The sky is full of dreams, and the earth is full of shadows.

— Charles Baudelaire


This sculptural work by Driton Selmani is more than a phrase suspended above a home — it is a quiet, weightless collaboration between three artists across generations, media, and forms of expression.

The title originates from a verse by the renowned painter and poet Rexhep Ferri, a figure who, as Selmani’s former professor, played a formative role in his artistic education. The same line was once repurposed into a painting by Ferri’s son, the celebrated artist Jakup Ferri, whose early works deeply influenced Selmani’s own beginnings in drawing and visual narrative.

Now, in a third gesture, the phrase is released into the sky, materialized as a sculpture installed on the flat roof of a private home. It is here, on the last untouched horizontal planes of Prishtina’s shifting architecture, that Selmani finds space to express something fleeting yet urgent: a thought, a dream, a utopia.

Referencing Charles Baudelaire’s poetic longing to escape the mundane — to flee toward the sky as a space of ideals, freedom, and infinite possibility — the work takes that ambition literally. The sky becomes not just a metaphor but a site; not a backdrop, but the ultimate destination for ideas too big to be grounded.

In this triadic collaboration — Rexhep, Jakup, Driton — words become image, image becomes sculpture, and sculpture becomes atmosphere. The work is a homage, a continuation, and a quiet rebellion: a reminder that even in a rapidly transforming city, the sky remains open — the last frontier for unspoken thoughts and collective imagination.

Text by: Alex F. Koenig

Galvanized Steel tubes, stainless poles,
Dimensions: 1600 x 60 x 10 cm
Installation View: The Red Goat, Prishtina
Courtesy of the Artist & Maden Group ©
Images: Ferdi Limani