Driton Selmani – This Must Be The Place (2025)

Public sculpture with motorized movement
Installed in the Giardino of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Podgorica

In the garden of the museum, a phrase rotates slowly against the horizon, moved by a concealed motor. The motion is steady and repetitive. The text does not arrive anywhere; it turns, returns, and continues. What looks like a declaration behaves instead like a test—of space, of language, of patience.

This Must Be The Place appears to assert belonging, yet the movement of the phrase prevents it from settling. The statement is repeated without conclusion. Each rotation weakens its authority. What should sound certain becomes provisional. The work suggests that belonging is not a condition that can be claimed once, but something that must be continuously rehearsed—and continuously fails.

Language here is treated as an object rather than a message. The words are exposed to time, weather, and repetition. Their meaning is not carried forward but worn down. The motor remains hidden, emphasizing that the forces that move language are rarely visible and rarely chosen.

Placed in the museum garden, the work engages the institution without decoration or reverence. The garden is a controlled space, curated and maintained, where nature is allowed to appear only under supervision. The rotating phrase does not harmonize with this order; it interrupts it mildly, persistently, without drama.

The work does not offer resolution. It neither celebrates nor rejects the idea of place. Instead, it leaves the statement in circulation—unfinished, doubtful, and exposed. In doing so, Selmani proposes that place is not something one finds, but something that is continuously negotiated, corrected, and undone.

This Must Be The Place, 2025
Metal tube, galvanized metal letters, rotating electromotor
600 × 480 × 50 cm, Installation view: MSU, Podgorica
Courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro ©