THE FIREFLY KEEPS FALLING AND THE SNAKE KEEPS GROWING

2022, single-channel video, 4K, color, sound, 11’46’’

Courtesy of the artist, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned by Manifesta 14 Prishtina and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film with the executive production of Video Sound Art Festival.

DRIANT ZENELI

Driant Zeneli (1983, Albania) is an artist who lives and works in Turin. In his films, drawings, and happenings, he reflects on ideas of failure, utopia, and dream through a personal investigation of architectural heritages with the aim of imagining alternatives to the perception of the past, present and future. He often interlaces his artistic research with a pedagogical practice aimed at children and focused on storytelling and robotics.

The film weaves together a medieval fable about a snake that wants to eat a firefly because it shines too much, and the state of symbolical failure and material neglect of Skopje’s Central Post Office, one of the most emblematic brutalist buildings in the Balkans.
The artist conceived and created the film with the students of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, in a participatory process that is integral to his practice. Over a period of one year, they built together the two mechatronic protagonists of the film—the firefly and the snake—while bringing the original fairy tale to a different end: even if the firefly gets eaten, this time it lights up the snake from within its belly.
Skopje’s Central Post Office was designed by North Macedonian architect and artist Janko Konstantinov in 1974. The building’s exceptionally powerful structure is made of reinforced concrete in the shape of a lotus flower to symbolize the reconstruction of the city after the 1963 earthquake, which heavily damaged it. After the massive fire outbreak that ravaged the structure in 2013, UNESCO now considers it one of the 7 most endangered buildings in the world.
Part of “The Animals,” a trilogy that the artist has developed since 2019, the video continues its reflection on the absurdity of oppressive regimes of power and the fragility of utopian architectures while nurturing, through collaboration and storytelling, collective ways of remembering the past and imagining the future.