Kledia Spiro, Leaves Some Kind of Residue, solo performance “Të Dua aq Shumë: I love you so much,” 2024, Vivid Oblivion, Cambridge, MA. Curated by Nife (Jennifer) Lucey-Brzoza.
I presented excerpts from my dad’s own poetry notebooks through my performance. My ultimate goal is to translate all of his work, including his dissertation, starting with this performance. Collaborating with my mom, I designed an outfit: a silver bodysuit with a skirt made of zippers. I performed while the audience is hearing my mom’s translation of my dad’s poetry. She is translating in English, while you hear his voice reading the work in Albania. I remixed these on vinyl using Serato.
To give and receive.
Te dua aq shumë.
Participants extracted words from my outfit to collectively create new poetry within this new communal body. I invited members of the audience to trace my body and each other’s bodies on top of mine. After the performance, Spiro plans to send everyone the collaborative piece they co-created.
Boston Art Review: “Kledia Spiro painstakingly walked on all fours for her piece Te dua aq shumë: I love you so much, ripping excerpts of her father’s love poems off of a hand-fashioned belt and handing them to the audience. In the cramped room, audience members had to scoot forward and backward to make way for Spiro. She then called upon everyone to read their lines aloud, first one at a time and then all together. The result was a jumble of utterances, a verbal exquisite corpse, voices timid and bold and everything in between. Deeply collaborative and playful, it felt like a conversation with a good friend, a religious ritual, a rite of passage all at once.
Audience Member: “Experiencing a fragment of the poetry and having the chance to speak it aloud was a profound moment. As participants in you art performance, we were not just observers but a component of the work. By collectively reciting words spoken by Kledia's Mom and Dad, we shared something deeply personal and rare. It's uncommon to voice the words of someone else's parents, and in doing so, we connected to the performance on a unique level. These parts how ever large or small, their impact, we can take with us as well.” - Buford Design