Ada X. is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She was born in Albania and at an early age moved to the United States together with her family. Ada’s work explores themes of sexuality, identity, geographical displacement and both social and sexual liberation.

Raised between the Albanian and the American context, she has constantly tried to give an answer to herself concerning her own personal identity—that of whom she is in relation to Albania and the U.S. Moreover, she still tries to make sense of both these identities coexisting in her patriarchal upbringing. Thus, in an artistic project called “My Contribution”, which was presented on 8 October, 2021, in the “Destil Creative Hub” in Tirana, we spoke of her recreation of the Albanian flag that she had covered in menstrual blood. 

Interview by Gresa Hasa 

How would you describe this specific work of yours? 

The work is originally titled in Albanian as: “Gjaku ynë nuk humbet kurrë. Ky gjak mbetet në flamur” which means “The blood we shed is not in vain. This blood in the flag remains”. It’s a three by five feet mass-produced polyester Albanian flag, composed of a  bright red background with black double-headed eagle in the center. It is covered with dark stains of varying size, shape, and opacity. The stains are an accumulation of my menstrual blood over a period of two years. The flag has an olfactory component because of the blood: to me it smells like dog breath and sharp kaçkavall cheese.

Where did the idea come from?

There are two cultural artifacts that highly influenced this piece. One is a song by Adelina Ismajli, a Kosovar-Albanian singer, called “Skënderbeu”. The other is the “Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini” (a set of Albanian traditional customary laws, which has directed all the aspects of the Albanian tribal society). Both reference blood. In her song, Adelina sings: “Gjaku i shqipes s’humbet kurrë, ky gjak mbetet në flamur” which influenced the title. I only changed “shqipes” which stand for “Albanian” or “eagle” (the country’s national symbol) to “our” – “our blood is never lost”.

The blood Adelina is referring to is the blood shed by men, Albanian warriors during the formation of the Albanian nation-state, in resistance to imperial and neo-colonial powers at the time. The red color in our flag symbolizes this bloodshed. The concept of blood and bleeding never being wasted intrigued me, but I wanted to explore it with blood not necessarily shed in violence or to better say, not in this particular type of violence.

The other source that prompted this piece  was the “Kanun of Lekë Dugagjini”. Dukagjini was a contemporary feudal lord. The Kanun, a series of codes that governed his principality, was originally passed down orally. Like other forms of governance in mountainous regions in Europe and Asia, the codes are infamous for their patriarchal values and structures. What interested me most, as it relates to this piece, is the Kanun’s description of a bride’s dowry, in which the mother and father include a single bullet. With it they “guarantee” their daughter’s “conduct.” In the event that the daughter disobeys or humiliates her husband (i.e. breaks the code of hospitality) or commits adultery, her husband is allowed to kill her with the bullet provided by the parents with no retribution. Her blood is “lost.”

This contradiction, this exclusion, compelled me to make this piece. I wanted my blood to not be lost, not like the young girls who were extrajudicially killed by the entire village (and those who continue to be, by femicide). As someone who is an immigrant, whose life is deeply marked by displacement, the idea that my blood had a home was attractive to me. So I took the concept of blood being held in our nation’s flag, and re-interpreted it in a feminist perspective by adding my own blood.

From a gendered perspective, our relationship to the flag is complicated. Before being Albanian, we are women. Our history is written by men and for men. Even our national hymn, a patriarchal call for violence, is a hymn directed to men. We have historically been excluded and oppressed not only as Albanians by different colonizers but also as women by Albanian men themselves. How does your flag, the one bearing menstrual  blood instead of blood shed by war, (re)interpret this relation?

