Episode Transcript
[00:00:32] If only I could present my ideas better.
[00:00:37] Intersecting technology and mollusks.
[00:00:41] Something ocular and scientific. A mesmerizing vision like a cut in thin steel, make it more appealing.
[00:00:51] For a better life opportunity, I joined the colonizers. Erasure.
[00:00:59] I am imitating them. The mimicry.
[00:01:02] Aren't you baptized?
[00:01:04] Oh, you're Muslim.
[00:01:08] Only half.
[00:01:11] How can you be half?
[00:01:14] My mother comes from a muslim family. My father is Greek Orthodox.
[00:01:18] There are also Catholics and Bektashi.
[00:01:22] Christianity first came to the area when St. Paul and some of his followers traveled in the Balkans. Passing through thracian, illyrian and greek populated areas, he spread Christianity to the Greeks at Beroia, Thessaloniki, Athens, Corinth and Urahum, today's Durus.
[00:01:42] And then I started talking about the Ottoman Empire.
[00:01:47] But their faces faded.
[00:01:50] They couldn't find my coordinates.
[00:01:53] Any coordinates.
[00:01:57] The Ottoman Empire was founded at the end of the 13th century in the northwestern anatolian town of Sogut by the turkoman tribal leader Osman I.
[00:02:09] I.
[00:02:11] The 13th century 13th century one three after 1354, the Ottomans crossed into Europe, and with the conquest of the balkans, the ottoman bay league was transformed into a transcontinental empire.
[00:02:29] I 1350 413 54 the Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmet the conqueror.
[00:02:47] I 1450 314 53 under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire marked the peak of its power and prosperity, as well as the highest development of its governmental, social and economic systems.
[00:03:07] At the beginning of the 17th century, the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states.
[00:03:14] I at the beginning of the 17th century, one seven.
[00:03:21] Some of these provinces were later absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy. Over the course of the centuries, the Ottoman Empire was at the center of interactions between the Middle east and Europe for six centuries.
[00:03:38] Middle east and Europe for six centuries. Six centuries of Ottoman Empire.
[00:03:47] Six centuries are 600 years, six times 100.
[00:03:54] Aren't you baptized?
[00:03:57] You're Muslim.
[00:04:00] Aren't you baptized?
[00:04:03] You're Muslim? Only half.
[00:04:06] Being Muslim is usually full.
[00:04:08] It implies a fatality.
[00:04:12] Who's talking? Them?
[00:04:14] But you are so white.
[00:04:16] It's about anti muslim feelings pervading italian Christians being good people as only they can.
[00:04:28] Pasta conne sarde and multiple chano da bruzzo.
[00:04:32] And then enver Hoja came. They call him oxa. In the west, no one notices there is an h before the o.
[00:04:41] They remember how to almost correctly pronounce Ceausescu and tito, and that suffices. It's about first come, first served with institutional memory.
[00:04:52] The h sound is called the voiceless glottal fricative, which means that the sound is made with the motion of one's vocal cords, but it is not voiced. Fricatives are sounds which are made by bringing two parts of one's mouth or throat very close together and pushing the air through them.
[00:05:16] Hook Hodja.
[00:05:19] Hodja invested in a communist ethy state. Albania transitioned from a simple secular state to state atheism, by which all public practices of religion were banned, although some private practices still survived.
[00:05:35] The beginning of anti religious policies implemented by the Communist Party of Albania was in August 1946, with the famed agrarian reform law, which nationalized most of the property of religious institutions, restricted their activity and preceded the persecution of many clergy and believers and the expulsion of all foreign catholic priests, half orthodox, half Muslim Catholics.
[00:06:05] Bektashi Hodja running out of breath.
[00:06:15] Death, exhaustion is when osteoporosis has consumed all the bones. The spine is about to fall, the flesh has become earth, heavy in rain.
[00:06:30] Going after the feeling of home. And you are running again.
[00:06:33] Even if you have stopped, your feet are still moving.
[00:06:38] You are near, as near as to have arrived. Bodies stretching.
[00:06:44] Hospitality is to be near. The affection of giving space, generosity.
