Erka Shalari: Let’s start at the beginning. You first conceived The Happiness of Others during a residency programme. What was it about that place that pulled you into this series?
Elsa Martini: It started in 2018, during a summer residency in Serole, a small village in Piedmont, Italy. The houses used for the stay were part of an old complex, kind of villas, extremely beautiful, full of history. Asking the director about the story of the place, I got to know that the villas belonged to a notary who was rich and had collaborated with the fascists during the Second World War. He had no children, so the person who ran the residency inherited the property as the child of the cousin. This story intrigued me immediately. The house was still full of furniture, lamps, and objects from that time. It felt like a small museum. I thought: there must be something here. Going through the photographs stored in the house, I found images that moved me, children, women, moments of domestic life. I felt being pulled inside the stories I wanted to understand. What was happening behind those images, the unspoken that triggers me. Even though I was working on another project during the residency, I found myself thinking about how these thoughts and emotions could unfold into a new body of work. This was the first moment where the whole idea started to unfold and became the first spark that eventually grew into The Happiness of Others. When I returned to Austria, the series continued almost naturally. I asked the grandfather of my daughter if they had old photographs. He was very happy to show me his archive, and suddenly, another world opened. Again, I saw women and children. No men. And when I asked, “Where is the grandfather?” they said: “He was in the war.” This I didn’t know! – that my daughter’s great-grandfather was a soldier in WWII. From there, many questions came. What happens to the untold stories in a family? I learned that when he returned from the war, he was not okay, he had psychological problems, he would go and shoot animals illegally because he couldn’t stop the impulse. Something stayed disturbed inside him. And I realised: all these stories, all these wounds, were never spoken about. They lived in the family silently. This was the real spark: the archive in Italy opened the door, and the Austrian archive brought the emotion back home.
What inspired you to open it toward other historical contexts, such as those of Austria that you just mentioned, or Albania?
The series continued because there is so much to understand. At the moment, I realise that these patterns, war, silence, moral ambiguity, psychological rupture, existed also in Austria, and of course in my own country, Albania, where decades of dictatorship and a long, unfinished transition have shaped entire generations. The more I followed these threads, the more I felt the need to expand the series, to explore how private stories mirror larger histories, and how collective trauma quietly lives inside family photographs, memories, and the bodies of those who came after. Also, I was going through heavy personal experiences, loss, and the work became a kind of self-therapy. Staying close to these images of women and children, who lived next to great historical violence but were not the center of the narrative, helped me look at trauma straight. The more I worked, the more I realised that these patterns, the same emotional line appears in different countries: vulnerability, silence, displacement, the unspoken, the things we don’t want to remember. So much pain is held in the body. So much is forgotten, or erased. So the series expanded because the theme is universal. Women and children were always the background of the “big history,” the ones who had to function, to survive. And the happiness in the title, The Happiness of Others, is really the happiness of the male world. The men were the ones whose stories were told, written, and celebrated. Women and children were only a function in this phallogocentric structure, where the male experience is treated as the universal narrative. By depicting them, I reclaim that power. I give them presence. I look INTO their world. I try to understand what was left out of the established narrative. The title itself creates a tension: whose happiness are we talking about? Certainly not theirs. This is why the work continued, because I felt responsible to give space to these silent figures, to give them a voice through painting.
You’ve presented this body of work in different contexts: as solo exhibitions in Vienna and Mumbai, and as a single work in group exhibitions in Paris and Rome. Each iteration takes on a distinct form, yet you keep returning to the same title. What draws you back, and how does each new version surprise you—especially now that you’re working in larger formats?