In a sense, I feel like pouring my blood on the flag to make visible something that’s invisible. Bear with me because I think there are layers to this. Menstrual blood has a lot of beautiful symbolic power to me. Perhaps most explicitly, and in congruence with the title, this piece reminds us that blood is shed, violence is done in the building of a nation, but that men aren’t the only ones that were sacrificed to create a national mythology and a nationalized territory. There is a Chicana writer who I love, Gloria Azaldúa, and she creates this interesting binary of the ableist society, describing two worlds: the right-handed world and the left-handed world. The left-handed of the world includes the people who are at a disadvantage or are marginalized: women, black and brown people, queer people, trans people, the disabled, the elderly, sex workers. Those who are in the left-handed world are controlled, punished, murdered, or otherwise violently institutionalized, and their culture appropriated, censored, erased, or demonized. To me, as a queer-pansexual,disabled-woman-artist, pouring blood on the flag was a symbolic act to represent the violence that those of the left-hand world experience in order to build the nation, which, in its original conception, was patriarchal and cis-heteronormative.

Menstrual blood is also symbolically linked to reproductive labor. While productive labor produces goods and capital, reproductive labor includes having children, caring for all members of the family, feeding, cleaning, and performing all the tasks that sustain the labor force that performs “productive labor.” Synonymous terms are “social reproduction” or “unproductive labor”. I have to dedicate more time  and  energy to care for myself during my period. This care I perform and that other femmes perform, is often invisible, unappreciated and historically has helped men to accumulate wealth and disempower us by saying it is work that we were biologically determined to do.

Menstrual blood is considered a waste, in the same way that certain peoples’ existence that lies outside of the heteronormative, ableist, white supremacist norm, is considered wasteful. When we don’t fit in to (by nature or by choice) the capitalist pace of production or sexual restriction, we are considered wasteful, and deserving of sufferirng. I think the next layer is more specific to the experience of being a woman or a person who menstruates, and the expectation to perform reproductive labor. Menstrual blood is blood shed when an egg is released by an ovary and is not fertilized by sperm. Those of us with the reproductive apparatus to grow and birth new life are subjected to a lot of socio-political pressure to do so. By 35 years of age, almost everyone with a uterus has been shamed for not prioritizing reproduction. According to Albanian culture, like other very patriarchal cultures, those who are sexed as female and gendered as woman would really be better off spending their time and energy birthing more—not children—sons. Menstruation, in this sense, to me is a by-product of my resistance, and my freedom to live my reproductive life on my own terms.

Before tackling nationalism, I would like us to speak about migration and displacement. You were born in Albania. Your family speaks Albanian. You do not. Not really. You grew up in the U.S. where you continue to live and work. How has this dualism affected you?

It might sound kind of strange but when I grew up, my family lived in very small, very white towns in the Northeastern United States. And when I was there, people really exoticized me, because that’s how white they are that I looked exotic, right? And I was very confused for a long time about what my race is or how my ethnicity plays into that. I remember being in sixth or seventh grade, and we had to do a demographic questionnaire where we had to answer race, gender, etc. At “race” I was like, “Oh my god, I don’t know what to put… why isn’t Albania here? I don’t see Albania here. And I know that I’m Albanian because we speak that language, we talk about it at home, we talk about history… My family explained to me who I am and I must be Albanian, right?” And so on that sheet, I just went down the list of options, found “Other” and wrote in “Albanian”. And then when I got home, my mom was like,” What? Why would you do that? We’re white.”

I was shocked because that’s not how I was treated by my classmates. I felt othered. I was a girl with a mustache and a unibrow. My mother was one of the only people that had an accent in our town. And everyone immediately was like, “Oh, where are you from?” And then you say “Albania”, they’re like, “Where’s that?” Are you are white if most people don’t know the geographic location of your country of origin?

Then coming back to Albania, everyone can hear my American “theks” (Albanian word for “accent”) when I speak  Albanian. And they all ask, “Ke jetuar jashtë? Ku ke jetuar?” (“Have you lived abroad? Where have you lived?” And when I respond, they’ll say “Oh, hajde pra, qenke Amerikane!” (“Oh, come on, you are American!”). I just felt that when I first returned to Albania, people wanted to push me back out. It’s not a microaggression, but I do think it is related to envy and self-hate, which I think we carry a lot of. But with many Albanians, it is noted that I’ve lived outside and sometimes they imply that I’m not fully Albanian. I don’t even necessarily disagree with them, but for a long time I felt hurt because I was unable to understand.

