What happens in the artists’ neighborhood stays in the artists’ neighborhood
The community of Egnatia Street in Ulpiana, between artistic explosion and gentrification.
Arianit: Do you have zhollt [grape raki]?
Artrit: No, we only have Mrizi i Zanave.
Arianit: OK? Grapes, pears?
Artrit: Grapes, grapes.
Arianit: Pour two in one glass, let’s explode. Hehe. Friend, did you want something?
Beyond the lights and glamour, cities can be exhausting to live in. Capital cities, even more so, are filled with stimuli and experiences of constant intensity that can overwhelm the individual. Faced with this psychological and physical intensity, city residents often adopt indifference as a means to emotionally distance themselves from such urban dynamics.
Sociological studies have often highlighted that city life can transform emotional relationships into ones that are merely functional, contributing to individualization, one of the key symptoms of the capitalist order.
Warm conversations, such as the one above between Arian Lakna and Artri Bytyçi, artists and neighbors in Ulpiana, give hope that Prishtina, despite its urban chaos, is resisting the discipline and indifference imposed by industrial urbanization.
This urban resistance is taking shape in one of the oldest neighborhoods of Prishtina, Ulpiana, which has seen Egnatia Street transformed into what is now known as the Artists’ Neighborhood.
Like Via Egnatia — one of the most important roads of the Roman period, which connected the cities of that era economically and culturally — this neighborhood connects different circles of people in Prishtina belonging to opposite extremes of class, age or profile: from art professors who, after work, return to Ulpiana to paint in their studios, to artists who solely live of their paintbrushes, musicians, creative writers, activists and students.
According to the painters in the neighborhood, the community of artists in this area came about from the students of two art professionals, Musa Kalaveshi and Agron Mulliqi, who had their workshops in what is known as the Lesna premises. The students, wanting to be close to the mentorship of their professors, found spaces being rented out at low prices on Egnatia Street — prices that suited them, especially at the beginning of their artistic careers. Three of these students — Hekuran Sokoli, Shpëtim Mehmeti and Mentor Avdili — were the first to settle in the neighborhood, sharing a studio in 2009.
At that time, the rent for these spaces was as low as 40–50 euros, but in recent years, these prices have become rare, with the rent now ranging between 150–250 euros, depending on the size of the space. Some of these premises do not even have toilets, yet they continue to serve as spaces for artistic creativity.
Following the pandemic, specifically after 2021, other artists’ studios and spaces for various cultural and social organizations began to appear in the neighborhood.
Following the pandemic, specifically after 2021, other artists’ studios and spaces for various cultural and social organizations began to appear in the neighborhood. This increase in numbers occurred after the neighborhood became the subject of murals created by the Center for the Development of Art – Q’art, which aims to artistically intervene in public spaces through the Bone Venin Tond project. Since then, the neighborhood has accommodated about 15 different artists’ studios, social and cultural centers, and bars. All of this has contributed to the creation of an artistic microcosm — one that is rarely so concentrated and nuanced as it is found in Ulpiana.
“We don’t paint to sell, we paint to create”
In each of the 15 different artists’ studios in the neighborhood, different styles, materials, colors, crowds and drinks can be seen. Even the service the artists receive, the beer and raki, is very well thought out. Elez Demolli, owner of the Te Gagi café, has been offering this service in the neighborhood for 15 years.
Elez has been based in the Artists’ Neighborhood since 2011. He recalls that the neighborhood was not so popular back then. He also highlights the paving of the street by the Municipality of Prishtina in 2024 as a step that contributed to the increase in the number of people visiting the area. Elez noted that while the road’s paving has led to increased rent in these premises, he hasn’t been personally affected, adding that while these increases are concerning, they have not reached levels seen in other neighborhoods in Prishtina.
“I’ve had the same rent for 11 years now,” he said. “My guests here are all MPs, doctors, professors. They started gathering here, one friend after another. When I opened my bar here in 2011, everyone told me, ‘You won’t be able to do anything in that neighborhood.’ But I knew what was going to happen, because I’ve been doing this job for 45 years.”
At Gagi, you will often find the artists who led to the creation of the neighborhood’s artistic community. Musa Kalaveshi and Agron Mulliqi, both painters, share their studios with their former students, Zog Limani and Hekuran Sokoli. The students, now established artists themselves, praise their mentors and continue to have respect for them. But their friendship with their mentors has now evolved beyond the professional barriers they once had, allowing the mutual artistic personalities between the pairs to come to the fore.
“This guy has managed to live his whole life from his paintings,” Hekurani said of his professor, Agron Mulliqi, as he patted him on the shoulder and jokingly advised: “If you’d like, you can go inside, Agron, because I know you don’t like it when I praise you.”
But Agron, with a smile, ignored him and began to explain how difficult it had been for him to live solely through his paintings.
