This post continues a series of scans of the issues of PamorART, a magazine published by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana, during Gëzim Qëndro’s time as Director. The editor-in-chief of the publication was Eleni Laperi, and its editorial staff included Suzana Varvarica Kuka, Ylli Drishti, and Edi Muka. PamorART began publication in 1998, and was a crucial reflection of the artistic and cultural scene in Albania in the late 90s, providing a specialized venue for discussion and critical assessment of the visual arts in the country. PamorART holds a tremendous significance for histories of contemporary Albanian art, since it is one of the few publications where we can get a glimpse of the relationship between the developing post-socialist and post-1997 art scene, in dialogue with the central artistic institution in the country, the National Gallery. It’s also a tribute to the important work done by the longstanding research staff of the gallery (including Eleni, Suzana, and Ylli)–work that I think is seldom recognized. The issues of PamorART are very hard to find–hence my desire to make them widely available to researchers.Thanks to Suzana Varvarica for lending me this issue to scan it.
The third issue of PamorART, published in March of 1999, was dedicated to the 1998 edition of the ‘Onufri’ exhibition, the annual exhibition and prize established for Albanian art in 1993. As outlined in Edi Muka’s article “Paqëndrueshmëria e Përherëshme” (“Permanent Instability”) in this issue of PamorART, the 1998 edition of the prize competition and exhibition brought certain foundational changes. First, Onufri became an exhibition that included international artists from various other countries in the Balkans(including artists from Kosovo, North Macedonia, Croatia, and Bulgaria). Secondly, and more importantly, this was the first Onufri to have a curator and a curatorial concept (the titular “Paqëndrueshmëria e Përherëshme”).
Muka’s text is historically significant because he attempts to lay out why the role of the curator and the curatorial concept are necessary to the success of Onufri: basically, he argues that the use of a curatorial concept to guide the selection of works included creates the ground for a critical position on the exhibition, opening up the possibility for dialogue about the appropriateness of the concept, the degree to which the works selected develop that concept, and so forth. Implicit in this claim, of course, is the idea that artistic quality is no longer a credible factor in selecting works, and that artists were by that time working in such various modes that traditional models of taste on the part of the audience would no longer suffice to explain the works exhibited.
Muka goes on to assert that the curatorial concept was reciprocally generated by examining the trends in artistic output in the Balkans. This series of claims is emblematic of the complex introduction of the curatorial function (which Octavian Esanu has discussed at length in his recent book The Postsocialist Contemporary) in the region. On the one hand, the curator is supposedly necessary to navigate the complexities of artistic production and social reality in the new post-socialist context. On the other hand, the curator is supposedly staying true to what artists are doing–the curator does not capriciously impose themes on artwork, but rather organically responds to the trends in artwork produced in their own time.
Of course, the introduction of a curator for Onufri (which already occupied a strange middle position between a prize competition and a general national exhibition) could not help but be controversial. A fascinating dissenting position on the 1998 edition of Onufri is presented in the issue through two short interviews with the painters Besim Tula and Stefan Taçi, two of the founders of the Nëntori group. The Nëntori group, and their annual exhibition, offered a different model: that of an exhibition without a determined theme and without a curator, a model that they saw as an alternative to the conditions of both Socialist Realism (which had imposed set themes on artists) and contemporary curatorial practice (which likewise organized artists by means of curatorial concepts). Tula’s response is very critical of Muka in particular, while Taçi’s s more circumspect in its evaluation of the changes taking place in the scene at the time.
In addition to Muka’s text and these two interviews, the issue also contains numerous other interviews with artists who took part in the 1998 Onufri exhibition, as well as short texts from other curators and critics in the region, such as Suzana Milevska.
I first began archiving the PamorART issues on this website back in 2016. You can see the first issue of the publication here, and the second issue here. These first two issues were scanned by Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei, who received them from Gëzim Qëndro before he passed away. I think both of them for initiating the project. I subsequently posted the fifth issue here; in the next week or so I will finish posting the final two issues (issue 4 and issue 6)
This interview was originally conducted and published in 2016 as part of a blog residency at the now-defunct Blog at ARTMargins Online. An edited version of the interview was also published in Albanian onPeizazhe të Fjalës in 2017. When ARTMargins Online’s website was restructured, its blog archive became unavailable, and as such the English version of the interview is being re-published here. The interview took place via email between November and December of 2016, and was was conducted in Albanian; the translation is by the author.
Pleurad Xhafa is an artist living and working in Tirana, Albania. Xhafa studied in Bologna, and graduated with an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna in 2012. Xhafa works primarily in video, photography, and installation, and his works address the politics of public space, commemoration, and labor in contemporary Albania. We spoke about the state of contemporary art in Albania, the relationship between art and public space, and the possibilities for contemporary art as a form of critique under neoliberalism.
Pleurad Xhafa, creating Negative I-II-III-IV, 2015. Work created with the support of the Department of Eagles/Departamenti i Shqiponjave. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Raino Isto: What importance does contemporary art have—or what importance can it have—in the development of society’s consciousness of public space? Can you discuss a little bit about public space (or its disappearance) in Albania in recent years?
Pleurad Xhafa: In order to speak about contemporary art and its significance in society, let me first try to offer a diagnosis of the pathologies of public space in Albania. For the 45 years of the communist regime in Albania, private property was completely forbidden; no one had the right to own private property. Property belonged to everyone and no one at the same time. Every institution and natural resource was public, and only the political regime had complete access to them and control over them. I think that this factor altered and deformed the socialist citizen, who—after the change of the regime in 1990—rushed to swallow up that which had been denied to him for some many years. In the almost complete absence of a state, large cities underwent a fundamental change in demographics. People despoiled the factories; they destroyed and stole everything that they had previously considered communal property. They build houses that did not conform to construction criteria, and established businesses on every available corner. At the beginning of the new century and the empowerment of state institutions, the destruction of public space was further exacerbated. The surgical knife of sophisticated neoliberalism, with its mafia character, interfered in the legal system, privatizing both natural resources and public institutions. This phase, from my point of view, was the most dangerous one, as it infected absolutely every cell of society.
Over the course of the 26 years since the fall of communism, Albanian society has never been able to construct a middle class. Only 3% of Albanians are extremely rich, while the rest are poor or living in absolute poverty. For this reason, the lower classes and those living in poverty are forced to accept every compromise that the violence of capital imposes on them, just so that they can survive, even if it fundamentally distorts their way of living. The infection of public space is heightened to psychological and spiritual level, and manifests itself in high doses of anger, aggression, and fear directed at different ways of thinking. Precisely in this kind of infected terrain, I think that engaged contemporary art can be considered as a kind of emergency treatment, that it should play the role of an antibody that can break through the callouses caused by shock therapy. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that the artist needs to leave the prison of mental masturbation and to create the necessary space for debate and for interaction with ordinary people that live in the cities and in the periphery. Only then can we really begin to talk about the role of art in relation to social consciousness. Until then, everything I just said remains at the level of a wishful theory.
