HISTORY OF A LIMIT by Aminta Pierri (book editor)

According to the laws of the Kanun code transmitted orally for centuries, if in a family community, especially in northern Albania, the man who was at the head of it died, his functions as regent could be taken over by a woman. This woman would renounce the role of wife and mother, wear men’s clothes and be considered and respected as a ‘man’, not only within the family, but also in the entire social community.

Burrnesh is a literal untranslatable term that is the feminisation of the word Burr, i.e. man.

Duality, impossibility, limitation become the subject of the book. The images are in reality denied, prevented from their ‘normal’ reading, bound in inverted quatrains that impose a broken vision but open up to the search for details and unfold in a journey that continually returns to the same road marked by certain elements that become strongly symbolic such as the presence of the waters of a lake, the masking of blue applied by hand to each copy to mark an encounter and an imposing solitary stone. A stone that determined the choice of the cover, which is also divided, cut between Burr and her femininity and which is a hint of the legend of Rozafa the mother sacrificed to the castle of Shkodra walled in as a sacrificial milestone to the keeping of the borders against the invaders, woman and rock. And again, it is the limit that imposes itself as the centre of the narrative as a dual border.

Limes has complex origins, it is a transversal road, a path that acts as a border, a territorial boundary: where I know separated from where the unknown is.

The limit is precisely that sign that on the one hand defines, describes and reassures and on the other is inextricably linked to the very existence of the road to the path that allows communication leading to where I do not know and where I will move my new limit. So if anthropologically we can study the phenomenon of the burrnesh to approach this story can we define who a burrnesh is? Whether she is a woman or a man or all that oblique of transversal to the definitions of the personal has led her to be what we want her to be or what she wants to be?

A je burrnesh can be translated into how are you burrnesh or perhaps we could force it into where are you on your way burrnesh? where are you?

A JE BURRNESH

First edition of 250 

©  Paola Favoino for the images

© Eliana Leshaj for the poem

© Aminta Pierri and EDO for book concept and editing

 graphic design Riccardo Gola

Printed SiZ Industria Grafica, Verona

Ottobre / October / Tetor 2019

Languages Italian/English/Albanian

the book is available at:

Leporello, Roma;

Marini, Roma;

Tlon Galleria Nazionale, Roma;

NW Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark;

Magazzini Fotografici, Napoli;

Officine Fotografiche Roma;

​and upon request by writing to

pfavoino@yahoo.it or balterbooks@gmail.com