In Still More Fragile: Memory, Immersion, and the Unstable Image

In Still More Fragile, Luján Candria constructs a space that feels less like an artwork and more like a shift in perception—a quiet descent into a slower register where language begins to dissolve. What remains is not interpretation, but presence. You are not looking at the work; you are inside it.

Candria’s practice resists passive viewing. Layers drift, images refuse to settle, and the eye is forced to adjust. Seeing becomes physical—dependent on movement, proximity, and time. Nothing arrives fully formed.

Memory, here, is not something retrieved but something navigated. It behaves less like an archive and more like a landscape—unstable, layered, impossible to grasp from a single position. The ocean is not a metaphor so much as a structure: depth without clarity, movement without fixed meaning.

The work does not collapse into certainty. It holds its instability. Images shift. Meaning slips. What you see depends on how you move through it. This is not ambiguity as effect—it is ambiguity as condition.

Authorship loosens in the process. Memory is not owned; it is shaped—by time, by perception, by the present pressing against the past. Candria does not construct a narrative so much as create the conditions for one to emerge.

By the end, the distinction between landscape and interior life begins to erode. What appears external turns inward. What feels distant becomes intimate.

The work does not resolve.
It lingers—somewhere between seeing and sensing, between memory and its disappearance.

AMM. In Still More Fragile, the viewer enters a suspended, almost pre-linguistic space beneath the surface. How do you understand this descent—as a phenomenological condition—and what kind of awareness becomes possible only in this state of immersion?

LC. I understand this descent as a shift in perception—from a more external way of seeing to a more embodied and internal experience. It’s less about going “beneath the surface” and more about entering a state where perception slows down and becomes less connected to language.

Rather than interpreting the work, the viewer inhabits it. It’s a space where boundaries soften, allowing for a more open and receptive way of paying attention.

For me, this immersion creates space for ambiguity, for silence, and for a kind of quiet recognition that cannot always be explained, but can be deeply felt.

AMM. The ocean in your work is not merely metaphor but a structure of thought. How do you conceive memory as a spatial system—one that can be navigated, inhabited, or even lost within—rather than simply recalled?

LC. I think of memory not as something linear or fixed, but as a kind of spatial field—something that can be entered, moved through, and experienced from multiple positions. In that sense, it’s closer to a landscape than to an archive.

The ocean becomes a way of thinking through this condition. It holds depth, movement, and opacity—there is no single point of access. Similarly, memory is not something we simply retrieve, but something we navigate. It shifts depending on where we stand, what we bring to it, and how we move within it.

In Still More Fragile, I try to create environments where this can be experienced. The viewer enters the image, moving through layers and fragments. This opens up new forms of perception, creating space for a different kind of engagement—one that is less about defining and more about experience.

AMM. Your installation destabilizes fixed perception through translucency, overlap, and movement. To what extent is the work proposing a critique of visual certainty, and how does it reposition the act of seeing as something unstable, contingent, and embodied?

LC. I don’t see the work as a critique of visual certainty, but as a reflection of how memory operates. Memory is never fixed or stable—it shifts, overlaps, and transforms over time. In that sense, the visual language of the installation—through translucency, layering, and movement—mirrors this condition.

The image is not presented as something definitive, but as something that is always in the process of becoming.

In this way, the act of seeing becomes unstable and embodied. Perception is shaped by movement, proximity, and time, rather than by a fixed point of view. The viewer does not observe from a distance, but navigates the work, and meaning emerges through that experience.

AMM. Your practice engages deeply with fragmentation, erasure, and recomposition of images. Do you see memory as an act of construction rather than retrieval—and if so, who or what is the “author” of that reconstruction?

LC. I understand memory as both an act of construction and a form of retrieval. It is not something we access intact, but something that is continuously shaped, reconfigured, and even partially invented over time. What we retrieve is always already transformed.