Pleurad Xhafa, Monument to Falure, January 28, 2016. Work created in cooperation with MAPS (Museum of Art in Public Space). Photo courtesy of the artist.
RI: Can you discuss a little bit about the connection between art and politics in Albania today? I know this is a question that is already worn out from overuse, but I’m curious to know how you see the role of the artist in relation to politics.
PXh: Contemporary art in Albania is completely in a state of crisis. The form of this art is illuminated only by the reflection of [political] power located on the first floor of the Prime Ministerial building, in the COD [Center for Openness and Dialogue], while its content is buried in the graves of Sharra [1], and one cannot even find this grave, since the bronze letters of the tombstones have been stolen at night by those living in poverty, to be sold for scrap. In my opinion, the majority of artists that could be considered ‘active’ today in Albania have been transformed into marionettes of political propaganda. This situation is at once concerning and desperate, especially since criticism, as a field of action, is nearly nonexistent. Even when criticism does appear, it comes from artists who are operating essentially as individuals. I’m quite happy to see the recent actions of the street art collective Çeta [2], who have been able to stir the stagnant waters of the Albanian art scene, but it remains to be seen whether or not they will survive the test of time.
To return once more to the question of the importance of contemporary art in raising the consciousness of society regarding public space, and to link that with the role of the artist in relation to politics, let me talk about an example that happened recently in Tirana.
Pleurad Xhafa, Monument to Falure, January 28, 2016. Work created in cooperation with MAPS (Museum of Art in Public Space). Photo courtesy of the artist.
The neoliberal policies that the current Albanian government has been following resulted in a reform in the education system that used taxpayers’ money to benefit the private university sector. This reform has been protested for several years by the “Movement for the University” [3]. As part of this protest, during an activity held to promote FRESSh (The Forum of Eurosocialist Albanian Youth [4]), student activist Mirela Ruko poured a bottle of tomato sauce over the head of the Minister of Education, Lindita Nikolla. This action could have cost the student 3 years in prison. In my opinion, this action came about not only as a result of the reform in the education system, but also as a response to policies of privatization and to the general lack of democratic representation in the country. However, if the student’s action gave rise for the first time to a debate on the issue of education, dividing citizens into camps for and against, raising questions about the ethics of protest and about how far democracy and the freedom of expression can go, this still makes me wonder, and it pushes me to raise a fundamental question when it comes to artists: are contemporary artists in Albania really able, with their forms of expression, to incite as important a debate?
Pleurad Xhafa, creating Negative I-II-III-IV, 2015. Work created with the support of the Department of Eagles/Departamenti i Shqiponjave. Photo courtesy of the artist.
RI: Some of your recent works (I have in mind Monument to Failure and Negative I-II-III-IV) have to do with both memory and with monumentality. What role do you think monuments currently play in Albanian society, and what kind of relationship does contemporary art have with official monuments (whether from the time of socialism or the years after socialism) in public space?
PXh: I think that Albania is the only place in Europe that celebrates their Day of Liberation from Nazi occupation on two separate dates, depending on the political party that is in power. When the Albanian government is controlled by the PD (Democratic Party), we celebrate liberation on the 28 of November; when the PS (Socialist Party) is in power, we celebrate it on the 29 of November. This anomaly is the product of the political forces that attempt—at all costs—to maneuver and regulate Albanian history. Likewise, Albania is the only country among the former communist nations of Europe that still hasn’t really confronted its own past. The dossiers detailing the crimes of those who formerly collaborated with State Security forces and the secret police still haven’t come out of the dark nooks and crannies of the archives. There are still today public prosecutors, judges, and politicians who were directly responsible for approving macabre executions in the name of communist propaganda. This hypocritical relationship to history can be seen directly in the cases of monuments and memorials that spring up like poison mushrooms, commissioned by private citizens in cooperation with the party in power, using funds from Albanian taxpayers.
Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj planting a tree at the site where Monument to Failure was installed. Photo from the Facebook page of Erion Veliaj, January 28, 2016.
When I decided to create Monument to Failure [5]—which commemorates the judgment regarding the Gërdec case, where 26 people were killed—I thought of the work as a gift, as a missing monument for the city of Tirana [6]. During the process of the monument’s creation, I was trying to make a prediction; I was convinced that the bronze plaque wouldn’t stay on the tree stump very long, since bronze is a valuable material and it would probably get stolen. For a secondary documentation of the work, I decided to stick the plaque to the stump with glue. Everything went far beyond what I had predicted, however. A few weeks later, the mayor of Tirana [Erion Veliaj] pulled up the monument personally, along with the whole remaining tree stump, completely destroying the monument. In its place, he planted a new seedling tree. This action is clear evidence of the relationship that the current political regime creates with history, and the modifications of public space that the regime carries out in the name of political aestheticization.
Pleurad Xhafa, creating Negative I-II-III-IV, 2015. Work created with the support of the Department of Eagles/Departamenti i Shqiponjave. Photo courtesy of the artist.
RI: Many Albanian artists have told me that the absence of galleries devoted to contemporary art in Albania is a significant problem for the country, but it also seems to me that (in the neoliberal context) as soon as an artist exhibits in a gallery, his or her work—together with any critical message it might carry—is immediately in danger of being assimilated by the authority of the institution. What do you think? Is exhibiting in a gallery still important (at least as regards the political or critical message of the artwork), or are actions undertaken in public space more important?
PXh: It’s true that art, especially critical art, is in danger of being assimilated by the authority of the institution, even moreso when it becomes intertwined with the chains of capital. However, in Albania there is a fundamental difference, since here there is no art market, properly speaking, and as such no galleries and no collectors. I have a different kind of concern regarding art spaces in Tirana. (I’m focusing on Tirana because in other cities in Albania, contemporary art and art spaces are almost inexistent.) Spaces that have an independent viewpoint, independent especially from dominant political structures, are extremely important because that help shape critical thinking. In my view, those few art spaces that currently operate in Tirana are headed for capitulation. They can’t manage to include the wider public. This isn’t only the responsibility of the institutions, but also of artists. The low level of interest and small number of people who attend exhibition openings is in danger of creating a tight, vicious circle in which no one realizes that this system limits the possibilities for creating dialogue. Personally, I believe that the artist—with the support of these institutions—needs to create political tactics to temporarily take control of public spaces, transforming them into ephemeral platforms for autonomous debate that are open to anyone.
RI: Several of your works also have to do with the concept of ‘justice’ (a concept that is frequently discussed in Albania, generally in debates on the war against corruption, ‘the rule of law’, etc.). Could you speak a little bit about how you conceive of the idea of ‘justice’, and about what connections contemporary art can make with justice? Do you believe that justice is something that primarily belongs to the sphere of political functions, or is it an element of all relations or connections between people in society? Is justice something that ‘acts’, or is it more of a situation or condition, and what does art have to do with this (either with the ‘action’ of justice, or with justice as a condition)?
PXh: Justice and art do not have any direct connection, but justice can be the subject of the work of art. Negative I-II-III-IV is a work that has justice precisely as its subject matter [7]. The work is about the protests of January 21, an event that is not very distant in collective memory, and which left behind four dead on the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation. On January 21, 2011, Edi Rama, the leader of what was then the opposition party in Albania [the Socialist Party], led hundreds of protestors in a protest against the government headed by Sali Berisha. This protest developed as a response to a video scandal made public in the media, involving Ilir Meta, Foreign Minister and leader of the Party for Socialist Integration, which was at that time in a coalition with Berisha’s [Democratic Party] government. In the video, Meta was caught on tape wrapping up a corrupt business deal. On the day of the protest, four citizens were shot to death by soldiers of the republican Guard, shooting from the windows of the Prime Minster’s building. During the elections in 2013, something surprising happened: two political opponents, Edi Rama and Ilir Meta, entered into a coalition and won the election. Rama became the Prime Minister and Meta became the Head of Parliament, which gave him immunity to prosecution by courts. The only sign that today remains from the shootings of January 21 are four bronze plaques that are embedded in the sidewalks of the boulevard, right along the edge of the sidewalks in the exact places where the four protestors were shot.
The primary condition for Albania’s membership in the European Union is the “Justice Reform.” Under the supervision and with the recommendations of the EU and the USA, this reform was unanimously approved in July of 2016, approved by all the political parties in the country, the same parties that produced the events of January 21, 2011. What made an impression on me in this whole series of events was the fact that all of these scandals and machinations are completely publicly ignored by all political and social actors. Perhaps the inaction of justice has created a situation that primarily aims to preserve the status quo of the regime, a status quo in which—by means of verbal abuse—that regime has stunted and corrupted society’s conscience.
RI: You’ve created several works in close proximity to official state buildings located along the boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation; have you encountered any problems from security guards or from the police during the creation of these works? Have the police ever monitored you afterwards?
The “21 January” Memorials by 51N4E. Photo by Pleurad Xhafa.
PXh: When I decided to create Negative I-II-III-IV, I faced two difficulties. The first was an institutional one, since to do anything with the bronze memorials; I had to get permission to act from the relevant institutions. One of those was the Municipality of Tirana. For about five months, continuously, I personally went to the offices of the municipality in order to get permission, which they never did give to me. This is understandable, since the mayor of the city at that time was Lulzim Basha, who—at the time of January 21 shootings—was the interior minister, and in all likelihood the order to shoot at the protestors had to pass through him. The second difficulty had to do with the technical realization of the work. For the work, I commissioned a professional sculptor, but as soon as he learned about the realization and the themes of the work, he withdrew immediately because he didn’t want to get involved with the debate about the shootings. After several meetings with him, I managed to convince him to take part, and the first thing he had me do was to take measurements of the memorials, which would assist in creating the structural molds for the poured plaster.
After I went and took the measurements of the memorials, I noticed—as I was returning to my house—that I was being followed by someone. Later, I assumed it was just my own paranoia, coming from the delicate nature of the event that was the subject of the work. Some time later, when we went to pour the plaster to take the negatives of the memorials, not only were the police present, but also the man who had followed me earlier, when I took the measurements. He approached me and asked me what I was doing, and what the purpose of these sculptures was. The only protection I could muster at that point was ‘Art’. After he took my personal documents, he continued to insist that I should not be getting myself involved in these issues, that art shouldn’t have anything to do with these kinds of things.
Pleurad Xhafa, Negative I-II-III-IV on view in ‘Teatri i Gjelbërimit’ at Galeria FAB, Tirana, 2015. Photo courtesy of the artist.
RI: Many of your works are—in some way—indexical. What I mean, for example, is that the photograph indexes light and with it a piece of reality in a particular moment. The sculptures that constitute Negative I-II-III-IV index the bronze plaques installed in the sidewalk of the boulevard. The idea of art as an ‘index’ (often an imperfect or incomplete index) has been frequently discussed in theorizations of contemporary art. Could you speak a little bit about this? Is there something that attracts you about the indexical character of art?
PXh: If you think about it, it’s very interesting, because the memorials to January 21 are bronze replacements for specific pieces of the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation, or the “Avenue of the Empire,” as the Italian fascists called it when they constructed it in 1941. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin analyzes the way that totalitarianism uses the experience of art as a way to control the masses by means of the aestheticization of politics. Thus, those memorials are nothing more that an imitation of the totalitarian concept. If we think about the index as the performative concept of a physical process, then in the case of the sculptures (Negative I-II-III-IV) taking the same form in the negative generates another viewpoint, that of the pointing-finger, where the signs in plaster materialize denial: the denial of justice, the denial of transparency and of accountability, and the denial of responsibility.
RI: It is often difficult to talk about ‘the working class’ or about ‘workers’ in Albania, because the concept of the worker has been so closely tied to the ideology of communism. But, at the same time, in a neoliberal-capitalist context, we need to talk about workers and the working class. Do you think that contemporary artists have a duty to address (insofar as it is possible) the issue of the worker? How do you see your own works in terms of the neoliberal/capitalist context?
Pleurad Xhafa, still from ‘Tireless Worker,’ video, 43min, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
PXh: In the communist regime, the working class was society itself. Although in a fiction, the working class had the most important position in the creation of the ideological dream of communism, while today, in the neoliberal context, the (under)worker is both unrepresented and positioned totally in the service of business owners, to the point that workers are forced to give up their own fundamental rights just in order not to lose their job. The absence, or more accurately the lethargy, of unions is a primary point of concern with regards to the organization of workers to demand their rights. This isn’t something I’m saying; our own Prime Minister said it in television broadcast in Italy, in which—on live TV—he issued a call to Italian businesses to come and invest in Albania, because unions are nonexistent and labor is cheap. [8]
In my work Tireless Worker, tried to show the hierarchical dynamics between the past and the present, the issues I was discussing a bit earlier. Completely by chance, I found out about a factory that produced bunkers [9] under socialism and now produces paving tiles for sidewalks. The terrible working conditions there, and the advanced age of the workers made me feel a duty and responsibility, as an artist, to document this reality, which exists just a few kilometers from the center of Tirana. The work was gradually degrading and deforming these workers both psychologically and physically. What pushed me to continue the project was the life of a particular worker, Haxhi Xhihani, who had worked in this factory since 1973. During the communist regime, he had been decorated by the brigadier of the factory with a ‘Tireless Worker” Medal of Honor, for his contribution to collective work. The painful irony of this event was that after the fall of the communist regime, the brigadier became the owner of the factory, privatizing it in his own name. Currently, Xhihani makes $3.00 a day.