This series continues because, for me, it became a need to go toward a radical acceptance of vulnerability. These personages are not just objects of my investigation – they make me ask what is left out of the established narrative. I want to point out the unspoken, the silence, the things that remain undescribed. It is a way of asking: what really happened to these subjects? What was their emotional reality? It’s not just a narrative. It’s almost a symptom of the human condition. These figures are not simply “motifs” for me; they are stories that need to be shared, because their vulnerability opens something in us. I try to deconstruct this idea of vulnerability, not to idealize it, but to see how things were, what was left out, and to give these unknown personages a missing voice. To give presence where history left an absence. There is also something very human in this impulse: to welcome these “others” into our own lives. I take them into my understanding, and hopefully into the viewer’s understanding too. It’s a way of destroying the established narrative, the one we think we know, and instead making our own story, even making these forgotten people the HEROES of the story. The impulse to narrate, to know what was what, to enter these lives, it’s a human need. And maybe that is why I return again and again to this series. Because these emotions, these silences, these unknown histories, we ALL share them. For me, the repetition is not repetition. It is growth. Each time I present the series, I arrive with another layer of understanding, personal, emotional, and historical. Also, my own life changed a lot in these years, and I needed to stay with the heavy emotions. Working with these images became a way to process them. Every “re-run” of the series brings something new. New paintings, new formats, new countries. The context shapes the work. And I always discover something I didn’t know before.
The stories are not linear; they have echoes. Trauma is non-linear. So the presentation also becomes a new reading of the same emotional landscape.
Could you walk us through your process?
Despite the heaviness of the themes, I like to keep the paintings dreamlike, touched by a sense of magic. Painting is a technique that I know well. I know its slowness, its layers, it is meditation, and it allows me to spend time with each subject, to go deeper into the stories that moved me. It often begins with a moment of remembering, something that flashes quickly through the body, that triggers when I look at a certain image. By engaging me with the transphere or painting it, I try to hold that moment before it disappears. I lose myself in the process, just being there, in that realm of beauty and freedom that it gives me. My technique is built from multiple layers, transfers, acrylic, washes, drawing, pigments mixed with gel, as it comes. Some layers penetrate each other, some stay on the surface, some dissolve, just like memories.
By appending Wiener werden Edition to your ongoing title, The Happiness of Others, Vienna emerges as a new point of gravity. What prompted this gesture?
The title is a play with words, because I like and work with TEXT art. But it is also connected to some coincidences. I moved into an apartment in the Sigmund Freud Hof, and suddenly I discovered the whole area is full of psychoanalysts, doctors, and psychotherapists. And because of personal reasons, I started psychotherapy myself, something that in my country was not very common. Even though I have been visiting Vienna since 1995 for my artistic life, and living here for 17 years, it still feels like a displacement. I think you can never fully become Viennese, although Vienna has something magical that pulls you inside. It’s a beautiful paradox: Vienna pulls you in, intellectually and emotionally, yet you never fully “become” Viennese. Wiener werden is therefore a kind of joke, but one that carries a truth about migration, belonging, and the feeling of always being slightly outside. On the other side is an invitation for Viennese, on following Vienna’s tradition of „Wien is anders“, to open up truly to these „other“ cultures and see it as enrichment, not as last on the social system. Also, the acceptance of resistance that our bodies do to this „asimilation“, to accept that we lie between these 2 words, NOT HERE and NOT THERE, to take this as a chance to see things from a higher perspective (more elevated perspective), to become a LINK and not to judge our bodies because of their resistance. Just to allow the natural way the word has gone and WILL ALWAYS GO through population movement. Let’s teach surrender, not control and division. The new works in the series reflect these tensions: the psychological, the personal, the historical, and the experience of living between cultures. In that sense, Becoming Viennese is less about assimilation and more about exploring the inner negotiations that this city triggers in me. So the title is a joke, but with truth behind it, emerged from this encounter between place, history, and my own process of healing. And these new works came exactly from this feeling, the struggle, the desire, the emotional processing that the city triggers.
How did working with smart fox Gallery shape this edition of the series? Did the gallery space and the surrounding neighbourhood influence how the works were presented?
