An award-winning journalist and TV producer, Elida joined the Associated Press-AP in 1998 covering the Kosovo War. She led the AP team in providing competitive coverage of an unfolding human drama at a time when the very nature of news was undergoing change, a coverage that brought international attention to the situation in Kosovo. Elida and her team's coverage were recognized for their reporting with the Royal Television Society Award and the Rory Peck Award in 1999.
In her stellar 20-year career with AP, Elida covered a wide range of international breaking news and issues ranging from IAEA efforts to verify weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to climate change protests and anti-globalization movements. She rose to the position of Editor for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, the Associated Press's main hub for news coverage worldwide.
She contributes to the annotation of Loca’s Journals through the lens of a participant and observer, an activist and a survivor, helping to contextualize her story, a glimpse of her generation's ordeal through the major changes that shaped their lives and that of their young country.
View annotationsA writer, researcher, and illustrator, Rina is co-founder of Lirindja, a publishing house that started as an independent literary zine in Prishtina. Rina has recently co-authored and published BOOM, a research zine on the youth and rock concert BOOM, held in Prishtina between 1992-1996.
Her literary works were published in Lirindja, Beton, Fryma; while her articles and interviews are published by the National Gallery of Kosovo, Balkan Insight, Kosovo 2.0, and Prishtina Insight. She did illustrations for various books, magazines, and festivals.
In TWO JOURNALS, she brings short personal stories, memories of childhood, quotes, and other literary bits, helping the annotated material to be articulated through another personal language that is capable of bringing into the platform a new and a very different experience.
View annotationsA theoretician and researcher based in Helsinki and Prizren. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rab-Rab Press and a member of Pykë, a newly opened space for experimentation in Prizren. Sezgin has completed his Ph.D. in Yugoslav “Black Wave” cinema. He has co-edited Nationalism and Contemporary Art: Critical Reader (MM & Exit, 2007), History of Punk and Underground in Turkey (BAS, 2008), Noise After Babel: Language Unrestrained (Spector Books, 2015, with Minna Henriksson).
Sezgin’s recent publications include In the Belly of the Beast: Art & Language New York Project, Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin's Language, Free Jazz Communism, Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968 - 1983.
He is currently working on a project of translating Ilya Zdanevich's 'zaum' play Yanko, Krul Albanskaya, and on the translation of Karel Teige's book Art Market, to be published in collaboration with Contradictions Journal based in Prague. Sezgin is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rab-Rab Press in Helsinki (www.rabrab.fi).
View annotationsA philosopher, political analyst, art critic, translator, publisher, and journalist. Shkëlzen Maliqi was the Director of the Center for Humanistic Studies “Gani Bobi '' Prishtina, Kosova for 20 years. He is the Editor in Chief of several periodicals published between 1986-1988, amongst them FJALA, magazine for art, culture and social issues 1989-1992: Thema, Journal of Association of Philosophers and Sociologists of Kosovo 1995-2011: MM - mixed magazine philosophy, literature, art, politics, etc. (24 issues); 2001-2002: Arta – monthly supplement for visual arts in weekly Java (12 issues).
He was an active part of the civil society especially in the years documented by Loca and will look into the journals to tentatively connect events and add witnessed truth to them.
Shkëlzen Maliqi was born in 1947 in Kosovo where he lives and works.
View annotationsA veteran Techno/House DJ, music producer, mixing/mastering engineer, studio owner, and a metal fan. He took part in organizing some of the musical events of the 90s which have been documented in Vjosa’s archives. This experience is transferred to the journals via a valuable annotation that adds context and narrative to the presented material.
View annotationsHer work focuses on the international interventions and the external relations of the European Union. She is co-editor of Routledge Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding and an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Previously, Vjosa has been postdoctoral of the Flemish Scientific Foundation, lecturer at Ghent University (Belgium) and Kent University in the United Kingdom. In 2019, in co-authorship she published her edited volume Unravelling Liberal Interventionism. Local Critiques of Statebuilding in Kosovo (Worlding Beyond the West Series).
Her second book, Europeanization and state-building as everyday practices. Performing Europe in the Western Balkans (Routledge Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding Series) has been published in 2021.
She was born and raised in Kosovo. During 2008-2009 she worked as a journalist at BIRN Prishtina.
According to her, Vjosa Shala’s two journals give an honest and raw depiction of the seemingly abrupt change of the political and social realities in Kosovo at the brink of the war. In the collection of newspaper clips, her notes, and drawings, you notice the disruption of the life of someone who is growing up amidst wars, the police terror in Kosovo, federative dissolution in Yugoslavia, the booming underground culture in Prishtina and the global changes of the 1990s.
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