The project that I am currently researching on is about microorganisms and their behavior in relation to the human body, both internally and externally and in objects that we use in our daily life. Through my work of art, I attempt to question how these organisms live with and within us and how they affect various physiological, emotional and psychological aspects of the body. By emphasizing a clash of worlds—the macro and the micro— I want to investigate the ways these two dimensions are conscious of one another and how presence is (not) felt.
The quest began with a small archive that I put together last year during the quarantine period. I collected dozens of masks and gloves from several visits to the Central Hospital of Kosovo. Masks and gloves have a particular interest in that they delineate the borders of the body that is to be protected.
"My research is situated precisely in this point of contact between what is considered inside and outside and seeks to deconstruct the hierarchies of separation. In collaboration with doctors at the hospital the specimens were then analyzed through a microscope and I managed to identify and get about 20 photos of the bacteria commonly found in the masks and gloves— microorganisms that have been present in objects with which we’ve lived on a daily basis over the past year.", says Zeqiri.
What strikes me through this inquiry was the lack of a sensory relation to this microcosm, which is invisible, untouchable,
odorless and yet most certainly exists. Moreover, daily life is structured around it. I want to further question this inability to imagine a microcosm that lives with me and explore the impact these organisms have on the human body.
How do we perceive presence and what are the discourses that frame presence? What are the circumstances and the mediums through which the microcosm is noticed and put to the fore? These are some of the main questions of my investigation, which are particularly pertinent in regard to the state of crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic presents an eruption of the microcosm – the virus – into our macroworld. But it is an eruption which by its presence as a threat to the human body carries enormous discursive weight and imaginative power. This mediation – the fact that a microcosm may only be noticed through a particular discourse, technology and imaginary – is the focus of my artistic investigation and the reason why I want to work further on with digitally-generated images. The work thus asks fundamental questions about the existence of a reality that exists with me, within me and blurs the boundaries of my body, which I can only access through a certain mediation that fills in the blanks and produces an image of something
I only experience indirectly.
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