The gallery felt like it was made for this exhibition. It has three rooms, and this architecture immediately aligned with the three chapters of my series: Austria, Italy, and Albania. The smart fox Gallery is very charming. The upper room is connected by spiral stairs that I always loved these kinds of stairs in Vienna. The house itself is beautiful. Entering the building with large doors with drawings incised in glass, it feels very Art Nouveau, very Viennese. You feel you are in the heart of the city, as the title suggests. And the vision of a new established Gallery in Vienna, aligned with my moment in my artistic career. The words of the director of smart fox Gallery, Ralph Overbeck, that: „The art market is polarised: collectors are cautious, yet the market overflows with images and speculation. What’s missing is true art – work that takes risks and shifts perspectives. At smart fox we focus on thoughtful curation, fair support for artists, and works that reward patience instead of chasing trends.“ – spoke to me, it’s the right place to be. Working in that environment, in the heart of the 9th district, with its layered history and its elegance, inspired me and created a very natural dialogue with the themes of Becoming Viennese.
Nature, and especially plants and flowers, has accompanied your work for decades. Why are they such essential components for you, and why do they remain significant in this series too?
The plants come from earlier environmental projects: Le Fleur du Mal, Don’t Be Afraid-They Like Music, Things That Will Bite You. I was engaged with environmental themes for a long time, and this love for nature, for breathing with the air, never left me. Even when I moved into different subjects, the presence of plants remained an organic, intuitive thread that kept my practice authentic. In this exhibition, I decided to use real plants characteristic of each country in each room. They built into the installation a domestic memory. They carry nostalgia and link the rooms emotionally. They breathe with the paintings. Using them in the most natural way, not as symbols to decode, but as living elements that complete the installation. Each space has chosen plants that carry cultural memory, a domestic environment. I found that some plants like: Spider plant (Chlorophytum), sansevieria (snake plant), monstera deliciosa (Swiss cheese plant), rubber plant (Ficus elastica), were common to 2 countries, so I chose to add them to the space. They become gentle connectors, evoking nostalgia and situating the viewer inside the emotional atmosphere of each chapter of the show.
In your work, the motif of female figures, often appearing nearly identical like twins, recurs. What significance does this similarity hold for you?
It began casually. But when I saw how strong that element was, I kept searching for it. Different people, but the same emotional state, make them look almost identical. Like repetition inside the story. This intensifies the feeling that we are part of one another. For me, this visual doubling intensifies the emotional state of the scene. It suggests that two different lives can inhabit the same story, or the same wound. When people live through something together, especially something difficult or traumatic, their inner worlds often mirror one another. We don’t just suffer alone; we also suffer for each other. This is why the figures feel doubled, as if one consciousness is echoing through two bodies.
Your works frequently echo broader social and political realities—conflict, political shifts, migration, and environmental crises. How do these forces resonate in the work today?
The world now is full of uncertainty, political polarisation, rising extremism, migration, economic insecurity, and inflation. These tensions echo the atmosphere before the Second World War. It is like a Stockholm syndrome; we do not seem to learn from history. At the same time, in Albania, the long transition continues. Trauma is not healed. It lives in the body. We feel it, but we often don’t remember. And the big question is: how can you heal if you don’t remember? All these experiences made me stay longer with this series. To understand displacement, fear, and the collapse of trust, all these “symptoms” that repeat across time. The current global climate makes these questions feel not only relevant but urgent.
What was it like for you to work in parts, creating Part I, Part II, Part III?
In the beginning was not a conscious choice. It just happened because I was moving from one country to another, and naturally, it became a series in parts. In Italy, at the start, I was almost in a fever to catch those emotions. You know, when I discovered the history of my daughter’s family from the father’s side, I was really hit by these family stories, things the new generation should know. So I started to research deeper, as that generation was caught between two worlds during the Second World War. I began checking archives, finding these intriguing images that spoke to me. For Albania, the story is something I know better, because I grew up inside the socialist system. It is the part that lives strongest in me. I could start from my own personal archive, and friends, and memories. It’s a period that echoes in me, inside me, and it felt necessary to appreciate these inner voices, to give them time and attention, to work through them. I said to myself: Okay, I have my own story to tell too. So it became simply natural to search inside as well.
