THE GROUND REPORT

A SPECULATIVE WEATHER FORECAST BY A BURIED RIVER AND A MYTHOLOGICAL FIGURE

2025

Galeria 17, Prishtina (XK), 2025 (c) Majlinda Hoxha

 mixed media installation
(readymades, textile)
video projection (11‘10), sound
performer: Artiola Syla

commissioned by
Galeria 17

shown at
“In the Making IV – Queer Ecology”,
duo show with Luiza Thaqi, Galeria 17, Prishtina (XK), 2025

supported by 
Galeria 17
Bildrecht (SKE)
Otto Mauer Fonds
Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (Republic Austria)
Austrian Embassy Prishtina

The initial research was developed during an artist residency awarded by the Province of Styria.

 

THE GROUND REPORT

The installation takes the form of an ongoing weather report, where Prishtina’s buried Rivers (Vellusha, Prishtina) – once flowing across the city, now forced underground – resurface.

These hidden waterways carry memories of floods, lost gardens, and suppressed currents, echoing experiences of erasure and invisibility.

At the center of this forecast, the buried River “Angry Vellusha” rises to speak, encountering Kulshedra: a mythological female* serpent-like figure feared for bringing floods, droughts, and destructive storms. Both embody forces marked as unruly, dangerous, or excessive; especially when tied to female* presence and power.

The forecast becomes a space of resistance and imagination, weaving together invisible flows, female* rage, and speculation into an urgent, collective weather of the present.

IN THE MAKING IV – QUEER ECOLOGY
exhibition text

In a dynamic network, where natural and social elements intertwine through co-creation, mediation, and collective survival, a hybrid and inevitable reality emerges for safeguarding ecological and social equilibrium. Within this configuration, conceptions of agency grounded exclusively in the human are surpassed, opening new pathways for posthuman perspectives and multi-agent interactions. Lena Violetta Leitner and Luiza Thaqi reveal this continuously shifting dynamic—between species, among different entities, and across time. (…)

In Lena Violetta Leitner’s work “The Ground Report” we are reminded that our relationship with the capital’s rivers, Vellusha and Prishtevka, was not severed with their burial. On the contrary, she re-links this communication through a speculative, urgent, and collective weather forecast that recalls floods, droughts, and destructive storms. In this way, the mythical curse of the kulshedra is revived, and the voice of the Vellusha resounds from beneath the ground as a living memory, irreconcilable with silence. By digging the intersections between narrative and memory, the individual and the collective, lived experience and discovery, we uncover fertile fissures where hybrid meanings flourish once again.

Thus, within the gallery, non-human actors—organic and inorganic matter, soil and time interact with human practices, politics, and activity, revealing how power, knowledge, and belonging circulate through hybrid pathways. The exhibition traces the movement of materials from one place to another; it reflects ecological data translated into community memory; it offers a weather forecast that surpasses agencies confined solely to the human.

***

Under the theme of Queer Ecology, we seek to offer an inclusive language—a language that honours and recognizes the personality of the natural world, liberating it from the conventional objectification of living matter. This approach highlights interactions with nonorganic actors while also unfolding flexible identities that reconfigure notions of territory and time. In doing so, it releases ecological perception from rigid boundaries and situates it within a state of continuous renegotiation and co-creation.

Fitore Isufi Shukriu
curator
(excerpt)

 

(c) Majlinda Hoxha
Detail: Costume (c) Majlinda Hoxha
(c) Majlinda Hoxha