Critical Fabulation Meets Material Culture: Reimagining Kosova’s Art by Feminist Knowledge Production

Working briefly at the National Museum of Kosova there were artifacts within the permanent collection that stuck to me, haunting me beyond my short internship. I found myself thinking incessantly about these markers of Albanian identity: how have they come to gain their venerated status and who/ what does this status negate? What is this status in service of? I turn to the objects themselves: the Goddess on the Throne (a figurine of the Neolithic), the Xhubleta (customary dress), and oil lamps of Ancient Dardania. I ask them to animate, to respond (or not respond), to engage in a collaboration with me as an art historian and as a female Kosovar American, as Drita. In many ways, these case studies are an attempt to exorcise their haunting through centering the material objects as agents of their own narration, through tracking historical processes that destabilize notions of linear time. Using critical fabulation (specifically the medium of poetry) I am hoping to create an alternative archive for these artifacts. My goal is to propose these poems as alternative museum labels that decenter fixed notions of cultural identity, femininity, and time, and recenter the contradictions that live within the pedestalized status of these cultural icons.