I think the experiences of being American, of being a migrant, and being Albanian—and I think that hybridity and displacement, are a very core part of also being an Albanian—It’s something that I’ve been trying to understand my relationship to. Sociologists have called it being “doubly absent,” or a feeling of “home in no place.” W.E.B. Du Bois calls it having a “double consciousness”, being able to see two sides of something because of a hybridized identity.

And our interview: I can’t speak well enough in Albanian to do it in Albanian. This language loss speaks a lot about my experience as a migrant/immigrant/American, but also about the Albanian experience, which, given our geographic position, and population size, and lots of other specific parts of our identity, requires us to migrate to survive and become separated from one another. I’m speaking in English, which is a language that my grandparents don’t speak. Because of the effects of this migration, I can’t even really communicate with my own grandparents. And that’s maybe one of the reasons that I come back here to Albania, often, and that I carry around this flag with me, trying to hold a little bit to this identity that both isolated me and that I felt isolated from.

I don’t feel anything if I were to wave the American flag, like, it actually brings me disgust in so many ways. I don’t know what it feels like to be American. I never watched The Simpsons. I don’t drink skim milk. I don’t know if I’d ever really felt American until people heard my American accent in Albania, until relatives or other Albanians abroad pointed it out. But I do feel something with the Albanian flag. Because I felt displaced from Albania and I longed to feel the belonging that my parents felt. My family left in desperation, in the way many of us are forced to leave and migrate for education or opportunity or safety. Albanians outside Albania rely on the flag more than Albanians in Albania because we aren’t or can’t be included in any national, or collective project, and so I think the flag for the diaspora is a way to bring the homeland to the land outside the home. In my case, I may have been inspired by American pride, but I don’t think I am. My father is very patriotic, for Albania, and he always has been.

In this project though, I am considering if even as an immigrant, placing another nation’s flag in an honorific position in America is an act of violence, a symbolic act of settler colonialism. Maybe we shouldn’t be raising any national flags in the United States, as it is still unceded Indigenous territory. It is one of the reasons that I choose to display my flag by resting it on the earth. But choosing to be represented by the Albanian flag, choosing Albanian-ness is a political decision. I don’t want to include myself in the American flag, that flag stands for a fascist, settler colonial project.

Theoretically, I think my work leans on Frantz Fanon. Reading “The Wretched of the Earth” helped me conceptualize this work. He’s a Black man from Martinique, but he went to Algeria and worked as a doctor in the Algerian revolution. He also participated in the liberation movement there. Fanon talks about how important nationalism is for marginalized peoples, to have that collective identity that extols the resilience of a people and explains a coming together for liberation. So, yes, if you want to add your menstrual blood, let’s come together to stain this flag. This piece is a process, a performance, an experiment for me to reclaim my identity as an Albanian immigrant woman.

I also want to acknowledge that I do feel that my identity in this case shouldn’t prevent me from understanding that I still carry white privilege in a lot of situations. Even though I am an immigrant, I still benefited from having light skin. So I make this claim but understand the responsibility that I carry. I absolutely have a responsibility to dismantle oppressive systems for people more marginalized than me. Specifically, I have a lot of white privilege in New York, which is where I live now. I do feel way more “white” there than I do elsewhere because N.Y.C. is so diverse.

I think anyone who is or has been racialized as white and has lived in the United States, i.e. passes as white or has white privilege in their skin color, does absolutely have a responsibility. You can still benefit from white privilege regardless of where you are from in this globally racialized society. Even if one’s family did not contribute to that history of colonialism and enslavement, one still benefits from the privilege of being racialized as white even having spent only one year in the United States or Global North, either in wealth or social capital, or protection from violence. It is a very different experience from people who are racialized as non-white. That experience, and the responsibility changes depending on your geographical location. Being Albanian is very different in Europe than it is in the United States. Racialization depends on geography, history, and other factors. We do have a very big responsibility to create a more inclusive and more just society, not just for ourselves, but for everyone who’s more marginalized than us. Having been a victim of some kind in world history does not eliminate that you may be a perpetrator in some other cases. The settler-colonial project of the Israeli state in Palestine is a great example of this contradiction.

