Marigona is a new
artist born in Pristina, currently living in Paris.
Her art conveys a
collection of experiences and feelings intertwined with each other, in various
dimensions of time, where colors represent the nuances of sentiments and
architectural elements which are the images of her perceived reality.
Through her paintings
she shares with us the view from her window, the places where she would like to
walk, have fun, hide, and get lost.
She is currently
working on her doctoral thesis on roman mosaics in Moesia Superior. She likes
to see history through art, which is why she started to share her personal
history through her paintings.
During conversations
with peers from university, she noticed the consequences and traumas of her
childhood. “I was very impressed at how passionately they discussed the wars
and historical events in France, which they had only read in books or heard
from their grandparents. And I, who had seen the horror with my own eyes, spoke
of it as if it were a mere footnote of my childhood days. I was comparing their
passionate stories, read and heard, to the ‘casual’ tragedies I had lived” she
says.
She graduated from the
Academy of Arts in Pristina in 2013 but economic and political circumstances in
Kosovo were not the most conducive for a young artist to thrive. The post-war
period in Kosovo for her is still a quiescence, a stagnation. Two decades after
the war, Kosovo continues to be an open prison. Always quarantined.
Growing up in Kosovo
was a real struggle– she says in retrospect. Even though she was a child, her
memories of the war are vivid. She still feels the burden of her jacket, in
which her mother had hidden food and some money, in case their fortune would
separate them.
Unwilling to be a
victim of the past, she tried to dismiss this period, but it remained one that
instilled in her strong, lasting emotions. It has inevitably fueled her work
and has been a turning point in her life. The quarantine period following the
outbreak of Covid-19 in some way brought back moments from the war, igniting
renewed reflections of history, personal freedom, and hope.
In her entanglements
she finds all the colors that she missed in life and realized that she had to
relive her fears, the stories of her elders, and the history of her country
from the first proven sources, in order to forgive herself and allow her
experiences to inform her art.
With strong contrasts,
bright colors and minimal details, she tries to give each of these dimensions
the same importance. By combining warm and cold colors, and melting them inside
her figures, she manages to cope with the entanglement inside her and create,
in her way, her ‘perfect places’.
