Rx 31 / Turn On
Adrian Paci, Turn On, 2004. Courtesy of Slought Foundation.
the fact of being at a crossroads, at the frontier of two separate identities, underlies all my work on film.
- adrian paci
This film still is taken from Albanian multimedia artist Adrian Paci’s 2004 work of video art, Turn On. Unemployed men in Albania wait on the steps of the city square in Shkodra, Paci’s hometown. Left behind by the country’s political and economic turmoil, these men render themselves visible as they wait for work. In this staged scene, Paci visualizes the material conditions of everyday life in Shkodra. Electrical generators, a necessity in a country with daily rolling blackouts, serve as a reminder of the region’s instability and in turn, its citizens’ personal precarity. The collective noisy hum of the generators, almost catalytic in its interminability, undercuts an equally pervasive sense of deprivation and hardship. As the generators turn on and the camera withdraws, the men’s faces are illuminated and the steps become aglow. Each man is at once isolated from and tethered to the other by this delicately shared line of electric current.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 initiated an uneven and disorienting transition from late socialism to capitalist democracy, one that is still unfolding. Civil society across the affected region continues to face a myriad of challenges. While other threats and transformations have further reshaped daily life and undermined the promise of democracy, many attempt to forge new ties and nurture collective identity and belonging through informal economies and networks of interdependence. As political extremism, barriers to mobility and opportunity, and defunding of the cultural sector fray progressive networks of people and institutions, Paci’s Turn On visualizes one form of mutual connection that persists.
Paci left war-torn Albania in 1997 with his family and fled to Italy. His work is informed by a culmination of personal experiences shaped by geo-political forces and the infiltration of modernity in the former Eastern Bloc. In many ways, Paci’s artistic philosophy embodies socialist anthropologist Alexei Yurchak’s concept of “being vyne,” or a condition of simultaneously living inside and outside state systems. Like Yurchak’s notion, this yearning for alternatives is a hallmark of many dissident artistic and intellectual circles across the former Eastern Bloc, which have historically flourished underground through informal gatherings in domestic spaces. In asserting their right to exist, and to exist beyond the control of the state, these groups are politically unpredictable in their non-alignment. They possess, like democracy, a promise that is to come and is always in the coming.
Reflections…
Although captured within the context of post-Soviet Albania’s radical socio-political and economic shifts, the scene Paci has intentionally recreated here, marked by the condition of waiting, without control and without guarantees, may feel familiar to many of us amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the case of Turn On, Paci’s subjects are the victims of an imposed cultural transition and infrastructural upheaval that left many without viable opportunity, entire networks of support uprooted. The decimation of public services in the United States over the last thirty years has induced a similar reality of abandonment during the pandemic for many. Even those Americans who benefit from any remaining forms of stability—healthcare, housing, basic income—are nevertheless besieged by a sense of waiting for a better post-pandemic future that feels increasingly out of reach.
What does the condition of waiting illuminate? How can Turn On remind us that this state of precarity is interminable in the lives of many individuals, both during the pandemic and beyond? By gesturing toward the often unjust power of environmental factors and external forces to shape and reshape our lives, how does Paci urgently call into question the meaning of agency and possibility? Is it tenable to salvage or strive for agency in hostile or even absurd circumstances while attempting to forge communities of support?
Noticeably, the men in Paci’s film are not illuminated by one streetlight, but by multiple, individual, handheld bulbs. The effect, whether intended or not, is that they each seem to create their own self-image, shedding light upon themselves as a form of self-promotion for day labor and validation within the body politic. The formal construction of Turn On reflects the political tumult of the context in which it was produced; this is a new and uncomfortable capitalism, marked by the vestiges of socialism. The men, thrust into a free market economy, are atomized in their existential dislocation, struggling to retain or reconstruct identity and a semblance of community.
In times of upheaval, how do we negotiate the needs of the individual and that of the community? How does the medical profession navigate this tension of prioritizing the needs of the patient, and by extension the community, over self-interest and, at times, at the risk of peril to oneself? What has the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about various types of support and stability in the private versus public domain? If you are a clinician, where have you found unexpected forms of community amongst peers and colleagues or others in this time of crisis? What networks of support have persisted or newly emerged?
sources
“Adrian Paci Artist, Artbasel.” Peter Klichmann, www.peterkilchmann.com/artists/adrian-paci/overview/turn-on-2004.
“Adrian Paci: MoMA.” The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4837.
“Discover Adrian Paci, His Works, Exhibitions and Bio - Kaufmann Repetto.” Kaufmann Repetto, kaufmannrepetto.com/artist/adrian-paci/.
Fakhamzadeh, Babak. “Adrian Paci.” BAK, www.bakonline.org/program-item/adrian-paci/.