Being Albanian abroad is certainly a different experience from being Albanian at “home”. Does the Albanian identity matter in Albania, a society where women are treated as second hand citizens, excluded from the public space and enslaved in the private one? Can feminism challenge nationalism in our struggle for identity? Do we have to necessarily embrace our “Albanian-ness” or can we look into a perspective free of nationalism?

For me, claiming Albanian ethnicity is protective against the liberal project of destroying cultural difference. It is a connection. It is a political determination. I know I’m Albanian because when I don’t know what to eat for dinner, I have “fasule” (beans cooked in a traditional way) or “trahana” (Traditional Albanian dish). I say “Qyqja!” (An Albanian word used to express a variety of emotions, such as surprise and pleasure, often as a reaction to something someone has said.) all the time. I love iso-polyphonic music. I am Albanian because of how I have suffered, as someone who has had to migrate out of Albania. I have a lot of longing for it.

Ethnicity is sometimes defined as “membership of a culturally constituted people, one with customary ways and means that it takes to be distinctive and to which it is affectively attached.” Most Albanians live outside of Albania. Our diaspora is huge. So, being someone who has lived outside of Albania, identifying as Albanian is very different for me. Whereas like, I know that being in Albania changes your relationship to your nationality/ethnicity. But I do feel that like you, I felt the repercussions of the dictatorship, of the Great Socialist Project…The lack of freedom, the isolation, the fear… Because my family created the same atmosphere in the house I grew up in. Immigration didn’t protect me from the damage to our cultural psyche. We have all been traumatized by that time.

But also as Albanians, I think about how we resisted. How many different invaders, imperialists, and the like tried to take our language away from us? I think being an Albanian nationalist is slightly different from being an American nationalist because we did not colonize anyone, we did not develop a settler colonial project on this land. Because if we do not identify as Albanian, what do we become? Where do we go? I believe that we are erased. Do we become white?. Which, not to say that there’s something necessarily wrong with having white skin but Whiteness as a race is a construct, and there are values behind whiteness. So the choice is either Albanian-ness or whiteness, and whiteness is erasure and assimilation. Like patriarchy, whiteness is a system of supremacy, of violence and domination. My experience with assimilation is that it is a violent process. To assimilate requires that I don’t bother learning my or protecting my language, or my culture; it requires that I subscribe to a capitalist system. It requires that I believe myself to be part of a hierarchy, and act accordingly.

Is it possible to imagine a reality without nationalism and national identity? Why not identify as “Europeans” which we are, instead of “Albanians”? 

Can nationality ever be irrelevant? Not at this historical moment. Nationality provides us with an imagined community. I think we need it to heal.

What I find really interesting is how queer movements in the region have managed to bring together people of different ethnicities which in the past have fought against each other as enemies. Pride manifestations bring together Albanians, Serbs, Bosnians etc. as a people under one flag, the LGBTQ+ flag; a people that is regularly excluded and oppressed under and sometimes in the name of national identity. (Homosexuality is often considered by conservatives and (far) right forces as an “imported vice” not an existing “Albanian” or “Serbian” reality for example.)

I think you make a really good point. But I think the flag is a symbol of an imagined political  community and it doesn’t necessarily have to be statist. Can we have both feminism and nationalism? I don’t think that they are mutually exclusive. Women have experienced solidarity in their ethnicity/nationality during conflicts like the Serbian genocide in Bosnia. It is a point of marginalization but also a point of solidarity. And I hate to think of nationality or ethnicity in that sense, that it is defined by our specific historic trauma, but it is. Our feminism must be specific to us, as Albanians, because our challenges are unique they come from a specific geography and history. Feminism has to be both local and global.

