An empty chair, intentionally left, becomes the scene of another ritual: the lighting of a candle in anticipation of someone's return, a historical reference to the Albanian tradition of the Lawn of Tears.
Choreographer Gentian Doda, a well-known name in international art, tells the story of his family through a video installation at the Venice Biennale.

Everything comes through the concept of Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg who captured this moment of traditional Albanian meeting on celluloid by adding an emotional choreography by Gentjan Doda and costume design by Ardi Asllani inspired by the famous “Lëndina e Lotëve” where the drama of immigration fits the theme of this year’s Biennale “Foreigners Everywhere”. This story of tradition and strong emotions that comes through the concept of “Eternal Return” led to the establishment of the title of the Mexican pavilion “We fled and always returned!”

WARD

Without looking back. This is how an immigrant travels when he leaves home to avoid connection with the past, as in the case of the biblical passage, where Lot's wife turns into salt after looking back.
The person who emigrates is a permanent stranger, who wants to return to something that no longer exists, while never quite finding a place to which he fully belongs.

With these sentences begins the explanation of the Mexican pavilion at the Venice Biennale "We always left and came back".
At its center is an Albanian history of emigration.
In 2019, Erick Meyenberg, a Mexican artist of German and Lebanese descent, gathered an Albanian family around a table in a northern Italian village to celebrate a ritual of reunion between celebration and mourning. The Doda family had emigrated over thirty years ago from Tirana, the capital of Albania, to Italy, where they integrated without losing their cultural ties and traditions. They were immersed in the culture of the host country while maintaining ties to their country of origin. The Mexican artist translates the details of this family’s development and traditions into a video installation, using an aesthetic and conceptual approach that communicates what is unique and connects us in our particularities as human beings: the ways of honoring, loving and missing, the gestures and emotions that are primary to all of us.

Everything is presented on 4 large screens where in the middle of them is placed the same table with every identical object but cast in ceramic to show the layers of time! On a chair, the "Lëndinës së lotëve" lamp has been improvised where a candle has been left lit for months (in Mexico) and it has created a game of time relief, around the pavilion the dancers Rosela Pellicciotti, Fjorald Doci and Julien Klopfenstein perform, performing artistic movements loaded with stones around their hands as if to show the weight of time. The dancer who interprets the character of "Doda" himself strips himself of any emotion artistically and realistically to return to the origin from the guidance of the stones of time and the weight of the goods!

The video installation and choreography "On the Reliefs of a Time" has filled the Mexican pavilion with artists and visitors from all over the world for two days, even garnering the attention of the New York Times, which dedicated an article to the emotional artistic idyll.