[00:06:52] Albanian Code of Honor, 1912.
[00:06:56] Ottoman Empire. Yes, I said it again.
[00:07:01] Ottoman Empire.
[00:07:03] But there are no boundaries. We succumb in each other.
[00:07:08] Bodies stretching beyond being near to the skin. Skin melting, smashed, glued to one another. Croatia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosniarzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary. You are going too far. Where are you going?
[00:07:30] How south are you moving? I said west. Yes, the Balkans, the west, the east, the south. Greece is the cradle of western sivilisation.
[00:07:47] 18 years old, actually almost 19.
[00:07:52] My pride was fresh.
[00:07:54] Smelled like parsley and morning dew vest.
[00:07:59] Albanian Renaissance, 1912.
[00:08:04] It aimed to create a unified cultural identity in a period of non state existence. Myths in succession of exacerbations.
[00:08:15] I'm talking about Stanislav Zhukalski. Creating a Europe without western states, creating a new European without an e, with an n, as in near to a. No. Iconographies of belonging.
[00:08:37] Stanislaw Zhukalski was an eccentric polish american artist, created a kind of pseudoscience called zermattism. He believed that the primordial language of the world was polish, and the primordial lens of the polished Sarmatians was a place called Zermatt in Switzerland. They themselves came from the Easter Islands. He published around 40 books on sermonism, which he illustrated himself. Being a painter and graphic artist, he campaigned for the idea of creating new a Europe without western states, and predicted the voluntary polonization of germanic and romanic people and a common religion, which was to be the pagan cult of the slavic deity Svetovit.
[00:09:28] This came from the sarmatian ideology of superstitions, providing the impulse for a fascinating artwork, an imperial pagan style image of what are principally mythical beings.
[00:09:42] Zhukalski had his pupils and admirers, among them the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who owns a collection of his work.
[00:09:51] East against west, west against east, near away from opposing communist dictatorships of the proletariat. Jeans, jackets and sunglasses. Sickle and hammer. Sick. One side needs the other to prove something against itself to the other for itself against the other. Sickle and mayonnaise, hammer and long hair. I cannot do with or without toxicities of afterwards failed admissions.
[00:10:31] We still hang on to the symbols. Little albanian girl.
[00:10:36] We young communist students of Italy, France and Greece.
[00:10:40] Its the two thousands. Yes, we do. Its 2022. We still do.
[00:10:47] Through your experience pain. You are too far from us. We were on the other side, opposing chewing gums. I want to kiss you now. Feel your tongue. In our homes. Hammer and sickle. A reminder of repression running against each other, almost crashing. Almost the same. So near in exuberance. Sulf, sulphuric fumes. Chewing gum and hammer. Sickle and Coca Cola. Virgin Mary. The workers, the muezzins. Berlinuer. He distant himself from Stalin. Yes, he did. Too late. We were forgotten. Sickle and hammer. Forced labor. Sickle and hammer, opening terraces, digging earth. She was 14 and a half. Her period came in the outskirts of Saranda, the sun burning down her spine. Back pain becks, breaking. Sickle and hammer. A mother told on her son. He was arrested for loving chewing gum.
[00:11:55] Great ideological projects have to come to an end. En d with an I endi.
[00:12:04] But this feeling of being forgiven, isn't it a christian feeling?
[00:12:11] Long hair, revolutions.
[00:12:13] Where are you from?
[00:12:15] Go back to your east. Twitch rubber boat. Kidnapped, raped. Your favorite prostitute, the rampuna.
[00:12:56] At length, after more than a decade in exile in Turkey and Iraq, Khomeini spent some time in Neufle le Chateau, a leafy suburb outside of Paris, where, urban legend has it, he often ran into Margaret duras at the local grocery store. There, the two would discuss which sorts of pasta to buy.
[00:13:35] There is something strangely touching about Dura, the proto feminist, proto communist, rubbing soldiers with khomeini, a man considered by many to be, if anything, the exemplary anti feminist and anti communist hesperian osteoporosis. To the bone, to the core. Past the near drilling, semi free for the people.
