Adrian Paci

Adrian Paci has spent many years examining and re-examining what it feels like to wander the earth. Predominantly working with video and painting, he has probed what it means to leave and return, to want to leave and be held back, to leave and be lost, to stay behind, to walk on the spot, to meander.

Set in rural Albania, The Wanderers contrasts two modes of walking, two modes of moving and being. Whereas the black-and-white video shows people and animals entering and leaving the frame randomly in slow motion, the colour video features a staged procession of people purposefully striding in the direction of the viewer: towards an unknown goal, an unknown place.

The tension between the two temporalities and sets of imagery transcends the work’s Albanian context. It invokes the literary or philosophical figure of the wanderer, a human being adrift in the cosmos, as much as it does that of the migrant.    

Adrian Paci (1969, AL) is a film-maker and artist who lives and works in Milan.

There are two significant aspects to his artistic practice. The first is the process of continuous transformation, which everyone in society is a part of. The second is the question of what remains after all of these transformations. Paci’s work is often situated in the middle of this fragile tension. His work can be described as a preservation of the past that has gone through a process of transformation, but which can still allow us to imagine the future.