The exhibition stems from some news dating back to just a few years ago about the discovery in the warehouses of the Albanian State Archives of two sacks bearing the label “Correspondence of Italian citizens in Albania.”
TIRANA, April 2 – Tracing the fate of some 24,000 Italians who were trapped in Albania after World War II, two Albanian artists based in Italy have created a video installation which is being showcased at Rome’s MAXXI national museum of 21st century art.
The outcome of the collaboration between Adrian Paci, who is among the most interesting artists in Italy, and Roland Sejko, a director, winner of a David di Donatello award with the documentary “Anija – La Nave” on the immigration of Albanians to Italy in the early 1990s, the exhibition named “Sue Proprie Mani,” is a reflection on the theme of being uprooted and the forced separation from one’s homeland, on history read through the dramatic subjective experience, inspired by a little-known event that took place in postwar Italy, organizers say.
Curated by Cristiana Perrella, the exhibition stems from some news dating back to just a few years ago about the discovery in the warehouses of the Albanian State Archives of two sacks bearing the label “Correspondence of Italian citizens in Albania.” Hundreds of letters, mostly written between 1945 and 1946, by the Italians who, at the end of the Second World War, were in Albania awaiting repatriation, and by their relatives in Italy.
“Dear mother, three years have already gone by since we last saw each other, and sixteen months since I last received your news. We’ll never know when we’ll be repatriated, if they will indeed repatriate us…” reads a letter that never reached their destination.
“Dear father, I heard the bombing…” “After months and months since I last had your news about your arrival, I can no longer hide the truth, your father passed away eight months ago.”
These are pieces of the lives of the Italians who stayed in Albania at the end of 1944, about 24,000 of them, including former soldiers, workers, doctors, traders, engineers, who arrived during the Italian occupation, and who, at the end of the war with Enver Hoxha’s rise to power, ended up being trapped there unable to return home, pawns in a political game that would last until 1949, when Italy and Albania established diplomatic relations.
Filmed in the former palace of King Zog in Durres, Sue Proprie Mani is a video installation on five huge screens, in each of which the camera, with a very slow movement, seeks, discovers and caresses six characters. “They are ambiguous presences, dressed in period clothes, each one holding a letter. Perhaps addressees, perhaps senders, perhaps only witnesses, they appear and disappear before our gaze, while in the background we can hear fragments of those unread letters,” says the curator.
“Sue Proprie Mani” is a work that brings to light a true story, elaborating its emotional and historical weight, expressing an exploration of a universal nature on the theme of loss, lack of communication, the eruption of historic events in personal fates. Along with the video installation prints of the letters are exhibited as well: an illegible but at the same time eloquent map made up of the traces of an interrupted communication.
The exhibition will remain open from April 2 to June 7.
