STEEL CORRIDOR – Gazmend Ejupi

Title: “Steel Corridor”
Curator: Gazmend Ejupi
Installation: Open Art Gallery
Technical support: Trainkos
Produced by: Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN

Inside the Reporting House Gallery, “Steel Corridor” unfolds as a confrontation with memory, testimony and the unforgiving materiality of exile. Along the exhibition walls, a metal fragment from an original wagon used to transport refugees to Blace in 1999 is placed in the space like a living fissure, an object whose cold steel carries history, stripped of all wooden elements and ornamentation. The metal reveals the brutal simplicity of displacement: borders, waiting and survival. The installation also invites members of the public to contribute personal artefacts from their experiences of the expulsion, during which nearly half a million people were stranded in Blace in 1999.

A system of rails installed along the exhibition walls transforms the space into a performative passage. These rails are not symbolic; they are functional. Visitors are invited to pull and guide the fragment of the wagon and to position their own artefacts along the installation, physically moving memory through the space. This action reflects the way memory itself is carried: by people, through movement and collective will.

Curated by Gazmend Ejupi, the installation reconfigures the interior of Reporting House, a space rooted in media archives and truth-telling, into a temporary corridor of return. As the metal structure moves, it evokes the tension experienced in 1999, when thousands of people stood inside similar steel wagons, suspended between expulsion and hope.

“Steel Corridor/Korridori i Hekurt” transforms Reporting House into a space where the past does not remain still. It moves through the gallery, guided by the public, insisting that the stories of Blace be remembered. Each gesture, each pull and each shared artefact contributes to a process of collective reflection, brought into the space through this curatorial intervention.