Pleurad Xhafa, still from ‘Tireless Worker,’ video, 43min, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
RI: In several instances, you have played the role of the documenter. How do you see the connection between contemporary art and the genre of ‘documentary’? I’m curious to know if you conceive of your artistic practice in relation to the tradition of realism (beginning in the mid-19th century), or with the tradition of documentary, which began later.
PXh: In nearly all the works I’ve made, the subject or argument that I’ve been interested in developing has in some way determined the language of the medium. When I work with moving images (in film or documentary), I prefer to maintain a position at some distance from the subject. The film Tireless Worker, for example, is significantly influenced by neorealist Italian cinema from the postwar period. The workers in the film aren’t professional actors; they play themselves in the film. The worker Xhihani places his own body in the service of the narration, and through him the viewers become acquainted with the dramatic landscape of contemporary Albania.
Recently, I’ve been in the process of documenting (on video) various protests that take place in Albania. The force of these images derives precisely from the weakness of the voice of the protest. All told, I’ve gathered about 3TB of digital material but I still don’t know exactly how I’ve going to use it. Maybe I won’t ever use it, but maybe after many years it will be valuable material to teach us something about today’s world…
RI: The problems that engaged artists face today in Albania are also problems that other artists throughout the world are facing, whether they are working in other countries in Eastern Europe, or outside this region… Based on to your experience, is there anything that we can learn in general from the situation of artists in Albania? Are there any tactics, any experiences that you believe to be important for contemporary artists everywhere, in the conditions of global neoliberalism?
PXh: I don’t know if there exists a precise formula for how an artist should act, but what I think is most important is the attempt to create platforms for debate, and an insistence on problematizing the conditions in which we live and work, regardless of where or when we live.
[1] Sharra is a village on the southwest outskirts of Tirana. The grave of the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha was moved from the Tirana Cemetery of the Martyrs of the Nation—the large partisan cemetery overlooking Tirana—to the small cemetery in Sharra in 1992. The village is also home to the Sharra landfill. In August of 2016, 17-year-old Ardit Gjoklaj, employee of a private waste-processing company, died in the landfill. His death was seen by many as evidence of the deplorable conditions for workers in Albania, and of the lack of accountability for private companies that the Albanian government has increasingly supported through public-private partnerships. For more on Gjoklaj’s death, see “Ardit Gjoklaj’s Death Continues to Haunt Veliaj,” Exit.al, November 2, 2016, http://www.exit.al/en/2016/11/02/ardit-gjoklajs-death-continues-to-haunt-veliaj/ (accessed January 8, 2017).
[3] The “Movement for the University” (Levizja për Universitetin, in Albanian) is a group of students and activists dedicated to advocating for free and quality public university education in Albania. The group, associated with the Leftist “Political Organization” (Organizata Politike) of students and citizens, aims to combat the ongoing privatization of universities in Albania. It advocates “an idea of the university as a state institution directly financed by state funds, but with an internal organization in which decisions are made by professors and students.” See the Facebook page for the group, here: https://www.facebook.com/Për-Universitetin-651561178215203/?fref=ts (accessed January 4, 2017).
[4] FRESSh, the Forum of Eurosocialist Albanian Youth (Forumi Rinor Eurosocialist Shqiptar) was established in 1992. According to the organization’s website, its goal is “to bring Albanian closer to the European mentality regarding democracy the establishment of the state, as well as European enlightened social democratic ideas more generally. Recently, the organization has used the broad umbrella of “European social-democratic ideas” as a way to draw youth into the current Albanian Socialist Party (Partia Socialiste). See http://fressh.al/fressh/kush-jemi/ (accessed January 6, 2017).
[8] For more on Rama’s claims about the positive aspects of a country without unions, see Vincent van Gerven Oei, “Urban Politics: The Unofficial View of Tirana (87),” Berfrois February 17, 2015, http://www.berfrois.com/2015/02/vincent-w-j-van-gerven-oei-urban-politics/ (accessed January 6, 2017).
[9] Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, Albanian’s socialist dictator Enver Hoxha ordered the construction of concrete domed bunkers throughout the Albanian territory. Approximately 220,100 bunkers were planned, but only about 173,300 were actually built. On the bunkers, see Michael L. Galaty, Sharon R. Stocker, and Charles Watkinson, “The Snake that Bites: The Albanian Experience of Collective Trauma as Reflected in an Evolving Landscape,” The Trauma Controversy: Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Dialogues, ed. Brown Golden, Kristen and Bettina G. Bergo (New York: SUNY Press, 2009), pp. 171-87; Emily Glass, “A Defence Dictated: The Changing Role of Mushroom-Shaped Communist Bunkers in Albania,” paper delivered at the Modern Conflict Archaeology Conference, University of Bristol, 2009, https://mcaconf.com/about/2009-2/; and Alison Reilly, “The Following is a True Story: Fiction, Bunkerization and Cinema in Post-Socialist Albania,” KinoKultura 16 (March 2016), http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/16/reilly.shtml, (accessed January 6, 2017). These bunkers continue to dot Albania’s landscape (although many of them have been removed or gradually covered over by the landscape itself), and they have become one of the most iconic symbols of the paranoia of Hoxha’s regime. The precise statistics on the number of bunkers constructed are drawn from informational texts at the Bunk’Art museum in Tirana, Albania (https://www.facebook.com/BunkArtAlbania/, accessed January 6, 2017).
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-Muzelikewise 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.
A day of celebration in Berat.
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.
Today’s post is the second in a series of posts that will present scans of the historically and critically indispensable publication PamorART, a magazine published by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana. PamorART began publication in 1997, and was a crucial reflection of the artistic and cultural scene in Albania in the late 90s, providing a specialized venue for discussion and critical assessment of the visual arts in the country. This issue contains, among other things, articles on Edi Hila and Kristaq Rama, as well as an insert in English.
The scans of the PamorART magazines are made possible by the tireless efforts of philologist Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, who scanned the issues, and art critic Gëzim Qëndro, who made the issues available to us from his private collection. My deepest thanks go to both of them for making these texts available to us.
Today’s post is the first in a series of posts that will present scans of the historically and critically indispensable publication PamorART, a magazine published by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana. PamorART began publication in 1997, and was a crucial reflection of the artistic and cultural scene in Albania in the late 90s, providing a specialized venue for discussion and critical assessment of the visual arts in the country. The first issue takes up a theme that has seen heated discussion in recent months as well: the Onufri competition and its role in the Albanian arts scene. (Somehow the title of Edi Muka’s article on the subject, ‘Onufri ’97: Impas apo Shpresë?’ [‘Onufri ’97: Impasse or Hope?’] seems to describe the current state of Onufri as well as it might have described Onufri ’97.
The scans of the PamorART magazines are made possible by the tireless efforts of philologist Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, who scanned the issues, and art critic Gëzim Qëndro, who made the issues available to us from his private collection. My deepest thanks go to both of them for making these texts available to us.