[00:14:02] Osteoporosis causes bones to become weak and brittle, so brittle that a fall or even mild stress, such as bending or coughing, can cause a fracture. Osteoporosis related fractures most commonly occur in the hip, wrist or spine.
[00:14:20] Bone is living tissue that is constantly being broken down and replaced. Osteoporosis occurs when the creation of new bone doesnt keep up with the loss of old bone.
[00:14:33] How much can my bone endure?
[00:14:36] Breakable or porous? The artist, the fragile ego.
[00:14:41] I thought of myself more as a ligament, the fibrius tissue connecting one bone to another, bone from ligament to ligament. How malleable am I?
[00:14:57] I was presenting a project about menstruation practices during communism in Albania at a very well known art university in Berlin.
[00:15:06] There was this hardcore white german feminist in the commission that didn't like my attitude from the very beginning. The opposite of chemistry.
[00:15:16] I said something about feminism in white academia and the false pretense of criticism, the exclusion of eastern european perspectives. And she said there were so many books about albanian vaginas and menstruation practices during the Ottoman Empire that she had read or heard of. Apparently it was a way of challenging a good articulated interlocutor that only this type of institutions can.
[00:15:46] Where real feminists teach, where I have heard so many of them hijack the word intersectionality from black feminist activists. The name Kimberly Crenshaw is nowhere to be heard, nowhere to be seen.
[00:16:04] Kimberley Crenshaw.
[00:16:07] Helene Sixou would be proud.
[00:16:11] I remember. Though I did not kiss the hardcore white german feminists ass, I so memorably resisted.
[00:16:20] I tried to kiss the other commission's members asses, but I did not succeed.
[00:16:26] The aggressiveness in the disappointment pouring out so joyfully, my skin pores glowing.
[00:16:35] So what?
[00:16:37] I want to kiss you now. Feel your tongue.
[00:16:42] White academia is finally engaged. Sorry, I meant fully fully engaged. They are looking for new trending causes. Who is it going to be next?
[00:16:53] They will send open letters and make a statement which awareness to raise, where to turn to, how to engage a flow of causes in waters without borders uncontained. Good intentions manifesting.
[00:17:11] Where does goodness end?
[00:17:15] Does it flow like a river?
[00:17:18] All the good intentions are rich.
[00:17:22] All the good intentions are rich. Juxtaposed to being poor.
[00:17:29] Poor. The gap where all good intentions fall.
[00:17:35] If they say poor and poor is where I am from.
[00:17:39] What mechanisms are born?
[00:17:41] Who is looking at what?
[00:17:44] €4780 net a month plus benefits.
[00:17:51] €650 brutal per month, no benefits.
[00:17:56] €300 per month.
[00:17:59] €80 net. The pension of a woman who can explain what to whom?
[00:18:09] The good intentions come first.
[00:18:12] Yes, they do. And then, being poor, is all goodness good? When it finally pours, does it pour into the sea in the end? In the end? With an I. Endy with an e, as in east, associated often with the color gray. A dim light.
[00:18:35] Something is about to fade. Though there is mostly sun involved in Tirana.
[00:18:42] Colorful surfaces have faded already.
[00:18:45] But we could have also been full of light. Could I have been the back of a tree turning its leaves towards the sun?
[00:18:55] A cypress in a cypress hill, like in Tuscany.
[00:19:01] The region of Tuscany, as the rest of Italy discovered our existence for the first time in the nineties, it was very the east going down under, in the bottom belly of the Mediterranean.
[00:19:17] It was still grey, even though there was so much sun involved. The kind of sun that makes the sky look like it is lower, about to crash onto the earth.
[00:19:29] Almost cobalt blue. Boiling blue.
[00:19:33] Blue. Yve clan electrifying, liquidifying photons.
[00:19:40] A photon is a tiny particle that comprises waves of electromagnetic radiation.
[00:19:47] Photons have no charge nor resting mass and travel at the speed of light.
[00:19:53] Photons are emitted by the action of charged particles, although they can be emitted by other methods, including radioactive decay.
