WHAT CANNOT BE PROCESSED

Conceived by Marko Stamenković

ZETA Contemporary Art Center

4–14 September

4 September

18:00

What forms of experience remain when nothing is measured—when life cannot simply be “converted” into data?

The exhibition WHAT CANNOT BE PROCESSED brings together four artists—Enza Rripaj, Besa Mustafaraj, Emi Behari, and Erisaida Veizaj—whose works engage with a contemporary condition of visibility in which the experience of reality—or, rather, of multiple parallel realities unfolding simultaneously—no longer guarantees understanding, while representation is no longer anchored in lived circumstances.

Instead, experience is increasingly mediated, translated, reproduced, and rendered operational.

The project was realized with the support of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport.

WHAT CANNOT BE PROCESSED

What happens when an experience (or its strategically enhanced misinterpretation)
becomes ever more visible—as it does in the age of digital delirium—but cannot be
genuinely or adequately translated and conveyed into information? Except for the
deviated, metabolic form of self-sufficient communication in pursuit of strategic,
calculative propaganda goals, no less imperial than “artificial” in its algorithmic power
dynamics spanning media, continents and human behaviours nowadays?
When something that reacts naturally against the diabolic order of affairs finally
refuses to succumb to the predetermined pragmatic visions of the “highest order of
all” and, indeed, rejects becoming the matter of the past—how do you process the
gesture of refusal? And the power of refusal itself: without images, without words,
without Internet (the “spirit” of our times), if you will?
How do you process something, anything from the past and the present, that refuses
to become or remain exclusively that: merely the “past” or the “present”? Raising
your eyes above, towards the celestial screen, where do you find the actual
remnants of potential Truth and Reason among all sorts of data embodied by stars,
moonlight and noisy, curious and lethal “mosquitoes” overlooking everything and
everyone below? Even before they leave their drone-factory nests to spread among
us, the simple, worthless community of humans?
Try looking down at your feet, for instance, as humbly as you can, to start with the
puzzle of un-processing: a footprint disappears wherever you pass, but the floor, the
sand, the mud all retain its pressure. Or, in case you prefer attending a public protest
instead, you must be aware that sooner or later the protest ends, with or without any
expected historical U-turn or transformation. Yet it continues, no matter how invisibly
and discreetly, to occupy the private sphere: YOUR private sphere—unless you
stand firmly with those whose scepticism, justifiable enough, about today’s possibility
for privacy (in an old-fashioned, “primitive” sense of the term) as utopian instantly
classifies you into a category of people without mercy for allegedly emancipatory,
“civilizing” attempts of artificially created realities to impose new power dynamics as
the only actual answer to Truth, Reason and, why not, Faith. Yes, faith: in humans,
semi-humans, and non-humans alike.
When one body is absent, yet traces of its presence remain; when an embrace can
be seen, but never completely understood; when a figure, or a space of worship, of
living, of working… can be reconstructed without ever being recovered – how do you
process something that refuses to become visible, to announce or embody itself and
be presented to others without having been converted into any legible system of
signs (except for the initiated ones), without ever being properly described,
pronounced or imaged?
We speak of processing in relation to personal experience as though experience
were something that could eventually be sorted, understood and put away. But some
things resist this passage. They remain lodged in surfaces, cracks, gestures, skins,
memories, traumas and, certainly, images – both sacred and secular. They return,
no matter when or why, yet they return in altered forms. They become symbols,
fragments, sounds, repetitions, distortions, noises, broken mirrors, abstract

adventures. They exist and persist. They refuse closure. They cannot be “processed”
by one and only order. They are many and among us. They are powerful. They are
ghosts; and spirits, too. Monstrous and beautiful at the same time.
For your viewing pleasure they matter nothing, you know… And you also know that
you matter “so much” for their devouring pleasures of viewing everything and
everyone, everywhere, anytime…
Welcome to WHAT CANNOT BE PROCESSED!
In the age of digital phantasies, which some rather provocatively look at through the
omnipresent prism of naturally fake intelligence, this exhibition is nothing but another
little lie. Under the given conditions of digital revolutions, a resolution that—“as a
matter of fact”—nothing can be unprocessed today is perhaps as self-evident and
unnecessary as it is demanding the recognition of another position. That nothing
remains except for the resistance to any resolution of all-things-processed and every
conclusion or final solution to all-things-processed.
WHAT CANNOT BE PROCESSED thus gathers four humble, simple, and simply
humane positions around this resistance to resolution. Without pretension, force, and
aggression (the three pillars of current global geopolitics), four women and their
works transform traces, political experiences, intimate gestures and bodies into
images and objects. But they do not promise that transformation will make them
intelligible.
Instead, they expose the gap between experience and its representation, in a time-
space capsule of ZETA Contemporary Art Centre in Tirana where resistance still
seems to be more than just another word in the AI vocabulary of multiple words (and
multiple worlds, realities, images) that mean little or, often, nothing but only
“words”… Here, in the midst of a world of poor words, cheap images, and high
ambitions, art is not necessarily a means of overcoming what has already happened.
It can also be a way of remaining with what cannot yet—or perhaps cannot ever—be
fully processed.
When you think of “processing,” what usually comes to your mind? Like any other
word, this one can mean several things at once: emotionally processing an
experience, politically processing violence, digitally processing data, materially
processing traces, cognitively processing an image, verbally processing gossips,
virtually processing goods and ideological promises for sale, or institutionally
processing what does not fit an established category.
The four artworks on display seem to meet precisely at that point where multiple
meanings of a single word cross each other: something has happened, something
has been experienced or left behind, but it cannot be completely transformed into
knowledge, representation, memory, language, or resolution. In other words, rather
than treating art as a mechanism for turning experience into something complete,
coherent, and intelligible, the exhibition approaches artistic practice as a space
where things may remain unfinished, excessive, ambiguous, latent, or resistant to
resolution.