Sead Kazanxhiu (b. 1987) is an Albanian Roma artist working in Tirana, Albania. Born in the village of Baltëz, near the city of Fier in central Albania, Kazanxhiu’s work deals with the personal and political aspects of both Albanian and Romani identities. Kazanxhiu works primarily in painting, performance, and installation, and his art explores both his own personal search for cultural identity and the unique sociopolitical situation facing Roma communities in contemporary Albania. He has created installations dealing with Romani struggles for housing stability in Albania, as well as addressing the challenges related to Romani inclusion in political decision-making in the country. Kazanxhiu’s efforts and explorations highlight the diversity of identity in Albania—the artist uses his investigations of his own individual identity as a way to suggest the myriad linguistic, visual, cultural, and historical heritages that characterize modern Albania. I spoke with him in the summer of 2016 about his recent works and his thoughts on the relation between politics and the Albanian art scene in recent years.[1]
Sead Kazanxhiu: This project relates to the idea of the Roma resistance. The idea of the work is to create a discussion, to provoke those people who are working with these projects today, with this ‘resistance,’ if we can call it resistance. We can’t call it resistance because it doesn’t come from the bottom up, but it’s pushed from this middle, from the NGOs. I call them the ‘middle’ because the top is the government and the politicians. That’s why I don’t see a resistance that has the old meaning of the word ‘resistance,’ because today it’s pushed by the NGOs and the politicians.
Raino Isto: It’s still working within the system. You still have to apply for grants, and do projects, and hold activities, and give certificates, and so forth.
S.K.: Even when protests are planned, it doesn’t somehow come directly from the community; it comes from NGOs and donors and so on. Which is not bad, but still, there has to be some way to have continuity. When you resist, when you do something to resist, you have to take it to the end, you can’t stop halfway. That’s why I have a lot of confusion, after doing my research. Sometimes when you read too much, you know, you confuse yourself. That’s what has happened with me now, doing research for this project.
R.I.: When you said before that your were trying to provoke, are you trying to provoke the people in the middle, the NGOs? Or to provoke in general?
S.K.: That’s a good question, because if you say you want to provoke, you have to find a target. But, I think that provocation doesn’t always have to have a single target. For example, I also want to raise the subconscious of the Roma itself, like the grassroots. I mean maybe its difficult to try to do that with this kind of conceptual art, with the symbolic, but we have to try to educate people to understand this kind of communication. So, when I speak about raising the self-confidence or the consciousness of the community, that also means raising the consciousness of those NGOs, because they are part of the community too. So, the society I live in will see what I do, maybe not every day, but they will see, and this is a kind of provoking and challenging, making people see things in a different way, which can also create continuity. Because if I said that the government is my target, I won’t get anywhere…I will just be doing things for them. I will end up in the role of an NGO, trying to get the government’s attention, and then when an NGO gets the government’s attention, it shuts them up with some funds, and that’s it. I don’t know, I’m just trying to understand things first myself, reading and doing research, and then afterwards perhaps spreading them to other people.
R.I.: What do people in the Roma community here in Albania think of your work? Have they had a reaction to it?
S.K.: It is not like there is a constructive reaction. Of course, if they see something, they like it. But the idea is that it has to be beyond liking something, agreeing with something.
If this doesn’t happen with the people who are active for the Roma cause, I’m afraid that it wont happen in the community more broadly either. But, again, I don’t want to repeat myself, but if my work achieves a kind of continuity and a kind of standard—and it doesn’t have to be just me as an artist, there have to also be other artists, musicians, actors, painters, and moviemakers—then this will stimulate peoples’ imagination, seeing different perspectives. And that’s why it’s not only about an individual, because that individual can do his job, but there has to be a kind of ensemble that makes it stronger.
R.I.: So, these are the same paintings I saw when I came before, but before the chairs were empty?
S.K.: Yeah. Sometimes, you, know, when you miss particular things, you have this kind of emptiness. So then you want to put those things in your work. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. But in this case I think it was a good idea [to put the clothes in the paintings] because now viewers wonder about what the owners of the clothes are doing, they might be having sex or whatever, but you think about them. So, in the background, you have the house where they live, and then you have the clothes. It’s the contemporary moment of Adam and Eve. They are in front of the apple, in the central work, and it seems as if they have escaped from this life and they are in the Garden of Eden.
R.I.: We have talked before about colors your use of color. I’m curious what you think about color, given that it is such a popular topic in Albanian art today, in part because of Edi Rama’s promotion of his painted buildings. Before, you mentioned that people tend to think of the Roma as a ‘colorful’ people, in terms of their dress, but that that isn’t really true.
S.K.: There is this traditional saying: don’t respond in the same way that they speak to you. But in this case, I am answering in the same way that they are expecting, giving people the colors they are expecting from a Roma artist. But, being a Roma myself, and having years of experience studying textiles—and my diploma was actually on the traditional Roma way of dressing—I found out from interviews with my family and research that this idea of the exotic and colorful Roma dress is a myth. The reality is simply that each Roma mother or grandmother became a kind of ‘fashion designer’ for their children or grandchildren, making clothes and finding whatever materials they could. In fact, when you see old Roma clothes, they are very simple. In fact, they often just dressed the way people did in that society at that time; it wasn’t as if there was a sharp distinction in the manner of dress. Of course there were particular groups of Roma, like the Gabo Roma, or the Ola in Hungary, that had specific ways of dressing. But it wasn’t really to distinguish themselves as Roma. Of course there were particular groups of Roma, like the Gabor Roma, or the Ola in Hungary, that had specific ways of dressing. But it wasn’t really to distinguish themselves as Roma. For example, the Gabor Roma in Romania dress like the northern Albanians, with the big dress, and the shamia, the scarf. And you can see this in Hungary too. But in Roma villages, there isn’t really a specific way of dressing, like some people imagine in this exoticizing way. So that’s why I decided, ok, if you want colors, I’ll give you colors!
But also, there’s something else. Maybe I’m being too philosophical. It’s also this: we are not victims. The Roma are not victims, but we are seen as victims. And we are brainwashed to think of ourselves as victims. So when I paint something from history, I don’t want to emphasize victimhood, I want to give it life.
R.I.: So that it doesn’t just appear mournful.
S.K.: Yes.
R.I.: Do you choose the colors just based on what you have, or what paints you can find? Or do you plan out the colors and then look for specific paints to create them?
S.K.: That’s a good question. I can’t say that I plan much. I usually just look at what I have. Sometimes I plan that, for example, I want to work with a particular color, like brown, and I will start with that. But usually it’s just: I find it, I like it, I use it.
Sead Kazanxhiu, 8 për 8 Prillin [8 for the 8th of April], 2013, installation at the entrance to Albanian Parliament. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.R.I.: I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about your piece 8 për 8 Prillin [8 for the 8th of April].[2] I know we talked about it before, but I think it is an important piece.
