23rd Street Records
CREATIVE SHOWCASE
Uresa Ahmeti
This week's Creative Showcase is Uresa Ahmeti. Uresa is a 20-year-old poet, performance artist, & activist from Kosovo, a relatively new country in the Balkans. Her work and achievements are nothing short of extraordinary. Take a look at some her incredible poems, performances, as well as an exclusive interview below.
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Q: Uresa! We’re so excited to be featuring you for this week’s Creative Spotlight. So our first question for you is how did you discover your passion for art and poetry?
I first got involved with poetry in second grade, because Kosovo is such a primitive country and as a woman, as a young girl, you’re never given the words to name your oppression. I grew up watching my mom care for my entire family including my two paralyzed uncles, so poetry was an escape from that world. It gave me support as a child who needed attention, because my parents were dealing with two sick adults. So the only place where I could talk and really express my feelings was in my diary. I would write prose, but most often it would still come out as poetry, even though I didn’t really have a name for it yet. I titled this notebook of mine, in second grade, “The Silent Man”. It came from this idea that I was talking to this person who was there 100% just to listen to me. Because I just wanted to be listened to, you know what I mean?
I kept writing poems in that notebook, and as I grew up I started doing theatre as well. I created a play in tenth grade to work against patriarchy. I was at a catholic school, where that was like so not allowed, but I was like, fuck it. I’m still gonna do it. From then on I was called the femi-nazi [feminism nazi]!
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Q: Oh my god I love that. What was the next big step for you after that?
It was after tenth grade, when I won a scholarship to do the last two years of high school at the United World College Maastricht in the Netherlands. When I went there I was already still doing poetry the most. I wasn’t published or anything, I only had a few events here and there. But at that school, there was one person from each country of the world. And I saw the most diverse group of people in every aspect. We’re talking style, ethnicity, language, mentality, culture, you name it. I was being exposed to all kinds of art forms, so I was like, you know what? I guess I can try anything. So I started doing dance, and literally any type of performance art that I could engage with. So that’s how I started developing myself as an artist, and also as an activist, as I got to be exposed to more knowledgeable sources that helped me learn how to name my oppression. Because the problem, like I said, was that I just couldn’t name what was wrong with what I saw happening in the world and back home in Kosovo.
Back in high school I was also doing some civic organizing, dealing with non-profits. It wasn’t quite art that I was doing with them, it was more like projects. Like raising awareness for important issues. In ninth grade I had three different projects. I was fourteen or fifteen, and I had three different projects, with funds from the municipality itself as well as international organizations like UNICEF. One of the projects was to raise awareness for optical health, another was increasing awareness about gender equality and improving women’s role in society, and another one was for traffic crashes. Kosovo is such a new country that we barely have street lights, so it was like trying to make drivers more careful and streets safer.
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Q: Damn girl! You were doing all that as a freshman? That’s insane. So how did you get from there to the performance artist you are today?
Well when I got to the international high school in the Netherlands, I was already some sort of an activist and writing poetry under the table, but then I was like, you know what? I can use my poetry to raise awareness and talk about issues that are political. So I started doing spoken-word poems. I joined a spoken-word poetry club, and I was performing in the city at a march against the deportation of Gani people. I performed a poem there, and then I also performed at the international peace conference that my high school organized.
When I went back to Kosovo, there was a festival happening called FemArt, which is a feminist artivist festival. And I was like, I’ve been dancing, I’ve been writing, I’m already an activist, so why don’t I just combine all of these together and make performance art? So I conceptualized a performance art piece called From Other to Self that talked about the sexualization and objectification of womens’ bodies. That was in 2019, after I started college. That was my first premiere in Kosovo ever, and it was this experimental piece, and I had no idea what the people were gonna do.
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Q: What was it like having a big performance art premiere in Kosovo at such a young age?
Honestly, being a young artist in Kosovo is fucked up. I was literally only allowed in the theatre for the first time on the day of the performance and only had like three or four hours to deal with light design, get to know the space, rehearse on the actual stage, so it was just fucked up. But it ended up being successful, and it was great.
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Q: Holy shit, that sounds like it was stressful. So can you tell us about what you’ve been working on this year?
This year has been very intense but successful. I’ve spent the semester in Kosovo doing college online, and I’ve been involved with the same organization that put on the FemArt festival, an organization called ArtPolis. I had this performance art piece called Interrogating Power. You know how we ask to have a seat at the table when we’re trying to fight patriarchy?
Well, my performance piece was basically saying I don't want a seat at the table because the table was never meant for me; I want to reconceptualize the table in its entirety. I conceptualized the performance, designed the scene, my costume, the lights, and everything on my own. It was basically this performance divided in four parts, so there was the part where I would sleep and eat and watch tv, the part where I would work on my laptop--portraying not just “the office” but also the work outside the home, and then the kitchen where I was supposed to do my “labor of love.” But it's not really a “labor of love,” you know? It’s unpaid labor. Then there was my “beauty” corner where I was supposed to cut my hair and shave myself. And this idea came from feeling obligated to shave my armpit hair as a young woman. I have a quote that says something like, “only my face and the name of my oppression changes when my body is not mine, regardless of the space I breathe in.” So it doesn’t matter if you’re a president or a cleaning lady or a housewife; as long as your body is not considered your own and you’re living under a patriarchal system, you’re always gonna be less. Even armpit hair which takes only five minutes to be taken away, is micromanaged. So that’s the extent of micromanaging and exercising power that patriarchy goes to. You know the tweezers that you use for your eyebrows? I was taking away my armpit hair with a fucking tweezers. I was playing a frantic psycho woman doing all of those four different things in four different sections at once, which is basically our lives, you know? You have to do everything perfectly. Until you crash, and at that point in the performance I was just laying flat on the floor because I cannot anymore. Sometimes you need a fucking break.
Then I also was the author, host, and producer for the first and only feminist podcast in Kosovo, which has six episodes, and it’s all in Albanian [the main language in Kosovo].
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Q: Woah. It’s the only feminist podcast? In the country?
Yes. That was a lot of work. It was a special edition, only of six episodes to showcase one episode per day of the festival. They asked me specifically to make this feminist podcast because they knew about my background in gender studies and that I’m an activist. They also had me conceptualize a live queer performance for this festival, making me the author of the first queer performance in a public theatre by queer people for queer people. And it was the first performance in Kosovo with a lesbian director.
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Q: Fuck yea dude, that’s insane. So, last question. What is next for you and what should we tell our friends to keep an eye out for? What is on the horizon?
Well there is a drag performance that I am conceptualizing which I’m going to execute and perform with one of the first drag queens in all of Kosovo.
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Fuuuuck yes! That’s badass.
And we are going to try to film it and send it out by the end of the month to this drag festival in Slovenia, I think it's called Drag-Slavia. So that’s on the horizon, but I’m also publishing a poetry book of both English and Albanian poems by the end of the year hopefully.