I felt so alone in the United States. In my experience, being an Albanian woman is very specific. My experiences of sexism and misogyny were different because of my ethnicity. And then coming here and like my friends talking about the specific type of sex shame that they feel or shame around menstruation, or like the things their mother or father said when they were 10 years old, like: “Don’t look at the waiter. You’re sending the wrong message, if you look at the waiter.” It’s these very specific things that I feel like I have experienced and that other Albanian women who have spoken to me have experienced, and maybe that is the space… like the space of coming together in order to heal and move through that historic trauma. And how could we create that space if we don’t protect ourselves and our country? No matter what, we have to practice being in an intentional community together. Borders are also boundaries, and nationhood has protected Albanians within the borders from genocide. I know in Kosovo, people fear that the Serbian governmental institutions are waiting for the opportunity to continue its fasco-expansionist project of displacing us and murdering us like before.

The societal experiences that you describe, especially in relation to your  upbringing as a girl are not necessarily “Albanian”. I would say that they are more connected to patriarchy than Albanian-ness. Patriarchal pressure, particularly during the coming of age but only, happens to women elsewhere in the world, who happen to grow up or live in patriarchal contexts. How do ethnicity and gender intersect here? 

This patriarchal violence happens in our own language. Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship that we went through is also specific to Albania. The only comparison perhaps equally as repressive that we have in contemporary times is North Korea, and they’re still in it. No culture has come out the other side of something so repressive and so isolationist. Women were expected to work outside the home and then care for their family; it was a fake feminist revolution. I’m trying to figure out how that has affected my psyche, my parents psyche, and the generational trauma I have inherited from that regime.

But I want to go back to the importance of nationalism, which I think is more closely linked to self-determination than statism. I know that in Kosovo people continue to live with a fear that is connected to their identity as Albanians in the region. Can you have the language, the customs, without the protection of the nation in our current political reality? What would happen if our leaders would be entirely reckless and non-resistant towards actual existential threats? What would happen to us? History would repeat itself. How can we create that space for healing, for collaboration, for liberation on our own terms, if we don’t care to protect ourselves and our homes?

Choosing to identify as Albanian is political and it is positioning yourself in the global majority. It is recognizing that you didn’t participate in the colonization of people, and that very specific violence and exploitation. It is saying: “My ancestors did not colonize the Americas. My ancestors did not participate in killing indigenous people or enslaving black people there.” It is recognizing that the countries we immigrate to in Europe and North America are economically better off not because they are superior but because they are violent and feel entitled to everything. In fact, we have our own history of being exploited and disempowered by those same colonizers.

We have to ask ourselves how has/does our ethnic history fit in an international politics defined by race and what experience did it yield, politically, socially and psychically? While the Albanian identity is certainly complex, and there’s violence within our history, especially if you are gendered as a woman or are a marginalized identity, at the same time choosing, in this case choosing Albanian-ness or choosing whiteness, choosing American-ness, is choosing between being pro or anti liberation of the global majority to me. The American flag was born out of genocide, out of enslavement whereas the Albanian flag was born out of self protection, unity and coming together to not be colonized, to not be murdered systematically, which is what happened to Albanians before and after the world wars. So, I think that’s the difference. It is, in a sense running away from my American identity, but it’s also joining a larger group of people who say that what happened was terrible, and we are still suffering from white, Western hegemony, and that we exist and deserve the right to govern ourselves, to choose how we want to live, to speak our language or to participate in a collective, political project that doesn’t harm or exploit other people.

Going back to the menstrual blood on the flag. A mere curiosity and practical question: how did you manage to get the different shapes and shades in the flag?

My period is not very consistent. If I’m traveling within like a week around the time that I may expect to get it, I have to take the flag with me, to apply the blood because I cannot travel with a bottle of unrefrigerated menstrual blood. So, this flag has been to Italy, New York, Virginia, and now Albania. In Italy, I was staying in a hostel and I was supposed to get my period the day I arrived in Albania, not when I landed in Italy, but we all know the menstrual cycle is sometimes rebellious. So, I used the Diva Cup to manage my period and collect my blood. I usually take the blood from the Diva Cup, put it in a water bottle, close the water bottle, put a black plastic bag around it and store that in a fridge or amongst my belongings until I find an opportune moment to apply the blood to the flag and allow it to dry. At the hostel, I put my flag on the window sill on top of a plastic bag and poured the blood on it and let it sit out to dry and hoped that nobody noticed a suspicious bloody flag on the window sill. Some people saw it in the hostel but they didn’t say anything. It was covered in glass when I presented it in Albania because at the end it’s blood, so it has a little bit of a smell. As my friend Silvi Naçi, another Albanian artist in the U.S. said: I’ve “achieved” a sense of smell for this piece. Nationalism smells funny.

