architecture – afterart

Eduard Guxholli, “Mobiliet dhe Estetika e Banesës” [1983]

Today’s post is a scan of the 1983 book Mobiliet dhe Estetika e Banesës [Furniture and the Aesthetics of the Home] by Eduard Guxholli. This slim volume offers a comprehensive overview of the components and arrangements of domestic space in late socialist Albania. It analyzes the relationship of furnishings to apartmental architecture, considers the optimal proportions and arrangements of furniture, and offers a series of projects allowing readers to create furnishings for their own homes.

Guxholli (also the author of a book on famous artists, Mjeshtër të Pikturës [1990]) does not provide a long history of the development of interior furnishings, but instead focuses on practical matters. He lays out the prevailing standardized models of apartments in socialist Albania, and suggests how different pieces of furniture may be grouped and distributed throughout the rooms of apartments. He considers the emotional impact each space should have: “the living room should create the feeling of comfort and warmth, the guest room [dhoma e mysafirëve] that of welcome, the kitchen that of cleanliness, the bedroom the feeling of calm, and so forth” (p. 14).

Evident throughout Guxholli’s text is an emphasis on the rational arrangement of modern space as a key aspect of domestic comfort and productivity. Published in the 1980s, a period when socialist Albania had cut off most of its prior ties to other socialist nations, the emphasis on self-sufficiency– educating readers on how to create their own furniture to match their standardized living environment–is particularly noteworthy. Although produced during the final decade of Albania’s socialist period, Guxholli’s book provides a glimpse into the project of socialist modernization, and specifically the effort to provide Albanian citizens with the knowledge to function as socialist citizens, optimizing their surroundings in the spirit of modernity’s emphasis on efficiency and productivity. Often at the forefront of Guxholli’s considerations are those to do with avoiding waste (either in the form of material or space). He is also, however, concerned with personalization, and the avoidance of monotony (the perennial accusation raised against socialist material culture by its critics). This text will be of interest to scholars of socialist architecture, material culture, and domestic space in socialist Eastern Europe. It will also be of interest to those broadly concerned with the implementation of modernist rationalism in socialist contexts.

This scan comes to us thanks to Kreshnik Merxhani, who tracked down a copy of the book.

Two Museum-Cities in Pictures: “Gjirokastra: Qytet-Muze” [1978] and “Berati: Qytet-Muze” [1987]

Today’s post presents two photobooks devoted to the two settlements designated by the Albanian government “musem-cities” [qytet-muze] under socialism. (Both became UNESCO sites after socialism’s end.)

The former, with a text by Emin Riza and photographs by Refik Veseli, is devoted to the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastra, the birthplace of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Gjirokastra: Qytet-Muze includes a wealth of images of the ancient and Ottoman-era cultural heritage in the city, as well as an impressive documentation of socialist-era buildings and monuments. (Interestingly, Hektor Dule’s monument to the battles of Skënderbeu–already seemingly out of place in the southern city–is omitted.) There are also images of the interiors of the major museums created in Gjirokastra during socialism, which are invaluable for understanding Albanian socialist-era exhibition design.

A group of students visiting the Gjirokastra county museum of the National Liberation War view a painting of Bule Naipi dhe Persefoni Kokëdhima, two young women who were members of the antifascist youth resistance and who were executed by Nazi occupation forces in the center of Gjirokastra in 1944

The second book, published almost a decade later, with a text by Gazi Strazimiri and photographs by Refik Veseli, focuses on the southern Albanian city of Berat, located between Mount Tomorr and Mount Shpirag (the latter the site of Armando Lulaj’s NEVER, of 2012). Berati: Qytet-Muze likewise focuses on the ancient and Ottoman-era structures in the city, as well as modern urban restructuring and industrial architecture (such as the massive ‘Mao Zedong’ Textile Factory, which of course–by 1978–was no longer identified with Mao). There are also interesting images of socialist-era monuments, although there are relatively few of these in comparison to Gjirokastra.