In that sense, there is no single author of memory. It emerges from an intersection between personal experience, time, and perception. What we remember is always influenced by our present condition—by what we feel, what we need, and how we position ourselves in relation to the past.

In my work, this understanding takes form through processes of fragmentation and recomposition.

AMM. In your work, the landscape seems to shift from an external environment to an internal condition. How do you negotiate the boundary between the seen world and the felt world, and where does identity situate itself within that threshold?

LC. I don’t see it as something that needs to be negotiated, but as a continuous condition. The boundary between the seen and the felt is constantly shifting.

Identity, for me, exists within that overlap. It is formed in relation to the landscape—through memory, experience, and a sense of belonging. The external and the internal are not separate, but intertwined.

The landscape is not only something we observe, but something we inhabit, carry, and continuously reconstruct.

Between Darkness and Lightness: Manuela Gjoka’s Grief as Living Architecture

Andy Gato Gallery, Barry University • February 19 – April 24, 2026

Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral

Grief rarely moves in a straight line. It circles back. It changes temperature. It slips from clarity into heaviness without warning, then returns—sometimes gently, sometimes like a wave you didn’t see coming. In Manuela Gjoka’s Between Darkness and Lightness at Andy Gato Gallery, Barry University (February 19 – April 24, 2026), that truth isn’t simply described—it is built, staged, and embodied. The exhibition is a photographic and performative body of work that traces loss not as a chapter with an ending, but as an ongoing condition of being alive: vulnerable, resilient, and continually transforming.

Gjoka’s images feel caught mid-breath—between presence and disappearance, between strength and exposure. Developed over the past three years, the work documents staged performances in which the artist’s own body serves as both subject and medium, collapsing the distance between experience and image. Even when the photographs are silent, they don’t feel still. They feel as if something is happening just outside the frame: a shift in weight, a return of memory, a moment of acceptance interrupted by uncertainty.

When I spoke with Gjoka, she described the show’s title as an intentional wordplay—one that refuses the literal and insists on the emotional. “I decided to name it Between Darkness and Lightness,” she told me. “It’s a play on words, because darkness means the lack of light, but lightness means weightless—the lack of weight. These states of darkness and light are emotional states. They’re not physical, it’s emotional.” That distinction matters. The exhibition does not treat grief as aesthetic darkness, nor healing as an image of brightness. Instead, it treats both as states of the body—felt, carried, and revised over time.

The Body as Archive

What makes Between Darkness and Lightness especially affecting is Gjoka’s decision to turn toward self-portraiture. In the past, she explained, she often told stories through others, but here she removes that protective space. “I don’t want to confine myself to photography,” she said. “I am a multidisciplinary artist… a performance artist. The show is all self-portraiture… It’s what is left after the performance.” That phrase—what is left after the performance—lands like a thesis statement. The photographs are not the performance itself; they are its residue, its evidence, the trace of an emotional event.

Gjoka’s biography adds depth to the work without reducing it to autobiography. Trained in architecture and urban design in Albania and later working in New York in architecture and construction management, she speaks about space the way an architect does: as something that holds history. Photography, for her, began as architectural observation—documenting buildings, surfaces, and sites—but she admits her curiosity always went beyond the structure. She wanted to know the human lives that moved through the spaces: “Who walked the floors,” she said, “the transcendental aspect… beyond the historical focus.” In this exhibition, that curiosity turns inward. The “site” becomes her own body, and the architecture becomes the psychological landscape of mourning.

The show’s central insight is that Healing is not a staircase you climb. It is not progress as a straight ascent. Gjoka said it plainly: “Healing is not linear. It’s not like you climb the steps and then it’s over.” She spoke about being triggered, about returns, and even about relapses—without shame. “That’s what it means to be human,” she said. “Anything goes.”

This is exactly what the exhibition communicates visually. The series moves through emotional environments rather than a fixed narrative, mirroring how grief functions in real life: one step forward, two steps sideways, then a moment of surprising lightness, followed by another return.

