NEVERMORE, 2018
HD Video, 3 minutes, 3 seconds, colour.

This three minute long video shows a dream of the artist, using the subjective figurative, “normal” for an oneiric reality. Nevermore is the single word the Raven repeats over and over again in Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous gothic poem, which, in Albanian, was masterfully translated in the early twentieth century by the author and former prime minister Fan Stilian Noli.

Vorpsi’s Nevermore tells about the impossibility of the return; it is the eating away of the reality from the march of time and the approach of death. Or, put more simply, it is the inability to get back, even for a second, to what was before and simply is no more. The spine of Vorpsi’s video is based on logical dissonance, “décousu” in French, making the work difficult to translate into everyday logic. The surreal insert in the middle of the video, suffused with silent film effects such as scratches and grainy texture, highlights the dream element. The importance that the artist gives to the act of literally pulling out one’s heart translates, into a contemporary elegiac spirit, a famous Albanian saying regarding generosity: “For the guest [an Albanian offers] bread, salt and a full heart.” This ultimate act – which literally shows the transition from one world to the other – clearly indicates that the artist offers everything she has for anyone who enters her heart and soul, overcoming all sorts of ‘unreasonable’ suspicions that a contemporary ‘rational’ man may have.

The defining and succinct work of Vorpsi floats above a psychological and existential riverbed. This can be read in a personal way – a free association about the impossibility of controlling human relationships and the difficulty of interpreting personal and surreal stories of other human beings.

The work’s intensity, loneliness and laconism, recalls the similar obsession and complex relationship between an artist and his muse found in Ernesto Sabato’s classic existential novel The Tunnel (1948), or in David Lynch’s intoxicating gothic neo-noir Eraserhead (1977).