S.K.: The installation 8 for the 8th of April was done in 2013, and it was a project that I did as part of a fellowship that I had that year. The project was to block the entrance of the Albanian Parliament with these big tractor wheels painted with the colors of the Roma flag [red, green, and blue]. There was this funny coincidence, because the tires had ‘Goodyear’ written on them, so it was like the culmination of a ‘good year’. It was a good experience, because the installation gave me the opportunity to understand how things were working with the involvement of Roma in public institutions, because it was the year of the ‘Roma Decade.’[3] I wanted to do something in relation to this, and it turned out that the best way to do it was with an installation—because the protests here only work if you are a political party. You have to be a political party to have enough people to make a protest matter, but then it still doesn’t work because then the party is protesting, not the people. And that’s why I chose to go and install these eight big tractor wheels at the entrance of the Albanian Parliament. It was a way of symbolically blocking them—not really making their lives difficult, because you could just pass around them without any problem. I wanted to kind of exaggerate the issue, to show them that, okay, we Roma may be relatively small in number, but the issue of Roma involvement isn’t a small one. It can’t be ignored. There was this sign, that the government put up, for the Roma Decade, and they were supposed to actually do something, but they didn’t. I’ll tell you about it: there were all these activities and so forth, since it was the official International Romani Day, which is why I called it 8 for the 8th of April, because of the importance of that day. The installation was supposed to stay there for the whole day, but the police came—just the way they normally do, just to show up and make you feel pressure.
R.I.: How many police came?
S.K.: It was a minibus with four or five police, something like that. One of them, he was kind of the head of the group, and I was trying to complain to him. He was smart, trying to figure out how to negotiate with me. One of the other ones was like, ‘Come on! We left a very important operation just because of this garbage you put here in front of the Parliament! You have to move them.’ I told him, ‘I can’t move them.’ Then I called someone else who was in charge of organizing activities related to the International Romani Day, and they came, but the police still wanted us to move the installation, so I told them: ‘I won’t move them until I get an interview. This is the only way I’ll move them.’ The police said, ‘Okay, but can you just move them to the footpath that runs perpendicular to the entrance to Parliament?’ I said, ‘No, I can’t move them,’ so they said okay. I got an interview, which was good because it opened up the work to a bigger audience. Then, this other policeman, who had been standing there very straight and stern, he helped me move the wheels over to the footpath. So that’s the story of the 8 for the 8th of April installation. But I mean, you can do anything here with art, but the only feedback you’ll get is from a few artists or professors. For example, one of my professors, Vladimir Myrtezaj, he’s a friend of Edi Rama’s, he told me ‘Bravo!’ because it was the first installation done in the entrance of the Albanian Parliament. That was really the only feedback I got, and somehow for me it didn’t feel like I really accomplished something. But it was good because I’ve been able to continue this way of exhibiting. After that, I made another exhibition, with 2,500 small houses installed in front of the Prime Minister’s building (one of the iterations of Shtepizeza [Little Houses], 2014).[4]
R.I.: Yes, I’ve seen the photographs of this installation.
S.K.: Because I believe we don’t have to just try once and then give up, you have to create a kind of continuity. I mean, at the moment, I’m alone in this—because there’s another Roma artist from Albania who lives in the UK, but he isn’t very involved here in Albania—but I think in the future, there will be other artists who will continue in this way. Maybe not exactly like I do, but in other ways.
R.I.: When you do these installations, do you have friends help you? For example, to move the tires, or to install the small houses?
S.K.: I mean, for 8 for the 8th of April, there were some friends and artists, but mostly I was alone, and I had to call some people to help me. But people came, some friends and some people who were just passing by, sometimes ignoring it, like always happens. But at the protest that I did about housing, the installation in front of the Prime Minister’s building, there were some activists and some members of the community who had problems with housing. But not many people. Because they don’t really believe that as a single person, using art, you can change something.
Sead Kazanxhiu, Shtepizeza [Little Houses], 2014, installation. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.R.I.: One of the things that I liked about the installation of Shtepizeza was that, in the photographs, it looked visually interesting and compelling. I
Sead Kazanxhiu, Shtepizeza [Little Houses], 2014, installation. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.think this is one of the possibilities of these kinds of works, because of course as you said, sometimes people don’t come, or they just ignore it in the moment, but also afterwards the event is preserved. I think this is important especially with the houses, because they were so small, but in photographs the smallness of the houses against the massiveness of the Prime Minister’s building makes a strong statement after the fact, in the photos.
S.K.: Yeah. You know what was interesting about the installation about housing: the same policeman came, the guy who came to 8 for the 8th of April, and we became like friends. My idea, originally, was to put them not on the sidewalk but on the stairs of the Prime Ministerial building, but it wasn’t possible. I was trying to resist a little bit, but they said it wasn’t an option, so we decided to put them on the sidewalk instead. We just kind of put them in a pile.
Sead Kazanxhiu, Shtepizeza installed in from the Prime Minister’s building in Tirana, Albania, 2014. Photo from Gazeta Shqip.
R.I.: That is funny that it was the same police officer.
S.K.: Yeah. And my cousin, who is always organizing protests, now he knows her and when he sees her, he’s like, ‘Oh, you came again!’
R.I.: Do you thinks that’s a good thing, even though it might not completely change his mind, that at an individual level there is this one person who is comes from the side of authority but now he is personally involved because he knows the people who are protesting?
S.K.: Yes, I think this is good, because when people see that you ask for something, and you don’t retreat from that position, they see that you are sure what you are asking for. And I think that that can influence—maybe not too much—but it can influence an individual person. Because they see that these people are taking it seriously, that it’s not just about making a show or whatever. That these people are seriously suffering, and that’s why they are doing it. And then you can build a kind of trust, with the authorities or whoever. Then, if the authorities understand that, they can see that maybe something really has to be done. That’s why I believe in trying to establish continuity.
Sead Kazanxhiu, A Choice to Be Made, A Price to Be Paid, 2015, performance. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.
R.I.: I would also like to talk about your performance A Choice to Be Made, A Price to Be Paid [2015].[5] I think you did it once at Tulla Cultural Center in Tirana and once somewhere else. You’ve done it at least twice?
