof of the failure of a project part of an ideal society imagined by Albanian communism. The film is a simultaneous rendezvous between utopia and dystopia and encounters two desires: the one of an ideal society and the separation from it. Both, interdependent, could not survive without each other.
Driant Zeneli uses film to sculpt place and time. At the core of Zeneli’s research is the redefinition of the idea of failure, utopia and dream as the elements that open possible alternatives. In 2011 he represented Albania at the 54th International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale. In 2008 he won the Onufri International Contemporary Art Prize, Tirana, in 2009 the Young European Artist Award Trieste Contemporanea and in 2017 MOROSO Prize, Italy. He has exhibited at: Mostyn Gallery, Wales, UK (2017); MuCEM, Marseille (2016); Academie de France à Roma Villa Medici (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); MSFAU Tophane-i Aime, Istanbul, (2016); Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan (2015; 2010); IV Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Chile (2015); Viafarini, Milan (2014); GAM, Museum of Modern and Contemporaryart Turin (2013); White House Biennial, Athens (2013); KCCC, Klaipeda, Lithuania (2013).