THE TALE AND THE TONGUE. Hi, How are you?
“Hi, How Are You?”—episode eleven from The Tale and the Tongue series—arises from a conversation with Era Qena, an enthusiastic storyteller. Era is currently an active member of the social centre Termokiss in Prishtina. She was also part of the team of the European nomadic biennial Manifesta14, which took place between July and October 2022 in the capital of Kosovo, where Era Qena and Sonia Fernández Pan first met. The words “hi, how are you” came up a few times during their conversation, connecting to basic forms of hospitality and mutual care. This seemingly simple question is not always easy to answer. In some texts Sonia read about Kosovo and Prishtina, the notion of hospitality was a constant. Era would refer to an ancient book where hospitality already appears as a set of rules and principles. Far from written or spoken rules, conversations and shared stories are a place where hospitality can also happen. The conversation for this podcast episode took place in October 2022. Sonia and Era started talking about the difficulty of owning your own place when you are very young. Half of Kosovo’s population is under thirty years old. In addition there are the severe limitations imposed by the EU on Kosovars, who need a visa to travel to other states. This reconnects with imbalances in hospitality: when it happens on the one side but not on the other. The conversation however led also to other directions: to private spaces with public uses, to Termokiss and its influence on other projects and social structures, to taking care of street dogs, to relationships in digital times, to the many lives that appear in one’s own... For the question “how are you” is both a personal and collective one.