Why not? If you need to have something complete or completed, including any sort
of communication, you are free to ask your preferable AI assistant and you get a full
package. Alternatively, instead of unleashing your creative prompt-engineering skills,
you may choose to touch another surface with your own hands: by turning blank
papers into a set of charcoal or pastel drawings, a piece of textile or a curtain into a
vibrant watercolour painting, or a couple of patchworks into a disturbingly “alive”
female figure—or a charming little monster coming out of the dark dust on the old
floor straight into your computer screen…
In Enza Rripaj’s Sub Super Facies (creatures of darkness IV), the question begins
with the apparently inert surface of the gallery floor. Continuously crossed by bodies,
the floor accumulates scratches, pressure, dirt and wear—the material residues of
countless presences that are no longer there. Through frottage, scanning and digital
reconstruction, Rripaj moves from trace to image and from image to body. Yet what
emerges is not an identifiable person but Her Majesty, an Anonymous.
The reconstructed figures are fictions generated from real material evidence. The
work therefore occupies an unstable territory between archaeology and imagination,
archive and projection, memory and pareidolia (feel free to ask your preferable and
always ever trustful AI assistant for the definition of this magical word). The floor
remembers, but only indirectly; the artist reconstructs, but cannot recover. What
cannot be processed here is perhaps precisely the absent body itself: its
disappearance cannot be reversed, only given provisional form. It is yours as much
as anyone else’s (if you dare to look behind the curtain).
Emi Behari’s drawings approach the problem from another direction. Here, what
cannot be processed is not necessarily absent—it is too present. The Flamingo
Revolution enters the intimate spaces of everyday life: sleep, friendship, love, family,
food, childhood, the body, landscape (once again, feel free to ask your preferable
and always ever trustful AI assistant for the explanation of what pink flamingos have
to do with revolution without resolution).
The artist’s diary, neither verbal nor digital, becomes a site where political events
and personal experience become impossible to separate. Anger, mourning,
surveillance, care and hope, even something as sacred as one’s own pubic area,
occupy the same visual field. Do not be ashamed—engage with them: these
drawings do not resolve any alleged contradictions. They embrace them. And
preserve them. Untouched by political or algorithmic greed, they are “virgin” images,
thoughts and statements that refuse to be processed, classified and stored. Yet
precisely because of this, the drawings become a form of processing, but also
evidence of its limits—a diary in which experience is recorded precisely because it
has not yet been fully metabolized.
The series moves repeatedly between vulnerability and resistance: a sleeping body
marked by a national map; hands that offer care while simultaneously containing
watching eyes; a threatened future held within the fragile form of an egg; a feather
registering imperceptible political currents; a tower awaiting its inevitable disruption.
Even the recurring symbols of childhood and nature become politically charged. The
private cannot remain private; the political cannot remain outside the body.

Erisaida Veizaj’s image of the embrace (or hugging, if you prefer) is a response to
the same kind of pressure, though by very different means and reasons. But it is also
a kind of question unpronounced: What happens to (parental) sacrifice once it
becomes visible? What remains after everything that can be measured, including
intimacy (or its deliberate conversion into a public spectacle) has been measured,
calculated, judged upon? Quiet, intimate and recognizably human, two bodies
occupy a moment of profound physical proximity. One figure rests against the other,
while the second remains present, almost watchfully, beside them. The scene
appears simple, even familiar: a gesture of intimacy, exhaustion, protection or care.
Yet the longer we look, the less easily the encounter can be reduced to a single
meaning.
Is the person being held, cared for, protected—or simply sleeping? We don’t know.
That uncertainty itself becomes productive. Also, what is being exchanged between
these bodies cannot be fully seen. There is no measurable unit for the weight of
trust, the duration of an embrace, the sensation of another body resting against
one’s own. The image therefore holds something that remains outside the
informational surface of the image itself: an experience that can be represented, but
never completely transferred.
You feel it only when you give a hug to the other, even to your enemy. The
experience it evokes is larger than any information, or misinformation.
So, what happens to this kind of experience (pleasant and dangerous alike) that
cannot be processed, partially or entirely—when the body has disappeared, when
there’s no one to hug? Or when the same experience cannot be remembered
adequately, represented completely, and explained rationally?
Besa Mustafaraj’s object – strange, tactile, almost ritualistic and sacrificial – evokes
some thoughts about these questions, yet without answers. Silence may be the most
powerful voice ever to be processed, though not all the time and under all conditions.
This is what one preferable and always more trustful AI assistant (whose identity, for
the sake of privacy and secrecy, cannot be disclosed) thinks about Besa
Mustafaraj’s “silence”:
Her figure occupies an uncertain space between body, doll, relic and handmade
object. Its fragile materials, visible construction and almost deteriorated appearance
resist the polished legibility expected of contemporary images and objects. It
resembles a body, but refuses to become a stable representation of one. Here, the
material itself seems to carry a memory. Fabric, hair, fragments, surfaces and traces
of making accumulate rather than resolve into a clearly identifiable identity. The
figure cannot be easily classified: it is simultaneously familiar and uncanny, intimate
and alien, human and artificial.
If contemporary systems ask us to identify, categorize and assign meaning to what
we see, Mustafaraj’s object (you may call them “dolls”, but be aware of simple
definitions and risks carried therein) seems to remain deliberately in excess of
classification. It asks us to encounter something before we start thinking we know
exactly what it is.

That connects very naturally to WHAT CANNOT BE PROCESSED. Can it ever be?

Marko Stamenkoviq