PRISHTINA INTERNATIONAL CREATIVE HUB

17-19 May, Prishtina

In last year’s edition of polip - International Literature Festival, we reflected on the festival’s first 13 editions. It was a moment of closure for the festival’s old format, as we listened to how our writers envisioned polip’s future. This year, we’re bringing that new version into existence. We will no longer walk on a one-dimensional path. Rather, we will create intersections by opening the festival to different disciplines of art. In this, the 14th edition of polip, rather than engaging ourselves solely around a public program of activities, we turn inward in an attempt to make polip a creative hub for writers, playwrights, translators and performing arts professionals. 

We are transforming this year’s edition of the festival into a creative hub, an art factory in which creatives — especially young ones — of different profiles meet and create, generating new ideas and forms and means of expression. This edition, along with all the upcoming ones, is built on and honors the rich and graceful heritage of the festival’s previous editions, which have constructed a literary history of this tormented patch of the globe. Those previous editions, through which polip has grown into a venue not just for literary exchange and growth, but a space of courage, reconciliation, reflection and constructive criticism, create a strong foundation on which the festival’s future will be built.  

We honor this heritage built by courageous artists by returning to our roots, creating a safe platform for artists to create, experiment, and fail, if need be. We are well aware that many artists are often not given such space by established arts institutions that are not ‘willing to take the risk.’ This is why we are building this international creative hub, a space that allows new ideas to be generated, executed, performed and tried, without the fear of the perception of failure. We are creating a space of artistic growth and development in which we are not simply audiences, but rather each other’s mentors through critical and meaningful engagement with the pieces in front of us. 

Memory Lane

This year’s guiding theme is Memory Lane. As such, we look back at our festival’s beautiful past, which planted the seeds of what we think of as an international creative hub for emerging artists. In polip 2024, we explore the many ways that creative work produces memory. Sometimes, that production of memory is based on the subject used by writers and other artists. Sometimes, it is just about the time and space of when something was created. This year’s festival will focus in particular on discussing creative work as a process of building memory practices through remembering authors who are no longer among us, engaging with their work, and talking about art as a transformative process through which what was, what is, and what should be is melted into the identity of being an artist. 

As we reflect on memory at this year’s rethought edition of polip, we look at how the arts have been used in constructing memory narratives. “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves again because it is life,” said William Faulkner, in an interview for The Paris Review sometime in the mid-1950s. By arresting motion, by capturing historical narratives in artistic forms, artists construct memory narratives for future generations. Moreover, art has also shaped memory by projecting the dreams of the future, new ideas and visions.

In short, the past and the future are not two separate subjects. They feed into and give meaning to one another. Dreams for the future reflect experiences of the past, and memory about the past is shaped by anticipation and vision for the future. However, not all that is in the past becomes memory. Processes that determine what becomes collective memory are often discriminatory, biased and ideologically influenced by the more powerful. Or so it seems, at least. For often, the more vocal take up more space so that their stories, or the ones they want to be seen as representing, are better heard. However, this has never discouraged artists from fighting for that collective space in which they often find themselves representing less-heard voices, ordinary people’s mundane everyday life experiences, the stigmatized, and the discriminated against. The space where artists create is less physical and more ideological and metaphysical. Artists create for tomorrow.

Full program coming soon...