Being a mother and being part of a family where my siblings also have children, I have been surrounded by children all my grown-up life. I already depicted them in my “children’s series,” but I also touched on the story of the past communist time. For example, in the painting „Family Bunker“, I paint three of our children sitting on top of a bunker. Many families in Albania inherited bunkers on their land. But here is not about bunker inheritance; they symbolize the new generation holding the past trauma, like a bunker inside us. That is why the parts came: each country, each archive, each history asked for its own chapter.
I’m fascinated by how you depict children in some of these images, especially by describing them as “radiant ecosystems.”
In this body of work, I depict children as radiant ecosystems, surrounded by a subtle, shimmering halo. Not a spiritual glow, but the real microbial atmosphere that every human body emits. The “aura” is the invisible cloud of skin cells, breath, and organic particles. It is part of the porous boundary of being. By painting these auras, I try to catch this state of being. Children, especially, are still deeply entangled with their environment; their bodies are open, receptive, connected, and that’s why they are so sensitive and can become vulnerable. In my paintings, through pearlescent glazes and diffused halos, I try to make the air around them alive, a luminous space in constant flow. This atmosphere is almost binaural, vibrating on two levels, physical and emotional. I want the viewer to see children not only as individuals, but as living atmospheres, porous, interconnected, radiant. Born beautifully, like light. And through life, we get hurt, but the light remains. In a time dominated by border politics and social division, with these radiant children, I want to remind that there is no real separation “us” and “them.” Even in a physical sense. We leak into each other. We share the same air. We live miteinander.
Looking back at the series as a whole, what insight or feeling do you hope it leaves with the viewer?
For me, this series is a need for radical acceptance of vulnerability. The people in the paintings are not objects of investigation; they are human beings whose stories were left outside the dominant narrative. Phallogocentrism, this male-centered, “rational” history, wrote the world in one direction. And women and children were always outside that logic, just functioning around it. So the question becomes: what is left out? What was never told? What remains in the silence? I use painting to open that silence. I want to look inside their reality, not to recreate a narrative, but to show what is unspoken — the emotional residue, the traces. These figures deserve presence. They deserve to be seen as complex emotional beings, not just background to the male story. In this way, painting becomes a gesture of giving back a missing voice.
I bring them into my understanding, and into yours. It is a kind of human need — to welcome “the other,” to see that we share the same emotional territory. Painting rebuilds the story from another angle, from a space where vulnerability becomes strength, and presence becomes dignity.
Exhibition: Elsa Martini: The Happiness of Others. Wiener werden Edition
Exhibition duration: 15.11 – 17.01.26
Artist Talk: Elsa Martini in Conversation with Annemarie Türk, 12.12.2025, 18:00
Address and contact:
smart fox Gallery
Fuchsthallergasse 10/3, 1080 Vienna
www.smartfox.art
Elsa Martini – www.instagram.com/elsamartinistudio
Elsa Martini graduated from the Tirana Academy of Fine Arts and Vienna University of Applied Arts, as well as Institut für Kultur Konzepte. Her practice is based on mixed-media work, encompassing painting, video and text art, site-specific and performance often exploring experimental and boundary-pushing approaches. Her works has been exhibited internationally, such as UNESCO Paris (2024), Temple University Rome, Bangla Biennale (Kolkata), Gallery Weekend and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Galerie Histoire de l’Oeil (Marseille), Belvedere 21 (Vienna), Parallel Vienna, Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art (Genova), the Museum of Creative Women (Asilah, Morocco), the United Nations Headquarters (New York), the Biennale of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean (Bari), the National Gallery of Kosovo (Pristina), Artcenter Seocheon (South Korea), and the Nomadic Art Project (Mongolia). Martini’s recent projects include DISHEVELED (Les Nouveaux Riches Magazine, Vienna, 2023), The Happiness of Others (Kras Gallery, Vienna, 2022) and The Happiness of Others II (Nippon Gallery, Mumbai, 2022). She lives and works in Vienna and is the founder and curator of NATA international art collective.