Paola Favoino, A je Burrnesh

Every Wednesday and more or less once a week, Leporello’s Instagram account will host a series of guests; photographers, designers, publishers with whom we planned a presentation in the bookshop, or simply with whom we would have liked to set a dialogue. Starting from Paola Favoino and her book A je Burrnesh, published by Balter/Edizioni d’Ottobre

A je Burrnesh by Paola Favoino is a book built on the path she took, following geographically and intimately the traces of the last sworn virgins. According to the laws of the Kanun code, if in a family community, especially in the north of Albania, the man who was in charge of the family was missing, his functions as regent could be assumed by a woman. She renounced to her role, dressed in male clothes and was considered and respected as a “man”. Burrnesh is untranslatable and represents the feminization of the word Burr or man. Duality, impossibility, limit become the object of the book itself.

The images are actually denied in their ‘normal’ reading, tied in inverted four-pages signatures that impose their broken vision, they open in search of details and unfold in a journey that continuously returns on the same route marked by some symbolic elements: the presence of the lake waters, the blue used to highlight an encounter and an imposing solitary stone. The stone becomes a symbol for the cover choice, also divided, cut between Burr and her femininity. And yet it is the limit that imposes itself as the center of the narrative as a dual border. The term limes has complex origins, it is a crossroad, a path that works as a border, a territorial border: where I know separate from where the unknown is. On the one side it closes and on the other it is inextricably linked to the very existence of the road that leads to where I do not know and where I will move my new limit.

Thus, if we can anthropologically study the phenomenon of burrnesh to get closer to this story, can we define who a burrnesh is? Whether is woman or man or what oblique and transversal, and personal, from time to timemade her what we want her to be ?Can A je Burrnesh be translated as how are you burrnesh? Or maybe can we translate it where are you on your way, where are you?

Paola Favoino, Calabrian photographer, began to deal with Albania during her University final work, in 2002. In 2011, having discovered the existence of the burrnesh, she decided to dedicate her first photographic work to the theme. Thanks to Aminta Pierri and Balter / Edizioni d’Ottobre, in 2019 A JE BURRNESH becomes her first photographic book. Her new project “The island”, a reflection on the body as a tool for the story of the self, also originates from this experience.