[00:20:05] Italians are good people.
[00:20:07] They never decay. They smell good, dress well. They produce the most perfect commercials. They believe in it. Fascism. Allacua di rose.
[00:20:21] Let's downplay down. I am here in Milan, where I studied for six years and worked for other four. I was frequently asked if I had come to work as a prostitute.
[00:20:33] Are you an ex prostitute?
[00:20:35] Did you come here in rubber boats?
[00:20:38] No, I didn't mean it like that. Don't be aggressive. I thought you came as a prostitute, but are studying now. I mean, initially, is what I meant.
[00:20:49] I would never dare otherwise.
[00:20:53] Prostitute.
[00:20:55] Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute.
[00:21:52] An explosion of orgasms for the clients only.
[00:21:57] All these italian men having sex with prostitutes.
[00:22:02] It's the prostitutes fault. They are so available. They are there on the streets. Italian men are inside, in their homes. They are catholic. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
[00:22:20] Adrina Seydini.
[00:22:22] She fell from a bridge on the 6 November 2021. It was a Saturday.
[00:22:30] Kidnapped, raped. Sent to be a prostitute on a rubber boat. Albanians trafficking female bodies. Italians buying three for one. In the name of the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is high on cocaine. Italians are good people. They never decay.
[00:22:56] Adelina became an activist, the ex prostitute. She accused her perpetrators.
[00:23:03] She had 40 men arrested, she committed suicide after being abandoned by the country that had convinced her to fight against the criminals that raped and sold her into prostitution.
[00:23:18] They denied Adelina the right to italian citizenship, even though she had proven herself worthy of.
[00:23:27] She had said she deserved it.
[00:23:32] I deserve it. I do.
[00:23:35] Oh, I do. I deserve it. I do, I do, I do, I do. I deserve it. Yes, I do. I deserve it, you hear me? I do, I do, I deserve it.
[00:23:54] She was stateless, but the italian institutions, they took away her stateless title.
[00:24:05] They assigned her back the albanian citizenship.
[00:24:10] Go back, Adelina. Go back to your country.
[00:24:14] Italians validated a permit for work reasons, even though a medical commission had declared her to be 100% invalid for work. Breast cancer with metastasis.
[00:24:27] Unable to work and earn a living, the catholic church gave her room to stay, going back and forth between Pavia and Milan.
[00:24:37] Go back to Albania and Helena. Go back. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
[00:24:45] Is it in Albania where your trauma began?
[00:24:49] Is it there where they kidnapped you? Is it there that they raped you? How many were they?
[00:24:56] One after the other?
[00:24:58] You will never forget.
[00:25:01] How much did they beat you? How much? How many cigarettes spent onto your body?
[00:25:08] You don't remember?
[00:25:11] There was this tv show, Le Jene, the hyenas. With humor and investigative journalism, they exposed italian absurdities.
[00:25:24] You know Italians, they love a good tv show. They love tv. It gathers them around a living room and it makes them whole again.
[00:25:36] Everyone watched the same shows at home. At their mother's home. Their mothers had been cooking with love and hyper protectiveness. I was with my boyfriend at the time, an architect with a PhD.
[00:25:51] He also had an overprotective mom. Unable to show him healthy forms of affection, she would also cook for him, but only once a week. We were in the living room after dinner, the hyenas were on. They were interviewing Adelina, and my heart gushed to my throat. There she was, the real prostitute.
[00:26:14] I, the accused one.
[00:26:17] I was supposed to be her.
[00:26:19] She could have been me.
[00:26:23] I was ashamed, I was afraid. I was sorry. I betrayed her. I was not able to welcome her pain in mine. I was critical of the tv show, of the journalists interviewing her, penalizing her story. I was critical of the editor, the choice of words, not elevating her. I was vivisecting her portrayal, but I was not reaching out to love her.
[00:26:46] Adelina spoke in a phosphorous dripping sorrow. Being cognizant of her fate, she shortly said how she had been as a young girl, growing up, her dreams, her passion for dance and italian music.
[00:27:06] She said she liked the italian singer Loretta Goggi.
