center for narrative practice

Centre for Narrative Practice – a new multidisciplinary institution
at the former Hivzi Sulejmani Library. The Centre is free and
accessible to the public, with community initiatives for citizens of
all ages and backgrounds. The Centre’s facilities include maker
spaces, reading and radio rooms and a garden with a tree canopy.

The Centre for Narrative Practice is a site for storytelling.
It is a place to read and to listen to stories, a place to learn new ways
of telling stories and a place to reflect on how we use storytelling to
engage with one another, to take part in public and political life and to
bring forth new imaginaries and ways of being.
This new multidisciplinary institution is situated at the former
Hivzi Sulejmani Library, an oasis of quietude, learning and sharing
that has been greatly missed since it closed its doors to the public in
2016. The library’s renovation, refurbishment and reimagination by
Manifesta 14 Prishtina draws on the desires and needs articulated by the
people of Prishtina in consultations and research conducted by the Education team.

The complex consists of three buildings set in a lush shady garden.
It contains a reference library and reading rooms, maker spaces,
meetings rooms, cabinet galleries, a podcast studio and a children’s
museum known as The Room of Things. It offers spaces for screenings,
educational activities, presentations and performances.

Yll Xhaferi seeks to revive the garden of the Centre for Narrative Practice as an “urban oasis” and to help restore the sense of common ownership it once embodied.

Oral histories suggest that the garden of the Manifesta 14 Centre for Narrative Practice, formerly home to the Hivzi Sulejmani Library, was once a site of solidarity and learning. The lush, leafy environment served as an alternative to the small and dark reading rooms inside the building and as place to gather and drink coffee. Back then, the staff of the library voluntarily tended the trees, flowers and shrubs.