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Interview with Damir Ocko

The film The End of the World was made during your artist residency in Tirana in the beginning of the year. Can you describe the circumstances that led you to Tirana and the conditions in which the work was made?

In the period before going to Tirana I felt a great need to continue my development as an artist. I wasn’t willing to keep confirming myself in an environment which I no longer found challenging. I had an idea for a project that could evolve into something new only if I realized it at the right place. The newly established Tirana Institute for Contemporary Art launched a residency program. I sent them my concept and after two weeks I received a phone call by Edi Muka, inviting me to visit Tirana and realize my project. I was interested in the subject for several reasons. I knew that I would spend the spring period, after Tirana, in Vienna and it was very important for me to get an idea of the cultural parallels between Vienna, Zagreb and Tirana, or the differences between societies that have gone through a process of change and that are still changing. In this way, I was actually trying to define my own place and my own environment, which I no longer felt inspiring. On the other hand, I knew nothing about Tirana and it was interesting to see to which extent my prejudices will be confirmed or dissolved. My plane landed into a complete darkness. Later I found out that Tirana was very exhausted by electricity reductions due to a dry season (three weeks later it got much better because that was also the time of local elections in Albania). Throughout this initial adaptation to the way of living there, my project was becoming more complex and was gradually transforming into a real challenge. We all started working very hard on it. It was necessary to organize a very demanding filming session with twenty actors, find the right locations and search garbage containers for cardboard from which costumes were made. Many people volunteered and helped realize the project. In this sense, I was completely overwhelmed with Tirana, especially when compared to my experience in Vienna where I could only dream of such support. For example, the people I had just met in Tirana would drive me around the city to search the numerous football playground “cages”, they would search the containers for cardboard, they were friezing for hours during the shooting of the scene high up in the mountain range above Tirana or introducing me to the world of Albanian symphonic music which I had known nothing about until that time – something like this is only possible in Tirana.

The film narration is divided into three parts: in the first the camera is focused on the big fountain immersed in multicolored light, in the second we see figures with multicolored cardboard stilts and huge masks leaving a mysterious building, a building that recalls social housing from the 1980s. In the third and most spectacular part, these enigmatic giants are standing on a football playground, while blindfolded people are moving around them, trying to keep and lead the ball with eyes shut. Who are the disguised creatures, these hybrids between shamans and Pokemons? What is the game they are playing?

The creatures behind colored masks are wanderers who accidentally find themselves at the end of the world. The place seems like a deserted city filled with colors suspended in darkness. Since the end of the world is the final point, the wanderers can no longer move so they start projecting a game in which they imagine potential inhabitants of the ‘end of the world’. Their projection is actually what they see around themselves, this is why the players are also wearing masks of suspense. Their eyes and ears are covered so the course of the game is ruled by accident. They are playing football with somewhat adapted rules. There are six wanderers and twelve ‘end of the world’ players. Since they are motionless, the wanderers become obstacles in the field, and to the players the ball always seems to be somewhere else. Such game has no result or final point. This is something that is being played ‘forever’.

The world we see in the film is, according to your explanation, the world in which Earth is a flat surface. More precisely, the action takes place at its very edge. Is this a vision of the world before Galileo or some post-apocalyptic fantasy? Or maybe the merging of the two?

The end of the world is a taboo place which has, throughout history, been transposed from myth into a political place. It is common knowledge that during the Middle Ages, but also earlier, there existed a strong current within the Church, that supported the theory of the Earth being spherical and that many Church scientists were writing theses to prove this, but the official belief remained that Earth was a flat surface and that the universe, together with all its components, was moving in a constant and predictable circling of the Earth. For example, the bishop Saint Isidore of Seville taught in his ‘Encyclopedia of etymology’ that Earth is a globe, Thomas Aquinas constructed an astrological manual ‘On the sphericity of the world’ etc. However, the contenders of Columbus expedition to India, as it was based on traveling westwards to reach it, still used the existence of an ‘end of the world’ as the main argument against the journey. In this moment, the place becomes an argument of political manipulation, an empty and unconvincing myth that served as a static point of a geopolitics unwilling to accept change. I asked myself to what extent the contemporary geopolitics is still keeping this myth alive. So, the action takes place neither in the past or the future, it is taking place now even though the whole work is imagined as a certain ‘forever’, or a constant movement in which one such place is always newly positioned and fixed in the map of the world. Time makes no difference here. The culmination of the work is the game in which suspense disables the players to realize it. As a result of such intervention (where one team is blind, while the other is motionless) everything relies on accident. It was interesting to watch the situation on the playground since the whole film set was conceived as a performance, there were not many instructions given to the actors, everything that was happening was spontaneous.

You are mentioning a considerable number of international artists in Tirana. What kind of prejudices are they bringing along with them and what kind are they leaving behind? How much can the general perception of Tirana and Albania be put in connection with the metaphor of the ‘end of the world’?

Tirana is a city that is currently undergoing radical changes. The charismatic mayor Edi Rama decided to enrich the city and the building facades with colors, refreshing Tirana with lively patterns. The whole city looks like the city of professor Balthazar, immersed in a dusty haze caused by thick traffic. Everywhere you go, you encounter derelict monuments from the communist period, such as the monumental pyramid in the city center that kids use as a ground for sliding down on cardboard boxes. These are the changes that make Tirana an incredibly dynamic place. Albania is a place where it is very easy to arrive to, but very difficult (for the locals) to leave – this is why I wasn’t surprised that the place was so international. The Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art is developing several very complex projects, one of which is the Tirana Biennial, an important international exhibition that transformed the city into a mecca for contemporary artists. All throughout the city, one can run into buildings painted by Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija and others. I think that this situation of dynamic change makes Tirana so interesting for the artists. On the one hand, the streets are filled with generators that switch on when the electricity runs out and the whole city is buzzing, with wild dogs that become very aggressive at night or the traffic in which you are bound to eventually be hit by a car (I had this luck), while on the hand there is the urban center with excellent atmosphere, where I had the feeling I could realize whatever I imagined. Many artists arrive with prejudices, some get rid of them while others make them even more intense, by searching exactly what they came to find. Personally, I stayed in Tirana long enough to understand the speed with which the things are changing and that nothing should be taken for granted.