[00:27:10] You know Loretta, she sang about spring and love.
[00:27:15] Many italian boyfriends asked their girlfriends to be quiet on where they really were from.
[00:27:21] Sh.
[00:27:23] Say you are from Croatia for now, babe, we will explain later where you really are from. We have to be careful with our families, especially our mothers. We don't want our mothers to be hurt by your nationality. She is cooking with care for me. I cannot disappoint her with a girlfriend that comes from Albania.
[00:27:44] Yes, she does my laundry too, I cannot disappoint her. You see, the italian feminists, the italian feminist activists never gave a shit, just like the german hardcore feminist.
[00:28:02] So what? Only theory do they go to the streets to see how the prostitutes are doing?
[00:28:10] Adelina did.
[00:28:12] She kept seeing how the girls were doing, she kept helping the police, she threw herself from a bridge bone into waters in the name of the mother, the daughter and the italian ghost.
[00:28:29] All these northern italian women that had been afraid from the very beginning of the nineties to the end of the two thousands, because of this unfair competitiveness of the eastern european women, with their docile, gold digging, approving, self deprecating self, they were all looking to settle and steal italian men away, escaping poverty, vaginas who would do anything, open mouths of fatigue and hunger for normalcy. The italian dream, an apartment, a summer house at La Gomaggiore, dinners at a restaurant twice a week, pizza on Sunday, and vacations in Sardinia. Murino Bianco, a biscuit dipped in milk.
[00:29:26] It's the italian sunnyside of mornings.
[00:29:31] Secular materialism tools are provided. Mothers of the east have left their children behind to take care of the elderly. Italian people ageing alone in the country of the holy family, aging alone with women from the east, mostly from Ukraine.
[00:29:55] Italian mothers, above 80, dying in the company of women from the east, taking care of them, mostly from Romania.
[00:30:05] Le donne del Leste, le Badante.
[00:30:09] Prostitutes or caregivers?
[00:30:12] The prostitute, the caregiver.
[00:30:15] My life is hell, I come from hell, I am 42 years old now, and unfortunately, the years went by very quickly.
[00:30:25] The most tender of my years I unfortunately spent in the streets of Italy to force prostitution.
[00:30:31] My kidnappers, they took me into this bunker and they raped me, all of them. As a group.
[00:30:40] I was, as my mom had made me, a virgin.
[00:30:43] I didn't know what a sexual intercourse was.
[00:30:47] They hit me so hard.
[00:30:49] I will never forget, for the rest of my life, I will never forget.
[00:30:56] They did it to threaten me. So that I would never go away from them, they sent me to Italy on a rubber boat.
[00:31:05] I arrived in Brindisi and was then taken to the region of Lombardia.
[00:31:11] I was sent to beat everywhere in Italy.
[00:31:14] There were other women in the rubber boat, too.
[00:31:18] They left us in an apartment where we were ten girls.
[00:31:22] Thanks to my denunciation, they were all set free. The youngest was 14 years old. I was terrorized. I was hoping in my mind that someone would come to save me.
[00:31:35] The italian state police came every day to see the girls working in the streets. They told me, we can help you. We can help you catch who forced you here.
[00:31:47] This Adelina that you see, the strong one, the one that tries to help other women, she cries too. You know, when I see other women or a family, I think how wonderful it would have been to stay near my family had I not been kidnapped.
[00:32:09] My future, for my future, I see helping other people, but mine I really don't see.
[00:32:21] I don't see mine often. I feel very lonely and I surely miss my family. And when I feel so lonely, I go to them, the italian state police, because they are. They are also my family now.
[00:32:38] I talk to them and then it all goes away.
[00:32:43] She committed suicide.
[00:32:46] No family, no italian state police, no right to citizenship. A body on a bridge.
[00:32:56] Is it gravity or attraction pulling her down, keeping her afloat in me?
[00:33:05] Loretta Goggi singing about love and accursed spring.
[00:33:11] It is autumn, deep autumn.
[00:33:15] Saturday night on a bridge.
[00:33:20] How much can a woman scream to be heard?
[00:33:23] How does the sound break when a body touches water?
[00:33:35] Voglia di stringer sie pai vino bianco fiore vecchi e siri devadinoi cambroglio era maledetta primavera que fretta chera, maladetta primavera.
[00:34:02] Kefreta, chera se amorire sole la shami fare kumasiquazi fosamore ma pere cudolyokie pensoale que freta chera, maladetta primavera.
[00:34:31] Kefreta, chera se amorire solo volia destringersi a poi vino bianco fiore avecche canzone esirideva dinoi kimbro lloera maledetta primavera. Kefreta, chera, maladetta primavera.
[00:34:58] Kefretta, chera, samorire solulei la chamifare commesaquaze for samore maperore kudolyoki.
[00:35:15] Women from the east, the prostitutes, the caregivers.
[00:35:20] All things I have are sent home.
[00:35:23] All things I have are of plastic.
[00:35:27] All that I do is work.
[00:35:31] I am being watched all the time.
[00:35:34] Is this eastern european feminism?
[00:35:38] Was this effort more bone or more ligament?
[00:35:43] Are photons running through my porosity?
[00:35:48] Anger?
[00:35:49] With time you learn to tame the destructive energy into liberation and transformation.
[00:35:58] Do you feel closer to yourself now?
[00:36:02] You've said so much. Are you tired?
[00:36:06] As near as to be overwhelmed by joyful insurrection.
[00:36:12] Yet to be transformed fully.
[00:36:15] Let the brain connect to the plant. The dove is gone.
[00:36:20] Grandma gave me a hair clip. She is riding on a horse. Light pink rose petal. Fire in my belly. Bonsai tree in my lungs, mountains in my shoulders, the moon on my lips, the stars in my cheeks.
[00:36:44] Aren't you? Bet. And sunglasses. Your Muslim and hammer. Sick, aren't you, Beth? But there are no boundaries.
[00:36:53] Your muscles succumb in each other. Only half bodies. Being Muslim is usually full. Beyond implies of fatality.
[00:37:02] Who's talking them?
[00:37:04] But you are so white to the skin. It's about skin melting. Anti muslim feelings glued to one another, pervading italian Christians being Croatia, Kosovo. Good Erbia, Bosnia as they can. North Macedonia, albeit Ukraine, Hungary. You are going to fire. Extortion is when osteoporosis consumed all the bones. The spine is about to fall. You're Muslim. The flesh has become earth heavy. Being Muslim is usually full.
[00:37:35] Going after saying you are running again. Who stop even if you have stopped them. Your feet are so white.
[00:37:42] It's about near anti muslim fear. As near as to have our eyes pervading bodies. Italian christians being good people. But there are nobody they can. We suck on the side of each other.
[00:37:56] Bodies running against each other beyond almost crashing. Almost the same. So near in exuberance. Sulf sulfuric fuel to the skin. Chewing gum and ham. Sickle and Coca Cola. Smash virgin Mary. The workers, the muezzins, Berlingui, Croatia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia. Great ideological projects have to come to an end. Ukraine, Romania, Hungary. You are going with an r. Where are you going?
[00:38:25] How south are you moving? Means feeling of being forgiven. Sickle, isn't it sick? Long chewing emotions.
[00:38:34] Great ideological projects have to come to an end. To the bone, to the the core. Drilling with an eye for ending the people feeling being forgiven.
[00:38:46] Isn't it a Christian? All the goodness. Good luck revolutions.
[00:38:51] Where are you from? Pouring to the sea in the end. Go back to your east in the end. Which riper boat? Andy kitten E. Rezzy. Your favorite prostitute. Associated often with the color gray. Where does goodness? Where does and goodness? And does it flow like a river? Does it flow like a river? All the good intentions. All the good intentions are rich. All the good intentions. All the good intentions are goodness. Good. They will find it. Fascism.
[00:39:23] Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. Prostitute. With an.
[00:39:28] Who can explain what to whom?
[00:39:40] Chewing gum.
[00:39:42] Great ideological projects have to come to an end. En d with an I.
