ARTAN RUSHIDI

I grew up among the mountains of North Macedonia. At the age of ten, I moved to Belgium, and since then, I have lived between two countries, two languages, two cultures. This constant movement between “elsewhere” and “here” has always shaped me. From a very young age, I felt the urge to leave a trace of my passage in this world.

As a child, what fascinated me most were constructions, walls, buildings, human-made forms built to defy time. So I naturally turned to architecture, convinced that designing spaces was a way of inscribing oneself into permanence.

But along the way, art entered my life almost out of necessity. I started creating to earn a little money: painting, customising, inventing on other people’s shoes. Gradually, I understood that this gesture, this need to create, was far more than a temporary job. It was my way of speaking.

Through my works, I began to tell my story, to walk back into my memories, to relive what I once felt. I held my first exhibition with thirty shoe-based artworks. Each of them carried a part of me brought back to life, so I could better understand it.

I believe that art, at its core, is an act of memory and presence, a way of remembering who we are, why we are, and where we come from. It is a thread between people, between periods of time, between memories and emotions.

Today, I weave shoelaces the way others write poetry. My works are knots of memory, emotions in bloom. I write as well, because writing is another way to exist through words.

Everything eventually becomes memory, the present as much as the past, fleeting moments as much as encounters. What remains, though, are the emotions. And it is there, in that burning and blossoming space, that my art finds its place, to leave a trace.

“Leaving a trace. Weaving memories. Blooming, remembering, to keep living.”

Artan