It has been an interesting experience to carry it around from place to place in the same way I carry my ethnicity as a diasporic Albanian, or the “shame” of being a bleeding creature. I will not deny that I’m still confronted by the shame of my menstruation even though I’m creating a work of art with it. It’s not like that goes away, and neither does the visceral experience of bleeding.

There are times where I have my period and I’m shocked, my stomach flips, because it’s so much blood that my hands will shake. None of that autonomic response, or the emotional baggage of the period, is transcended in this process. It’s a constant confrontation of both something that is so shameful and considered dirty. I feel this is compounded by my identity as an Albanian woman. Our culture is very repressive of sexuality. But also, I am a witch and pouring my menstrual blood on it, in a sense, puts a spell on the flag. Menstrual blood has been conceptualized as powerful, magical even, in different cultures and it’s been treated differently over time and place in human history. I’m destroying the flag and I’m also embellishing it. It’s so much better this way because I am included in it.

Sometimes blood is thicker than other times, like the first or second day of your menstruation has more pieces of endometrium in it. This makes it thicker. Sometimes later, on day two or three, it’s thinner, more blood to chunk ratio, and then it gets clumpy and thick again. So that’s the blood doing its work. It has very little to do with my application. Really, I have applied it in a variety of ways, depending on the situation. What’s important is just soaking this flag with my period blood, every month, no matter where I am. I burn some sage or palo santo and I laugh, I allow myself to be filled with indignation, a spirit of rebellion. I allow myself to be disgusted, humored… Sometimes I say affirmations or little poems. Every application has been different and adapted to what I feel I need. But some of these patterns that you see here formed because I have to put a trash bag down on the floor and let the blood dry on top of it. It creates these interesting capillary-like patterns. So really, it is more of the blood’s work, then mine, all the patterns and colors and shapes. I definitely want this work to be anti-aesthetic, or rather, I don’t have an aesthetic goal. I am trying to saturate all the natural red of the flag with my blood until I can’t any longer. I am approaching this point of  change in the piece because the smell is becoming intolerable. I need to find this piece’s arc.

How is this work representative from a feminist perspective?

Like I mentioned before, pouring menstrual blood is a little bit like casting a spell. Whenever I do it, I’m laughing. I brought a flag to Italy and I had to figure out how to pour blood on this flag in secret. It feels so joyful and playful.

It feels so good to degrade, or decorate, this symbolic object that has meant so much to the construction of a capitalist patriarchy. As a feminist, this act represents how bodly I have to live in the world to make space for myself, to begin to change the norms. I have to question everything I have been conditioned to believe, including male/masculine disgust of my body.

I will find magic in me. But the act is also multi-dimensional in meaning. Whenever I get my period, it is hard, I am exhausted for days before, I am in pain, I get migraines. It’s a disabling experience. And I know for a lot of other people who menstruate, it is a disabling experience, and being able to connect with my body and my menstruation and to recognize that I don’t have to treat it the way that society requires me to treat it. That is actually a revolutionary process. And within that resistance, that process, I discover new ways of being. In disrupting how I usually menstruate, I get more in touch with my body. I break that capitalist alienation to my body and I realize that perhaps, I am meant to change my pace during that time. Capitalism has set a pace for us that is masculine, that centers able-bodies, that is based on a body that doesn’t fluctuate, a body that doesn’t spend days being ill, or carrying around a fetus. And so, like, pouring this blood on the flag, this blood not born of violence, finding a connection to it, disrupting the societally prescribed care of my body is a reclamation. Cultivating a deeper connection with myself, my sexuality, my body and its functions and, moving through the shame and stigma of having this body that does this, is a form of resistance.