Thank you for what you’ve done here, a black haired girl said while looking into my eyes during my last night at the brick factory, at the borders of Prishtina city center. I’m not really sure that she knew where she was, or that she understood for real what I’ve tried to explain to her in two minuter or so.

This place is for you, I replied. It is meant to be, I should have said. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this place, which has been the gravitational center of my experience in Kosovo. Here is where for two weeks I’ve worked along with a group of forty girls and boys on a common ground, which has meant for us: covering ourselves in dust and clay, cleaning and carrying bricks, assembling chairs and opening holes in walls, building a swimming pool and a kitchen, asking ourselves a million questions in trying to understand what the factory used to be in the past and imagining a future by inhabiting the present.

The [Working on] common ground summer school is the reason why those forty or so young people spread across Europe met there in Kosovo: a two weeks long workshop coordinated by the German collective of architects raumlabor as part of the grand stage of Manifesta, the nomadic biennial of art and architecture that this year opens Kosovo’s doors to the world.

What do we talk about when we discuss public spaces? How to talk about it in a city that looks much like a giant construction - or demolition - site? How to talk about when you are just passer-by, and you are not an architect, nor an urban planner, but you would like to fill these spaces with ideas, projects, people?

A step back. Urban spaces and stories. These are the two pillars of this edition of Manifesta, happening in a country with a vigorous identity yet almost unknown outside its borders, due to the 'young age' of the Republic of Kosovo and the impossibility for its population to cross its borders.

In a country covered by a lot of abandoned spaces that ask to be redefined through the recollection of their histories, which have been forgotten and swept away by the winds of war.

To give room, physical and not, to new uses for these buildings and new urban narratives: hence the ambition to turn the city in a large urban lab where social, environmental, economic and cultural chances can be accelerated.

Between the 25 main locations on Manifesta’s map, there is also Tulltorja, the brick factory. My first day there I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know much, except for a few information raumlabor had shared; I just knew that what I was seeing would be completely transformed in two weeks.

We were soon to build a patio where meetings, events, performances would take place; a swimming pool - a reinterpretation of the traditional Albanian Oda - a public meeting space for communities and - more simply - a place for children to have fun; a kitchen conceived as a space for meeting, caring, learning and built one piece at a time, playing and experimenting with natural elements. 

The first question that came to my mind was: how are we going to do all this within just two weeks?

Alongside this grand ‘to-do' we tried to trace and visually materialize the history of the brick factory, starting with the memories of the neighbors of the area surrounding the building. Not a physical map as such, but more of a living archive of data, memories, stories, a work carried on through exercises in reading the present and speculations on its future during the second week of activities. We re-built pieces of stories of a place which wasn’t just a work space, rather a home for a community where friendship, loyalty and a sense of belonging came first, even of social, ethnic and religious affiliation.

While we were busy restoring and transforming some areas of the brick factory trying to re-use materials that were already there (read here: bricks, bricks, bricks), the real challenge starts now: getting the factory back to life not just with occasional visitors, but for the boys who play basketball on the hill a little further up, for the families who have opened their doors to some of us by offering them hospitality with an ice cream, for the owners of the cafés, copy shops, bazaars in the surroundings. The real deal is understand from them and with them what does common grounding means, what are their needs, what do they lack of and what to do repair some of these wounds through a collaborative and collective work.

Back home I’ve asked myself quite often - and here I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one - what we could have done more, or differently. By talking between us, with visitors and those who are part of the community, in the end, is that it is not up to us to decide anything, except hand on what little we have learnt with an outside eye and eager for new perspectives. And that is why who’s going to visit the factory will find a mirror where to share ideas on what that space could be, in the hope that someone might continue the conversation, imagining a real and possible future for the brick factory.

And if I keep asking myself like a refrain of an annoying song what I could have done more, or differently, the memories of the girl from the last evening and her words, of the melancholically happy looks of the former workers who came to talk to us, of the children splashing around in the brand new swimming pool come to mind and I think that after all, maybe our work and our presence there was worth something.