Of particular interest is a panoramic view of the city of Berat that features the massive ENVER geoglyph in the background, across the slopes of Mt. Shpirag. Upon closer examination, however, the letters have been inscribed not on the mountain itself, but on the photograph: little attempt has even been made to make the letters correspond to the visual rules of perspectival recession into space. They appear to hover over the landscape, perhaps unintentionally positing the flatness of the photograph itself as the surface of history, rather than the immensity of the landscape indexed by the image. The image, therefore, clearly represents the alteration of a photograph made before the creation of the ENVER geoglyph in 1968, a studious updating of the landscape to match its more current visual actuality. Alterations of photographs—whether to contribute to the rewriting of history or to increase the legibility of the history supposedly depicted by them (or both)—were not uncommon in socialist culture, and Albania was no exception to this. This particular textual supplement to the panorama of Berat must have been particularly significant in 1987, just two years after Enver Hoxha—Albania’s socialist leader and eventually dictator from 1944 through 1985—died. Regardless of precisely when the photograph was originally altered, the inscription on Shpirag’s slopes represents an attempt to assert Hoxha’s longevity not only forward into the future (as the permanence of the geoglyph was not doubt meant to) but also backwards in time, as if it was somehow part of an eternal view of the city of Berat and the mountain. Of course, the details of this retroactive eternity were loose: close consideration of the photograph in comparison to later images reveals that the letters do not even appear on the correct slopes, but have been shifted to the left. This inexactness, however, has its own logic—its imprecision is the imprecision of myth, rather than the precision of documentation. This altered photograph provides a fascinating piece in the history to which Armando Lulaj’s subsequent re-writing of the geoglyph in NEVER (2012) belongs: a history of reinscribing the geoglyph across various historical surfaces: photographs as well as the mountain itself.[i]

A panorama of Berat with the ENVER geoglyph later added to the photograph.

[i] On this topic, see Chapter 4 of my forthcoming dissertation, Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960-2016, which focuses on postsocialist negations and temporal extensions of monuments in Albania and the former Yugoslavia.

Mësimet Konsekuente Revolucionare: Nëntori 9, 1977

This is the twelfth in a series of posts containing PDFs of texts that may be of interest to those studying Albanian socialist realism. More posts with critical content are in the works, but for the time being I’m too busy to do anything except scan more documents…

Today’s post contains selections from the September 1977 issue of Nëntori. The first selection is Dalan Shapllo’s fascinating “Mësimet Konsekuente Revolucionare të Partisë dhe të Shokut Enver: Mbi Letërsinë dhe Artin,” a review and ‘study guide’ for Mbi Letërsinë dhe Artin, a collection of Hoxha’s writings and speeches on the subject of literature and the fine arts, produced between 1944 and 1976. (The full text of that book is available here.) Shapllo concludes his review of the collection by drawing the reader’s attention to two sections of the book in which Hoxha made concrete statements and suggestions regarding the realization of works of art. The first is, of course, the well-known letter written (in 1969) by Hoxha to the trio of monumental sculptors Kristaq Rama, Shaban Hadëri, and Muntaz Dhrami in connection with the realization of the Independence Monument in Vlora. The second is the 1962 statement made by Hoxha to the Shkodran creators of the drama Plaku i maleve [Old Man of the Mountains], devoted to Bajram Curri. Shapllo points out that in both cases, one of the key ideas expressed by Hoxha was that the ‘great figures’ of Albanian history (Ismail Qemali and Bajram Curri, respectively) should be depicted as acting in close concert with the masses. Shapllo notes that Hoxha’s aesthetic interventions can be summarized as expressing the following two key principles: “1) Historical works [of art] must be characterized by revolutionary ideas, thus preserving their historical truth; and 2) the relationship of the masses and of the hero must be conceived as a dialectical and materialist one, in order to show that the masses create history and heroes can emerge from the masses and play a positive role only when they embody and reflect the interests of the people” (19). As formulaic and ambiguous as these principles might be, one can’t help but think that they might prove instructive for current politicians and artists in Albania.

Also of interest is the second part (I regret that I don’t have the previous issue of Nëntori, so I can’t offer you the first half) of an essay by aesthetician Alfred Uçi entitled “Arkitektura dhe Estetika.” Uçi, the author of the monumental Labirintet e Modernizmit, was one of the most prolific and distinguished aestheticians of socialist Albania, and his analysis of the relationship between architecture and the other arts—including the factors that distinguish socialist architecture from Modernist formalism—is enlightening for anyone interested in considering the precise character of the relationship between representational art and abstract arrangements of space and form in socialist Albanian culture.

Finally, the issue contains several great prints and drawings highlighting the activity of the Albanian youth in aksion in agricultural development.

Happy reading!