A Balkan Tale: Joan Kamberaj and Visar Arifaj
Chris Keulemans
Animators on stage are rarely as wild as their work on screen. Yesterday at noon, two modest young men took their place next to the giant screen, speaking softly about their work, as if they would rather not be there at all. But then they showed us their videos. And those were anything but humble.
Anibar likes offering the stage to animation artists from across the Balkans, to tell us about their working methods, the challenges they face and the techniques they are exploring. This time, Joan Kamberaj and Visar Arifaj were invited. The first-time moderator, 16-year-old Era Hyseni, who has followed animation workshops here at the Anibar Academy, guided them elegantly through their conversations with the audience.
Kamberaj fell in love with stop-motion at highschool in Tirana. A cheap camera and computer, open source software, paper and scissors were all he needed to start creating. His parents, unfamiliar with the art of animation, supported him nonetheless in this unusual career choice. Today, he considers himself fortunate to divide his time between commercial jobs for fashion brands like Hermes and independent free work. The short examples he showed us of both excel in smooth, sweeping movements that have an effortless feel. Then we got to see his short personal film Abeo, created while he was still at highschool. Suddenly, we were dragged into the meticulously reproduced and frankly chilling psyche of a boy who resembled David Lynch in his understanding of the horrors lurking underneath the pastel colors of everyday life.
Arifaj, from Prishtina, introduced himself as a politician, designer and animator. He apologized for showing us an unfinished video called nc-nc-nc… He’s been working on it for a while now and would love to hook up with a like-minded spirit who is into traditional animation. ‘Most designers now are too lazy to work frame by frame. But as you can see, I really need some help to finish this. It is really difficult to find someone who is passionate about this and would be willing to drive themselves crazy by working frame by frame for months.’ His video, however incomplete, triggered our curiosity: it’s a disarming tale of a young man lying awake at night, while all the characters who crowd his daily life enter his bedroom one by one and talk to him incessantly.
Someone asked him how his creative work influenced his political work. Arifaj responded: ‘When you combine design and animation, you start seeing the hierarchy in information. This really helps you to handle all the information when you start a political or activist campaign.’ Only then did I realize that this gentle, humble animator was none other than the self-proclaimed Legendary Leader of the “Strong Party”(Partia e fortë), shook up the local elections in 2013 with its brilliant satire of Kosovo’s current politicians. They came up with promises like: ‘The party wants to decrease the number of divorces by no longer allowing marriages. Serious diseases will be made illegal, which will naturally result in fewer diseases. Corruption should be legalized, so that it is no longer a problem.’ Hard to rhyme that swaggering campaigner with this modest animator struggling with the technique he needs to finish his troubled short film. But they are both real. The satirical and the vulnerable: animation has room for them all.