Three Environments, One Journey

Gjoka described the exhibition as unfolding in three “moments” or environments. The first is surreal: “We don’t understand what’s going on,” she said. “We understand there are humans, but we don’t know—there’s just darkness and hair and limbs.” This is grief as fragmentation, grief as a world that no longer makes sense. Bodies appear in pieces, like memory shattered by an event too large to integrate. These images don’t explain; they confront. They ask the viewer to sit inside the disorientation.

The second environment shifts into a recognizable reality—doors, mirrors, architectural cues that anchor the scene in something more familiar. Here, Gjoka’s use of nudity becomes explicit and metaphorical: “I am using nudity as a metaphor for fragility… and defenselessness,” she told me. “We use clothing as a shield… but in this case I am shieldless… in this reality that is not mine.” She connects that defenselessness to loss: the absence of what once protected her. “Without the strongest figure in my life—my protector, my father… I’m just by myself and defenseless.”

That framing is crucial because it clarifies what the work is not. The nudity is not a provocation; it is a removal of armor. It functions as a stripped-down condition of being, where the body is no longer an object to be consumed but a vessel of truth—exposed to weather, memory, and time.

Gjoka also uses shifts between black-and-white and color to mirror emotional confusion. “I’m going back and forth to make a little bit of confusion,” she said—“just as the confusion that happens when you’re going through moments like that.” Even the palette refuses stability, because grief refuses stability.

“Grieveland” and the Weight of Time

The show consists of 12 artworks, and Gjoka intentionally connects that number to time and mourning. In Albania, she explained, there is a forty-day mourning tradition in which family members wear dark. After her father’s death, she chose to wear black for a year. She speaks about that choice as a kind of durational performance—one she didn’t recognize as art at the time. “I decided to wear black for a year… and in a way, I think that was my first contact with performance art… a durational piece… my way of showing the world how much his loss meant to me.” She links the twelve months to the twelve artworks—a full cycle of time translated into a visual structure.

The first piece, she told me, is titled Grieveland, which she describes as “a barren land after an explosion… after a tragedy.” The metaphor is startling because it removes grief from sentimentality. It becomes terrain: scorched, quiet, emptied, unstable. In her words, “nothing is happening… just a mess of chaos… grief… darkness… and nothingness.” And then comes the second piece, The First Step—the beginning of movement, not toward resolution, but toward survival. “That first step into this land,” she said. “You find yourself in a surreal reality that doesn’t belong to you… but you have to… come alive and understand your surroundings.”

This is the exhibition’s deeper achievement: it does not romanticize Healing. It presents the labor of continuing. It presents the courage of returning.

Why the Work Lands

What makes Gjoka’s work so resonant is her insistence that the more personal she becomes, the more universal the work becomes. “I realized that the more inward I go,” she said, “and the more personal I get, the more relatable the art is.” That’s the paradox of honest art: specificity becomes a doorway.

The images invite viewers into their own internal dialogue—not by demanding interpretation, but by holding emotional space. Gjoka is also comfortable with ambiguity. She acknowledges that viewers often perceive things she didn’t intend—and she welcomes that. In grief, interpretation is never fixed; every viewer arrives with their own history, their own losses, their own thresholds. Between Darkness and Lightness meets them there.

In the end, the exhibition does not offer closure. It doesn’t pretend to resolve grief into triumph. Instead, it offers something more truthful: a space where grief is understood as an ongoing process and Healing as something that continues to unfold, shift, and reveal itself in new ways over time.

Gjoka’s photographs do not ask us to “move on.” They ask us to stay with what is real: the oscillation, the vulnerability, the strength we build without noticing, and the strange lightness that sometimes arrives—not as a cure, but as a momentary gift.

Between Darkness and Lightness is not simply an exhibition. It is a lived architecture of mourning—one that holds both the weight of loss and the possibility of becoming human again and again.