The Column

Cutting across media, Albanian artist Adrian Paci archives the stories of lives set afloat by forces of globalisation; exploring themes of exile, homelessness, and the nature of community and of memory in an age of intense mobility. Having fled to Italy in the aftermath of the 1997 mass rebellion in Albania, Paci himself is no stranger to displacement and its profound psychological impact.

In The Column (2013), the artist films a group of Chinese stone carvers transporting a marble block from China to Europe. While they are at sea on this intercontinental voyage, the workers use the boat as a workshop to carve the stone into a ‘Made in China’ classical Greek column, to be delivered to a buyer at the destination. The urge towards efficiency that forces them to converge shipping time and production time in the interest of profit is, to the artist, “simultaneously sick and fabulous”, resulting in a mythic voyage attesting to the perversity of our present.

The Column weaves into the journey of the stone and its carvers the innumerable tales of transit that make up human history of travel and maritime exchange. Towards the end, as the boat sails towards the horizon with its cargo of busy workers, a patch of filtered sunlight moves over the finished column, evoking a vision of the earth itself journeying through space on its own voyage around the sun.