Albania Today - The Time of Ironic Optimism

by Edi Muka, Tirana

Albania seems bound to existing as a no man's land, a place on the border, a site of migration : shelter for the refugees from Kosovo, and point of no return for the escape towards the Western myth. While the whole world talks about globalization, global and local villages and new nationlism, Albania faces every day the wounds of nomadism and deterioration, experiencing the real meaning and pain of new criticism buzzwords. Albania lives the tragedy of distance : its citizens are close to everything and everyone (NATO, Onu, Italy, the East... ), yet they are forced to leave their homeland, and rely only on the image of a future which never happens. Escape or hope : these are the ways to picture a better tomorrow.

This precarious equilibrium, this hybrid mix of feelings, of hope and frustration, produce a cynical optimism, which permeates most of the national culture and art.

Albanian artists are walking a tightrope stretched between tragedy and comedy, ironic adherence to the brutality of daily life. Reflecting the tragedy of the present, while trying to escape from it this is the meaning of Albanian ironic optimism, which seems to be the only way out of the anxiety of history. Being an artist in Albania means coming to terms with utopia, with an image of the future ; nonetheless Albanian artists refuse the myth of progress (which was a central to the aesthetics of Social Realism). They have learned to corrode the surface of utopia with the acid of irony and nonsense.

All the artists in this exhibition respond to this sensibility, each one according to his or her personal strategy : having experience Diaspora and the fall of political and social powers, Albania could never go back to a unitary movement. It's in the variety of media, of stylistic and emotional tones that dwells the richness of Albanian art in the context of the art world. This exhibition does not promote a movement nor, nor a generational manifesto : it aspires to show the variety and fragmentation of a situation wich is still moving and defying unity, thanks to the combination of autobiography and violence, hyperstylism and infantilism.

It doesn't really matter if we don't form a group, a solid coalition : after the fall of walls and ideologies, Albania has learnt not to trust unity and systems. We prefer to walk along interrupted paths, accepting heterogeneity and diversity as the only reliable truth.

Albanian art doesn't provide a thesis, for it works on hypotheses of subjectivity and diversity, which defies the stereotypes of a new art form a "marginal and peripheral culture" as the curators from the global market like to put it. To escape from this form of cannibalism, Sislej Xhafa will take the viewers on a tour through the city of Venice : like some sort of bizarre tour guide, Xhafa will not describe the beauty of the bayou : he will try to corrode the myth of the city. It is a role game, in which the figure of the outsider and immigrant renegade finally attacks and judges the West using its own weapons. Xhafa reverses the condescending glance that tourists and colonizers have been throwing on marginal cultures : finally we can question the classical Western taste.

Lala Meredith-Vula uses a similar strategy, adopting the positive, documentary glance of Western ethnographic photography. Transforming men into objects, anthropology claims to be the study of the Other. Lala Meredith-Vula undermines this assumption and uses the very same instruments of anthropological analysis to describe her own Kosova culture, working on the distance between empathy and the cold glance of documentation.

Albanian art dwells on this distance, half way between power and straight criticism : Albanian artists have turned fragmentation and heterogeneity into a form of strength and subversion. They live on strategies as precarious as our situation in the face of history.

AlbMuzika.Com