It’s hard to imagine meeting her in Paris. This woman is attracted by colours, bright colours, the ones that define, that catch the eye and don’t let go. She uses a more or less bright red to portray women, blurred and unsettling nudes in broken decors. It’s the red of her country’s political past (our “red cause”, she writes in “Le pays où l’on ne meurt jamais” (t: The land where one never dies). Red again is the look of a man: "Le blanc de ses yeux était parcouru de capillaires rouges. Cartes ensanglantées. Géographie de la jeunesse cruelle." (t: “the white of his eyes was covered with red capillaries. Bloody maps. Geography of the cruel youth”). Ornela Vorpsi writes these words in one of her last books published in France, by Actes Sud and in Italy by Nottetempo, “Les tessons roses” (t: Pink Shards), a collection of cruel and fanciful tales. "Ainsi je fais rouler lentement les verres colorés de mon existence. Je préfère lorsque la géométrie des dessins est baignée de rose. La couleur des tessons roses." (t: “Thus I slowly let the coloured glass of my existence roll. I prefer it when the geometry of drawings is bathed in pink. The colour of pink shards.”). Then there’s that title, she doesn’t like much “Vert venin” (t: Venom Green), a novel born from a trip to Sarajevo. The aftermath of war and exile written without any style effects or mannerism. Nothing and no one is just black and white in her stories.
One of the secrets of her writing resides perhaps in its making. Ornela doesn’t write in Albanian but in a language that isn’t hers, Italian. “It’s the language that comes out when I write. I can’t really explain why…Maybe I need the distance that a foreign language implies…Maybe I still need to recover from Albania…I write in a particular shifty Italian. It’s hard to translate.” However, it is in France that this young photographer, graduated in plastic arts and was published for the first time. In the publishing world, to edit a book that is written in a foreign language is an exception. The book is "Le pays où l'on ne meurt jamais". In it, she talks about her country, through the lives of three women, who are one. The text is absolutely devoid of complacency. From the first page: “Je dédie ce livre au mot humilité, qui est absent du lexique albanais. Une telle absence peut donner lieu à des phénomènes très curieux dans la destinée d’un peuple.” (t: “I dedicate this book to the word humility, which is absent in the Albanian vocabulary. This absence can give place to very curious events in the destiny of a nation.”) An introduction that will not award her only sympathies. “I’m so fed up with questions on Albania… People have asked me what was true and what wasn’t so many times…If I actually lived everything I wrote…
Of course, there are resonances, things that Ornela Vorpsi saw, in the
pages of her first book. There’s no need to disentangle true from false, reality from fiction. The language, often carnal, sometimes violent gives a feel of what this country had become, during a period of its history. It helps to sense the experience of dictatorship, isolation. In an environment where the beauty of women is suspicious: “En tant que fille de détenu politique, je devais plus que toute autre me plonger dans l’apprentissage des grands idéaux communistes. J’étais aussi en danger parce que cela ne pouvait que me conduire à la perdition” (t: “Being the daughter of a political prisoner, I needed more than anyone else to bury myself in the apprenticeship of the great communist ideals. I was also in danger because this could only get me in trouble”).
Ornela Vorpsi, doesn’t take the reader by the hand. “I like Kundera’s definition: “The novel that thinks”. The book that asks questions…The book must be a real encounter with the reader.” Even if this means plunging him in the fury of the world. “La masure était faite de briques de boue séchée au soleil, les fenêtres aux vitres manquantes, étaient tendues de ruban adhésif, mais elle était équipée d’un fil assez solides pour soutenir les corps amaigris de ces deux putes, nouées gorge à gorge.” (“The shack was made of mud bricks dried in the sun, the windows with missing glasses, were covered in adhesive tape, but it was equipped with a string strong enough to bear the scrawny bodies of those two hores, tied neck to neck.”)
Her own life is a novel that she recounts with irony and…humility. Aged 22, Ornela Vorpsi left Albania with her mother. In 1991, Enver Hoxha died. The country of eagles began a painful democratic transition. The two women were hosted at a cousin’s house in Rome. They left with a tourist visa: “We just left, to see what the world could offer us” The young woman opened her eyes wide on this new reality: exile. She and her mother were ready to go back when they met an Albanian friend living in Milan. That’s where the two women began a new life. Ornela is pretty. She danced in discos to finance her studies. “I was a “ragazza cubo” a girl who dances on a cube…”, she mentions simply. A grant allowed her to leave for France to follow her art studies in Paris, where she still lives today. Her writing came out to light during that period.
In parallel to a career in photography and painting. In her images, as in her writing, the body is in the foreground. The young woman is finally free to show it. To unveil it. In her first book, she told the story – real this time – of a reproduction of a painting by Delacroix, “Freedom Guiding the People”. In the Albanian history book, the bosom of the young revolutionary was covered… “I’m obsessed by nudes. The trip that the body offers.” A monograph of the photographic works of Ornela Vorpsi was published in Switzerland on 2001 (“Nothing Obvious”). A set of images of women’s bodies is titled “Politique d’intérieur”…
Her most recent works – exposed since 18 September at the gallery Analix Forever in Geneva until November – break with this universe. This time it’s painting, as always nudes. But it’s classical painting. “About Tomoko” takes the spectator far from the Balkans, bright colours and mistreated, dissimulated bodies. The book she’s now writing should also explore other paths. “What’s certain is that it will not speak of countries and nationalities. This novel is very different from the others”. Intact generosity of the artist, which lets you see: “ça évacue les pensées, écoute, laisse-moi t’expliquer : si tu as des choses à oublier et tu en as certainement, c’est la meilleure des méthode pour les chasser. Comme ça, tu t’en libères. Sans la moindre plainte, avec un calme déconcertant, Ana arracha son œil et voulut m’en faire cadeau.” (t: “it clears thoughts out, listen, let me explain: if you have something to forget, and you certainly do, it’s the best way to chase them away. This way you free yourself from them. Without the least complaint, with disconcerting calm, Ana pulled out her eye and gave it to me.”
Emmanuel Vigier
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