TIRANA, June 23 – Albania-based Italian photographer Antonio Fantasia has captured the country’s abandoned communist sites in a nigh journey through Albania in a bid both to restore the collective and historical memory connected to these sites and to rethink and reimage them as a cultural landscape and a source for local development.
“This is a night journey through Albania along those places that once were symbols of an oppressive regime and today are instead the emblem of the hard time Albania is having in dealing with its own past,” says the artist.
For 45 years until the early 1990s, Albania was Europe’s most isolated country under late Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha who built labor camps and prisons to persecute his opponents and banned religion.
“In Albania the communist past is largely ignored. But it still exists in people’s memories and minds, through fears and injustices gone unpunished. This past is only omitted, removed from the daylight, the light of consciousness. Sometimes though, it comes back at night, to haunt its survivors,” says the artist.
The journey showcased at Tirana’s Zeta art gallery combines photography with oral testimonies of people who experienced these particular places during the communist period, or who are today engaged in adaptive reuse projects.
“These ruins of a recently collapsed political system ‘forbidden zones’ whose past is still visible can be explored by artists, planners, architects, local community representatives and activists as sites for public art, cultural reclamation, tourism, local handicraft production and other adaptive reuse,” says the artist.
Both military tunnels and bunkers built during the communist era are attracting more and more attention in Albania’s tourism industry as legacy of the 45-year communist regime led by late Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha who had a phobia about a possible foreign invasion and fortified Albania with tunnels and some 700,000 bunkers.
The “Night of a regime” exhibition will be open at the Zeta art gallery from June 28 to July 9.