During your stay in Tirana the local elections were taking place. There are obvious political allusions like the architecture of the pyramid that once used to serve as mausoleum of Enver Hoxa and today has the function of a cultural centre, or the colors that appear on the characters, referring to the colors the mayor Edi Rama used on the facades, in order to refresh the city. To what extent can we interpret the work through the perspective of the political moment in Albania today?

I tried to encompass this notion of a place that is changing so I introduced the most obvious motives and these were the colors and the drastic conversion of space like the pyramid that transformed itself from a symbol of power and the mausoleum of eccentric dictator to an international center for culture. Hoxa kept Albania in utter isolation and introduced a system of bizarre regulations like the banning the citizens to change their place of residence, listening to music etc. The pyramid represents the example of transformation from one extreme to another.
Simultaneously I tried to establish a relationship between the place of taboo and the real place. The ‘taboo place’ derives from a ‘real’ fairytale, the Earth-centered universe and geopolitical power relations. On the other side there is Tirana, a place of changes. That hybrid place stems from a constellation outside the realm of local political will. This is the reason why it seemed natural to insert the piece in that context, in which there is an urge for self-accomplishment but also the suspension of possibilities. That provoked me to depict this place where the colors are some kind of signs of life, suspended in the dark.

Similar gigantic sculptures, like the ‘wanderers’ in this work, already appeared in your other video 'The Boy with a Magic Horn'. Could these be seen as their colorful relatives?

Yes and no. It’s a principle of creating ‘blank characters’. In 'The Boy With a Magic Horn' the characters bare very specific content taken from ‘The Ring of Nibelung’ but simultaneously they are filled with emptiness which they take over from the space. In that sense, their costumes exist as an organic extension of the nonexistent architecture of the never-finished Zagreb University Hospital. The protagonists become part of the architecture, superstructure above the vacuum of a story of failure. A 'Wanderer' is also a romantic character that brings to mind nineteenth century stories of the self-quest based on wandering. Wagner’s Votan wanders disguised as an old man in order to get a better perspective on things and changes that are to come. In the context of the idea of the end of the world the character of the wanderer is interesting because what is in question here is a travel without a beginning or the end - the wanderer is not lost although he doesn’t have any particular intention to get somewhere. It can be viewed as a sort of ‘blank voyage’ or a blank way of traveling. Once they get to the end of the world the wanderers loose the ability to move since it seams they cannot move any further. What connects them with the characters from 'The Boy With a Magic Horn' is their archeological ability to take over the features of the place around them and that is why each of the wanderers carries one of the colors of Tirana. After seeing the work a colleague of mine remarked that it seemed to him how the city was evolving into these beings.

You have made the cardboard costumes that transform the ‘wanderers’ into moveable sculptures. In the gallery presentation you repeat a similar formal action. What is the relation between those sculptural forms with the mythological foundation on which you base this video, but also the earlier work 'The Boy With a Magic Horn'?

This work is actually a combination of video installation, performance and sculpture. All of these mediums are intertwined in the video: the football game is actually a performance and the costumed players are moving sculptures. For this exhibition I decided to expand that with several objects, which represent some sort of hybrids between traditional sculptures and models extracted from the work they are part of. One of the models is a representation of the end of the world inspired by the mythological image of the edge of the world where the lost ships fall into an infinite abyss. Those sculptures - models find them selves somewhere between the film and the widened context of the myth of the end of the world, navigating an unknown space and a dark city from the end of the world, which in the film appears like a place where everything emerges from the dark.

The role of the music seems to be quite important for the perception of the film, which has a clearly tripartite structure Especially, I would say, in the first, lyrical contemplative opening scene with the illuminated fountain and in the last part in which the impossible game of static and blindfolded players takes place in the illuminated football ground. The credits bring information about the choice of the music - could you explain how the soundtrack was compiled?

I spent a lot of time in the Albanian Academy of Music listening to the Albanian music. I have discovered lots of incredible materials, such as the recordings of the overtures and social realist marches that sound really spooky on those recordings, lots of symphonic music inspired by folklore but unfortunately not a lot of original symphonic music. Fortunately, at the end I have found an excellent symphony by Medni Menxhqi the parts of which I used beside the Ravel music in the fountain part. What represented a real problem for me was the football game part for which I had a hard time finding the accompanying music. I wanted to avoid adding another emotional layer to the scene with the music I choose. Finally I decided to try to work with the composition entitled ‘Visions’ by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu that I edited and remixed in order to fit with the situation on the screen. I have to admit that I am quite content with the result: the whole work finally took a format of the tripartite symphony with the introductory scene, the scene with the arrival of the wanderers and the grand finale.

Do the static wanderers and the blindfolded players actually play against each other? Could this game be referencing the game of survival and, if yes, in what sense?

The blindfolded players represent a kind of projection of potential inhabitants of the End of the World. The wanderers, besides taking over the characteristics of the place take over this projection as well. In that sense, what they see around themselves and what they expect from the place that seems to be deserted, is being projected also in the way the blindfolded players are defined. I wouldn’t call it a struggle for survival but rather survival in the society of suspense. However, what the films actually brings to the fore is the feeling of isolation and loneliness inside a team game.


Interview by Jasna Jakšić.