“I spent my whole life changing professions — tailor, coffee shop owner, marketer,” he said. “But I could never adapt, because to adapt, I had to be obedient. And I have always been stubborn. I used to have a café, but my wife said to me, ‘You’re drinking too much, leave the café.’ So, I gave it up. And I spent almost 30 years looking for work. Not finding one, for the past 30 years, I have been living only from painting.”
Generational differences seem to have only served to refresh the artistic currents and styles in this neighborhood. Agron welcomes this combination, stating that young people are finding pathways into art differently from the previous generation of artists and are daring to pursue and experiment with their professional styles, whereas, in Agron’s view, older generations of artists were less oriented toward pursuing a career in art.
Despite the difficulties they face individually, each of the artists invests in maintaining social cohesion within the neighborhood. From time to time, they visit each other’s studios, discuss opportunities for collaboration and comment on each other’s work. Often, the topic of discussion becomes who is selling and who is not, but “not everyone paints to sell,” said Zog Limani. “Some people make paintings just for the sake of creating.”
On the same street, Vjosa Bujari-Maliqi and Merita Myderrizi-Maloku, both painters, also share a studio space. At the entrance, visitors can see how their creative space is divided into two: Vjosa’s paintings are made with stones, while Merita’s focuses on natural landscapes.
Vjosa Bujari Maliqi and Merita Myderrizi-Maloku, in their shared studio, within which they live out their art and friendship.
For Vjosa, who has also worked as an art teacher for 25 years, the Artists’ Neighborhood has become her home — a place beyond which she hesitates to go. “I no longer feel the need to go anywhere else; I simply invite my friends here. This is where I work, have fun and relax,” she said. Vjosa highlights the long-standing communication among the artists in the neighborhood, detailing how exhibition opportunities are often shared among them. “Agroni notifies us when an exhibition opens, takes our paintings and we take them together to the galleries where we hold the exhibitions. This way, we function much more easily, as a community,” said Vjosa.
Meanwhile, since 2024, Arianit Lakna, from Kamenica, has also settled in the neighborhood. Achieving financial stability through painting has not been easy for Arianit either. Initially, a generous friend of his — an “art lover,” as he calls her — paid the 200 euro rent of his studio for six months, supporting him in his early days. Later, Arianit continued to pay for it himself, but he still remembers her help with gratitude.
Arianit’s studio is filled with chickens of all different shapes and colors. Since childhood, he has had a close relationship with animals, especially chickens and roosters. He remembers how, in the past, he used to collect chickens from his neighbors, raise them and take care of them.
“I had 4–5 chickens here. I started painting them, and I kept them in the neighborhood for two days. People liked them,” he said. “The chickens behaved well; they only stayed near the studio door. One chicken had a nest in the barn, and when I saw it, it had laid eggs. They were white chickens; they behaved very well, it was nice to just see them.”
Each of the studios seems to contribute to the creation of an urban microcosm, where the boundaries between work, friendship and social life dissolve. But other spaces have also been added to the neighborhood, which, in addition to art, combine storytelling, social causes and human experiences through the activities organized there.
Ulpiana of social spaces
Prishtina’s cafés have often served as spaces for organizing discussions and cultural or social events. This is because social spaces, although not a new concept, are few in number. It was precisely the Ulpiana neighborhood that welcomed the opening of such a center in 2018, on the street where the artists’ community is now located.
This was Sabota, an anarcho-syndicalist center, established by a group of young people who aimed to organize to protect workers’ rights in Kosovo. Sabota functioned with this aim for about two years, but even after its closure, it seems that Egnatia Street, in addition to the artistic and aesthetic role it fulfills as an artists’ neighborhood, is destined to welcome the opening of other alternative social spaces, which enable people to engage in activism through socialism.
In early February of this year, Artrit Bytyçi, an independent artist and art lecturer, decided to take up a spot in Ulpiana to continue the almost five-year mission of the storytelling laboratory, otherwise known as StoryLab.
StoryLab is an interdisciplinary initiative based in Prishtina, operating in the fields of art, writing, technology, design and education. Its main goal is to explore and develop new — but also traditional — forms of storytelling through practice, experimentation, research and education.
Until the space was acquired, Kosovo StoryLab had operated in various locations, such as the Center for Narrative Practice (CNP), which, until early 2024, served as a cultural and work space, and Foundation 17, a non-governmental organization in Prishtina that combines cultural activism, education, and art while also offering work spaces for artists and researchers. This year, Artrit considered it necessary for Kosovo StoryLab to have a home.
“It’s all do-it-yourself,” Artrit said of the space. “We cleaned it, we had people come round and in April we launched the space. We just said, ‘Let’s open it, then we’ll see what happens.’”
