Initiated in 2016 by CHwB Kosovo, the Heritage Space platform engages with the processes of meaning- and value-creation in the field of heritage. Heritage Space invites researchers and cultural practitioners to preserve cultural heritage using interdisciplinary approaches such as written research, creative fiction and non-fiction, contemporary art, filmmaking, digital storytelling, and alternative archives. Since its inception, the platform has implemented yearly open calls, supporting a total of 52 projects across various mediums through professional mentorship as well as financial and technical support. From its latest edition, the platform’s annual open call has transitioned into a two-year fellowship programme, allowing for a more substantial engagement with selected projects. This shift reflects a broader commitment to enabling more structured and extended processes of research and production, while continuing to emphasize mentorship and interdisciplinary exploration.
Deliberately moving away from the view that confines the field of heritage to conventional preservation practices which often attribute innate and static value to materials and sites, HS Fellowship programme attempts to explore how heritage-making is a dynamic and subjective negotiation of historical narratives, collective identity, memory, and place. These questions are all the more relevant in the context of Kosovo, where any heritage discourse is underwritten by the complex consequences of war, trauma, colonization, and the struggle for recognition. The experiences around heritage that we give focus to are often vulnerable, difficult, transient, invisible, or disrupted. Articulating these experiences requires unconventional and experimental tools that have largely been absent in the field. Consequently, HS Fellowship programme is highly preoccupied with the question of methodology—how something comes to the fore as heritage is just as important as what.
Archiving Discontinuities
Scattered documents, closed doors and institutional amnesia call for a questioning of archival practices and lack thereof. Archives are structures of collective memory and historical continuity. But they are also active sites of power where certain narratives are negotiated, contested or reinforced. As such, archives are defined by what they exclude and marginalize as much as by what they preserve. How, then, can we address the gaps and biases in our archives to unearth lost stories and ephemeral materials that have been left behind? How can experimental approaches help us propose an alternative narrative to missing or fragmented historical evidence?
We invite proposals that seek to engage and activate archives to offer new ways of thinking about the past and the present, by recovering various local histories otherwise unknown or forgotten. Proposals may choose to focus on gaps in institutional archives or, on the other hand, on vernacular or unprocessed ethnographic archives that offer a counter-narrative to dominant institutional discourse. Works can include, but are not limited to, research into the historical formation of institutions and movements, such as: alternative platforms of learning, working-class histories and labor movements, various national minorities’ organizations, feminist platforms, and underground and subcultural movements. In navigating archival silences, we encourage the use of alternative research methodologies, including queer, feminist, and anti-racist tactics, developed in resistance against oppressive and/or biased archival structures.
Heritage of Crises
Most contemporary societies have their scars of history leading to or resulting from war, civil unrest, systematic social oppression and discrimination. These periods of crises have social, psychological or historical repercussions that can be traced in a range of events, sites or practices. In our particular context, this may pertain to sites of resistance and civil disobedience or to the memory of atrocities, such as: massacres and executions, wartime sexual abuse, paths of displacement, locations of disappearances, tangible and intangible loss, places related to prisoners of war and civil or political prisons. The heritage of crises also extends to the healing practices, cultural rituals and expressions that communities have used to make sense of and recover from those very crises.
Methodologies which aim to commemorate, remember, preserve and document, individually or institutionally, the narratives and memory of the aforementioned sites, events and practices, or that provide new approaches to dealing with the past practices, are areas of interest for research, interpretation and documentation.
Storytelling & Interpretation
Placed in tandem, practices of storytelling and interpretation play an important part in changing the way we approach, experience, and communicate cultural heritage. Beyond factual details, storytelling and interpretation focus on the personal and intimate experiences that tie people to a sense of place and time and, as such, unveil the subjective construction of heritage.
Proposals engaging with “Storytelling and Interpretation” can draw upon individual, collective and national histories preserved and narrated as stories, local knowledge and gossip, fairy tales, myths, legends, word of mouth, songs, visual stories, fictions built on truths, which all in all, through a variety of media reveal perspectives that intend to entertain, educate, preserve and enrich our shared culture.
Kaltrina Krasniqi
Kaltrina Krasniqi (1981) is an award winning Kosovo based film director and researcher working in film and digital humanities since the early 2000s. She is a founding member of the Kosovo Oral History Initiative, a digital archive that preserves personal stories from individuals across diverse walks of life. Additionally, she is the founder of Vera Films, a film production company dedicated to amplifying the voices of emerging filmmakers. Kaltrina graduated in Film Directing from the University of Prishtina in 2004, and in 2011, she earned her MA from the Kosovo Institute for Journalism and Communication. In 2015, she further advanced her expertise at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she specialized in Film Producing. Her debut feature film, Vera Dreams of the Sea, premiered at the 78th Venice Film Festival and garnered numerous accolades, including the Grand Prix at the 2021 Tokyo International Film Festival and the Ingmar Bergman Award at the 2022 Gothenburg Film Festival. She’s currently working on her second feature, Bleach, which is slated for release in 2026.
Zef Paci
Zef Paci is a professor of Art History and Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts, Tirana. In addition to his teaching activities, he has participated in exhibitions as an author, designed theatrical stage sets (2008, 2009), and created frescoes (1995) for the Shkodra Cathedral and stained glass works for the Vau i Dejës Cathedral (2005–2007, 2022). He is the author of texts, articles, essays, and translations on visual arts and photography, as well as a participant in conferences and workshops, including "Marubi: Photography as Ritual" (2012). Over the years, Zef has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions in the fields of art and photography, both in Albania and internationally. Some of his notable projects include the Ardhje Prize in Tirana, the Idromeno Prize in Shkodra, "Marubi: Life in Images" at GR Art Gallery in Connecticut, USA (2017), "Marubi il rituale fotografico” at the Triennale di Milano (2018), "Lekë Tasi, Vizatimet e një jete" at Harabel (2019), "Pjetër Rraboshta" at the Marubi National Museum of Photography (2021), "Dramamine" by Lek Gjeloshi at Bazament (2021), "Rerouting" by George Pali, personal exhibition at GR Art Gallery, CT, USA (2022), "after party" by Enkelejd Zonja and Vigan Nimani at MKK Gallery (2022), solo exhibition "Territore përvojash të përjetuara" by Edi Hila at COD (2023), and "Gjyqe," an exhibition from the ATSH archive in collaboration with the Marubi Museum.