S.K.: The performance was only done once publicly, at Tulla. It tried to record the performance here in my studio, to document it, but the space wasn’t good, so I asked the guys from Miza Gallery if I could film it there. But at Tulla was the first time it was performed for the public. The idea of this ‘Romani phuv’ [‘Romani land’] performance also came from thinking about housing, but also from living in a place where even though you are an Albanian citizen, the other side might not see you as being Albanian. Because people will ask about your story, and it will come out that you aren’t denbabaden Albanian [having a long Albanian heritage]. Even if you are a person whose family has been here for centuries, still they won’t see you as Albanian. And the Romani phuv as an idea came from reading some books by Nicolae Gheorghe, he’s a sociologist from Romania. I was inspired by what he says when he talks about the politics surrounding Roma issues: he says ‘there’s a choice to be made and a price to be paid.’ When you make a choice, of course there’s something you have to agree to. So that’s why I took this as the title of the performance. And I also wanted to provoke discussion about the issue of a territory. I believe, from my own experience as a Roma activist, that Roma never fight for their own land. That concept doesn’t exist for us. Of course, we Roma fight in other countries, like in Albania—our great grandfathers and grandfathers contributed to the fight for Albania, but they weren’t fighting on behalf of the Roma issue or anything. They were fighting because they were in this country and saw themselves as part of this country. So bringing the ‘Romani land’ into the discussion—if you bring this up in the European parliament, there will be a big mess, of course, because there are people who are afraid to speak about this, even if they think about it. For example, if we go further back to 1971, to the first World Romani Congress, people like Faik Abdi, Slobodan Berberski, and many other Roma activists wanted to speak about a Romani land. One of the proposals was Šutka [Šuto Orizari], which is a municipality in Macedonia populated by Roma, the mayor there now is a Roma. Faik Abdi was the first Roma MP in the Macedonian Parliament. This kind of discussion happened back at that time; now, Grattan Puxon and a few others write about this, but it is less discussed. So I wanted to raise this issue to show that we don’t have to be afraid to speak about things—it’s not that I want some kind of ‘Roma territory,’ but I want to provoke people in the Roma community as well to talk about this. The idea of moving around all the time, this is something that people do for economical, or social, or maybe even political reasons. If you read about how Roma first came to Europe, they were pushed from one place to another; for example in the Netherlands, at one time there was a practice that if you could kill a Roma, you would get a free beer. So the movement of the Roma is something driven as much by historical conditions as anything else; it’s not just some exotic practice. But this issue of a ‘Romani land’ is something that many Roma activists are afraid to talk about, but me—I’m not part of an NGO, so I can use my ‘freedom of speech and express my thoughts and ideas about it. I want to raise this issue of what it feels like to have your own land. For example in Baltëz, my village, the Roma have their own land.
There’s another thing I wanted to say about the performance. The kind of mud that I used in the performance, it’s a special kind of mud, it has a story, especially in the Roma communities. Nowadays it’s used for medicinal purposes, but before these shops for that kind of stuff existed, and it was difficult to find this mud. The Roma call it shishik, in Albanian they call it baltë krëri. People used it to wash their hair, and to wash their bodies. But when I did an interview with some old Roma women, they told me that there were some rules about going and taking this kind of mud. You couldn’t live near the mud, because if you lived near it, it would get polluted. So the people lived far away from it, and only the old women knew how to go and get the mud. When the women would go to gather the mud, they would take food with them because it was a long way, but you couldn’t eat immediately before taking the mud, because this would contaminate you. And you had to wash yourself before gathering the mud, in case you had lice or something. This was the paradox that was funny and interesting to me: you also had to wash your hands before taking the mud. So: they would go early in the morning to gather the mud, they wouldn’t eat before gathering it, and they would wash their hands before touching it. Which is funny because now in Albania we have this word baltosje [making muddy or dirty], but in this tradition, mud is actually cleaner than people think! So that’s why, in this performance, I used this shishik, because it’s a very intimate material, and I believe it’s cleaner than what politicians mean when they talk about baltosje. In fact, baltosje can clean you!
R.I.: So, this mud comes from a swamp, or near a river?
S.K.: You can find this kind of mud in the hills, I think, and near rivers, I don’t know exactly how they find it. But it’s not clay like you would use for terracotta or something. It’s different. Also, in older times, women would eat this mud when they were pregnant; this was crazy to me! And they would also use it to put on children, like a cream.
R.I.: When they go to find the clay, it’s soft? I ask because the clay you used in the performance is hard, and you were breaking it up.
S.K.: Yeah, the clay has a kind of gray color, but it’s also hard and you need to soften it with warm water; this is what they did to prepare it.
R.I.: Like you did.
S.K.: Yes, that’s why I did it.
Sead Kazanxhiu, A Choice to Be Made, A Price to Be Paid, 2015, performance. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.
R.I.: Is this practice something that is regionally unique, or is it a practice that exists outside of Albania too?
S.K.: All the Roma who lived in the villages were using this mud. They all knew about it, if you go to Roskovec, if you go to Levan, or to Baltëz—my village—or to Morava in Berat and Grabian in Lushnja…I really regret it because my father’s uncle’s wife was the expert on this mud, and I wanted to do an interview with her. It would have made her very happy—because my father also told me, when the women would put shishik in their hair, it made the hair very beautiful because the clay made it healthy. I wanted to do an interview with her because she was very old, and had cooked her whole life using fire, because the family was very poor, and I wanted to go with her when she went to collect the shishik. Because I thought it would remind her of that time. But when I went to the village, my family told me that she had died, and I thought ‘what a loss!’ However, there are still other women who know how to gather this mud. It’s also interesting because the name of our village is ‘Baltëz.’[6] I don’t know how it got that name.
Sead Kazanxhiu, A Choice to Be Made, A Price to Be Paid, 2015, performance. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.
R.I.: How old is it as a village?
S.K.: I don’t know exactly how old it is. Baltëz was like forestland before, but somehow they made it flat. The Roma, the Vlah, the xoraxaja or horahaja (muslim Albanians) and Dasa (the christian Albanians) were the first to live there. Later, people of Bosnian origin and Kosovars came too. In Baltëz, the Roma were in a place called Matkëz, it’s known for this manë [mulberry] tree, with those small fruit; it’s the tree of the Roma.
R.I.: As an artist, do you feel like you have something like a duty towards a community, either broadly or narrowly construed, or do you just feel like it’s something you’ve chosen, but you don’t feel compelled by a community?
S.K.: Of course, I feel a kind of duty because I am a part of this community. This is my artist’s statement: I am an Albanian Romani artist, and I have to dig through my identity and contribute to where I belong, through promoting my culture, through raising my voice about things that are happening in my own way, in a visual way. For example, I’m not a musician, so I can’t speak as a musician, but for example African American musicians made a great contribution to the culture in America. I cannot trust someone—a painter, a moviemaker, or an artist—who doesn’t also live what he does. So I stand by what I believe in. It doesn’t matter, even if people don’t think I’m an artist it doesn’t matter to me. I can call myself just a worker or a politician, because I believe that art is also politics. I think that we can use art to influence politics. I’m not talking about the art that is used by politicians.
R.I.: Since we’ve come to this issue of art and politics, what do you think about the relationship of art and politics in Albania today? Because some people say that there is a big problem now because art is being used so much to promote politics, that it’s more difficult to be an artist working in relation to politics. Because any art that you do might come to be related to or used by politicians for their own purposes. So I’m curious what you think about this.