Everything is kept alive by Artrit’s personal savings. “From the investment to the monthly expenses — electricity, water — I pay for them out of my own pocket,” he said. However, although this financial model is unsustainable, it is part of the lab’s philosophy: to create without depending on grants or bureaucracies.
Kosovo StoryLab, in addition to its projects, will now also offer space for community use. “This is being done because there is an urgent need for public spaces everywhere,” said Artrit.
He also confirms what other artists have said: “There is a certain gentrification here; there is no escape from it,” referring to the increase in rent for the neighborhood. Such a trend is a typical example of the social and economic process known as gentrification — when a neglected urban area is renovated and begins to attract a new demographic, who are often wealthier and more privileged, which leads to rising house prices and the gradual displacement of lower-income residents or tenants. He hopes that the neighborhood will escape this process and overload.
For Artrit, the aesthetic of Artists’ Neighborhood makes it a kind of mini-Brooklyn or little Berlin, where cafés, galleries and cultural initiatives create a rare ecosystem that exudes community vitality. “Sometimes I hear someone say, ‘This road has the potential to become like kafet e rakisë’… I’m like, I hope not,” he said, referring to the cafés lining 2 Korriku Street in downtown Prishtina, where dozens of bars have opened, and which is known as one of the city’s most frequented alleys.
Near Musa Kalaveshi and Zog Limani’s studio, a new space called Kometa has been added to the street — a social enterprise and feminist bar that opened in August of this year. Kometa is an alternative social space, conceived by the Center for Criticism, Information and Action (QIKA). The goal of Kometa, according to Leonida Molliqaj, editor-in-chief at QIKA, is for the space to serve as a connecting point for communication between students, artists and activists.
“QIKA has always dreamed of a space that would serve as a place for activism, work and creativity; a place that is open, safe and accessible to all,” said Leonida. This dream has taken the form of Kometa, which has already begun to serve as a space for feminist meetings and discussions.
QIKA has combined activism with a sustainable social enterprise model, making the bar a means to financially support the space. All profits from the bar are intended to sustain the space and keep it open for feminist activism.
Intentionally located near the University of Prishtina (UP), Leonida said that Kometa was created with the idea of providing students and young people a nearby place where they can work, read, meet or simply hang out in an environment that gives them the feeling of being “home away from home.”
Referring to one of the paintings in the space, which Kometa received as a gift from Arianit Lakna on the occasion of the center’s opening, Leonida said that the support QIKA has received from the neighborhood’s community has been inspiring.
Inside Kometa, the feminist space in the artists’ neighborhood, which opened in August of this year.
“The residents, artists and other informal groups of this area have not only embraced our initiative, but have helped in every aspect of its implementation — whether technically or with sincere solidarity and support,” she said.
The social and artistic nuances of the Artists’ Neighborhood do not end there. The neighborhood is rich in other initiatives that bring together different human profiles, contributing to daily life in Prishtina. One of the venues, for example, serves as a space where the well-known alternative music group ZWADA gathers to practice their musical creativity.
The neighborhood is also home to Ulpi Bar, known until recently as Pijetorja, which Bardhyl Noci, its owner, describes as “an island that has escaped the asphalt, concrete, and flashing lights of spectacle” and one that stands “within the city, but without its noise.”
Bardhyl opened Pijetorja in 2021, after being amazed by the many cultural and social dimensions he found in the neighborhood.
"Where artists go, businessmen go; where businessmen go, prices rise, and there is no longer room for artists."
Ulpi Bar has attracted a diverse clientele since its opening, just as the neighborhood itself has. Many of the bar’s visitors, in addition to enjoying the music and the tranquility it offers away from the city center’s noise, also come to admire the colors of the ateliers and experience the sense of community that the neighborhood provides.
Ulpi Bar, formerly known as Pijetore in Ulpiana, opened its doors in the neighborhood in 2021.
“Before the pandemic, the street seemed to me like a ‘diverse’ place,” said Bardhyl, “with old people, artists and all kinds of music.” He remembers the cheaper rents, which increased with the addition of bars, the paving of the street and the neighborhood being filled with concrete — a way, he says, to discipline the spontaneity of the Artists’ Neighborhood. When talking about the trend of increasing rents, Bardhyl also reflects on the role Pijetore has had in all of this, saying that ever since he opened the bar, he has been aware that he is contributing to “making visible” some people who “don’t want to be seen.”
“When I opened Pijetore there, I knew that where artists go, businessmen go; where businessmen go, prices go up, and there is no place for artists anymore,” he said, referring to the risk of unaffordable rent prices for artists. He added that he is already hearing people say, “I want to open something ‘big,’ there, in the Artists’ Neighborhood.”
For now, however, the community spirit present in the Artists’ Neighborhood is still a symbolic representation of cultural resistance to urban uniformity and discipline.
Feature Image: Ferdi Limani
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- This story was originally written in Albanian.