Radis
Curated by Marta Papini
Borgata Valdibà, Dogliani
Permanent installation, from 5 October 2025

Abetare takes its name from the alphabet used by children to study the Albanian language. It is a gigantic archive of drawings and engravings found by the artist on school desks. The idea was born in 2010, when the artist returned to Kosovo, to Runik, the village where he grew up and attended elementary school, now almost completely destroyed by the war. The school was one of the few buildings left standing, and while Halilaj was filming, he noticed that they were beginning to demolish it to make way for a new school. The old desks were stacked outside, ready to be thrown away, so the artist began photographing them, documenting graffiti and drawings that had accumulated over the years, from the Yugoslavian era to the post-war period. Halilaj then extended his research to other areas in the Balkans, questioning what united and differentiated the children of such distant generations and backgrounds. Today, Abetare ‘s archive gathers the historical memory of many overlapping eras and territories, uniting the passage of time with the crossing of geographical borders. From this encyclopedia of scribbles, the artist selects different elements and transforms the two-dimensional lines into monumental sculptures of folded and worked metal, reproducing the original drawing on a large scale and in three-dimensional space.

Scribbling on school desks is a gesture shared by girls and boys around the world. From the moment they could hold a pencil, the world was their canvas: doors, tables, floors, drawers. Anyone can recall, delving into their memory, drawing on the aquamarine surface of their desk: a stylized house, their initials, a smiling sun, a concise “CIAO.” Not out of vandalism or transgression, but out of the need to appropriate an object—so everyday yet so anonymous—and to leave a trace of their passage, transforming the desk into a witness to their existence in the school environment.

For the second edition of Radis , Petrit Halilaj was invited to create a work specifically for this location, where a small suburban school once stood, a two-story building abandoned since the 1970s. The artist created a work that occupies the space left by the old school, while also allowing for views of the surrounding landscape, previously hidden by the building. The work depicts a stylized house that Halilaj found carved by a child from a school in Dogliani. The artist assembled bent and twisted steel tubes to faithfully reproduce the drawing, transforming a fleeting scribble into a permanent, sculptural work. As the title suggests, Halilaj has created a new school, populated by creatures, writings, and symbols drawn from both the classrooms of the Langhe and the Balkans. The work is a crossroads of signs and figures from different geographical areas, an encounter that becomes a joyful celebration of imagination and fantasy , of the freedom and play of children from every place and time.

“ The old school in Borgata Valdibà is reborn as a fantasy house, inhabited by characters, doodles, and daydreams from both students in Dogliani and children from across the Balkans: a towering fantasy floating freely across geographical and political borders .” Petrit Halilaj