S.K.: I don’t know if you saw this, but at CEU [Central European University] recently there was this discussion about politics and art, called something like ‘Why Politicians Hate Artists.’[7] They were saying that it’s not that politicians hate art, it’s that they only promote that kind of art that they think is part of ‘their vision’. So automatically, the other artists won’t be included. Here in Albania, it’s like that: politicians don’t hate artists; they promote that kind of art that promotes their view. Of course, the government can pretend to give you a stage to speak about whatever you want, but still you won’t actually have that possibility, because you will face a compromise. As we spoke about before, if I were to do a show at the COD [Center for Openness and Dialogue],[8] the only condition for me would be that I wouldn’t tell them beforehand what I would exhibit. I would just say, ‘I agree to make an exhibition here.’ But this couldn’t happen, because there is a curator there, and this necessarily introduces the influence of politics in the space. So, that means that as an artist, you have to make a compromise, because you will have to choose which works to exhibit there with the curator. They control this through talking about the necessity of ‘respecting the quality of the space’ and so forth, but it’s also a way of letting them prevent you from exhibiting anything they don’t want you to exhibit. And politicians hide behind this notion that ‘there has to be quality art, and we must respect standards.’ This creates this idea that there is competition for quality, but that’s not really true. Here in Albania, in the art scene, there isn’t really competition; there are friendships and connections between people, but not competition. I mean, this viewpoint is questionable, but I don’t believe there is competition. They create the idea that there is, saying, ‘oh yes, you must apply for this and that, and it will be reviewed carefully,’ but it doesn’t really come down to a competition.
R.I.: Now that we are talking about exhibiting works, I wonder if you think that in Albania there is something more effective about works that occupy public space, like the small houses or the tires in front of the Parliament. Do you think that there’s something more effective about artworks in public space than artworks shown in a kind of ‘white-box’ gallery?
S. K.: I’m for both sides. But, in the case of Albania—and I came back to Albania because I wanted to contribute something here, because I’m still young, because I still believe that things can be changed—if we talk about wanting to change the Albania art scene, we have to go outside the gallery. When we do things in a gallery, there is only a small circle of people who come. I don’t want to just do exhibitions like that; we have to go to the public, and the public is on the street, or in institutional buildings, outside them. Until now, we artists have kind of created a space between the public and artworks, putting them in a gallery. But, the gallery can only stay in one place; it can only be this one thing in one place, and many people won’t come to galleries. If you do works in public space, you can catch both the government and the public, speak to both of these audiences. It’s also a way of protesting. I think you can’t just make art for the people who are educated, who read a lot. You also have to make it for the majority. In Albania, it’s the right moment to use more public art. In many countries, it has become a normal thing, but here not so much. Many Albanian artists still like this idea of the gallery. Why? Because it seems difficult to exhibit in galleries here, because there are so few, so artists want to push to do this. When something is difficult, you want to challenge yourself to do it. But you forget that you could challenge yourself just as much exhibiting in an outside space. Even paintings—there are ways to exhibit paintings in public space. I mean, I’m not a street artist; it’s not just about street art. It’s about showing your thoughts not only to a small group, but to a larger group as well. Even if they just pass by, and ignore it, at least you are trying.
We have this kind of thinking that galleries are good, that they are good for the culture of the city, but I think that art needs more than galleries. When I have exhibited in galleries, people came who knew about art and the exhibitions. No one came who didn’t already know about these things. But when I exhibited in public spaces, like the Parliament entrance or the street in front of the Prime Ministerial building, there were also people who were totally ignorant about art that came up, and asked questions, and touched the sculptures. These weren’t the people that you think ‘oh, I want this person to come to my exhibition’—because if you exhibit in a gallery, that’s how you think, like ‘ah, the ambassador or whoever came to my exhibition!’ And I’m not interested in that kind of thinking anymore.
R.I.: Have you ever done anything with public spaces besides those in Tirana?
S.K.: Yes, before I went to Budapest, I was in Fier and I did this project with recycling, and installation about recycling. I did it in three different cities: in Korça, in Fier, and in Durrës. I got together with two other artists who finished the academy with me, and we gathered people from the communities and using recycled materials we made installations. In Korça it was good because it coincided with the Korça Beer Festival, so lots of people saw it. In Fier we did the same thing; we did this workshop with young kids and then did these installations. The theme was about the Roma community contributing to the environment in Albania. It was this way of showing that we contribute something to the culture and the environment in this country. In Durrës when we did it, we exhibited them in this open are where the partisan monument is. It was very interesting because we were just trying to give the community a way to think about their space, and they made this installation using newspapers, they made a table and a chair from the papers. It was a kind of symbolic recycling, like the way the news comes in from places, and gets processed by people, and then produces something new. It was the same with the newspapers: they got processed into something new.
[1] This interview was conducted in the artist’s studio in Tirana, on 20 June 2016. The interview was conducted in English; the present transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
[6] The word ‘baltë’ in Albania means mud or clay.
[7] See “Why Do Governments Hate Artists?”, a short article discussing one of the conversations that took place as part of CEU’s School of Public Policy’s annual conference (this year entitled The View from Here//Artists and Public Policy), https://spp.ceu.edu/article/2016-06-16/why-do-governments-hate-artists (accessed 25 July 2006).
[8] The COD is a multipurpose center opened last year in the first floor of Albania’s prime ministerial building. It includes an exhibition space, as well as a library and a space for video projection. See the Center’s website, http://cod.al (accessed 25 July 2016). The space has generated controversy in discussions of contemporary Albanian culture. The government claims that it represents a space for artistic ‘dialogue,’ including critique of the current political leaders in the country (such as Prime Minister Edi Rama, himself an artist). However, others note that the space is essentially used as ‘artwashing’ by politicians, and does not actually present a space for substantive critique.
Today’s blog post is another departure from the typically Albanian-centered content on this blog. The post contains a scan of Mircea Grozdea’s Arta monumentală contemporană [ContemporaryMonumental Art] (1987), an album documenting trends in socialist Romanian monumental art in a variety of media, including sculpture, tapestry, and mosaic. Grozdea (also the author of Arta monumentală în România socialistă [Monumental Art in Socialist Romania] (1973), previously presented here) provides an overview of the developments of monumental art in Romania, including information on the major artists and on the institutional framework for the production of the monuments (the introduction is in Romanian, but an overview in English—“Monuments: Insignia of an Epoch”—follows the illustrations).
![Sead Kazanxhiu, 8 për 8 Prillin [8 for the 8th of April], 2013, installation at the entrance to Albanian Parliament. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.](https://afterart.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/8-per-8.jpg)
![Sead Kazanxhiu, Shtepizeza [Little Houses], 2014, installation. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.](https://afterart.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/shpepizeza.jpg)
![Sead Kazanxhiu, Shtepizeza [Little Houses], 2014, installation. Copyright Sead Kazanxhiu. Image courtesy of the artist.](https://afterart.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/shtepizeza-2.jpg)
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