For seven years now I have lived in Albania. I have seen ambassadors and foreign representatives come and go. And they all, so they say, share this same ideal: to make Albania a better place.
Read MoreOn November 19, Prime Minister Edi Rama, Minister of Interior Affairs Saimir Tahiri, and media entrepreneur Carlo Bollino opened Bunk’Art 2, an exhibition space managed by the latter one.
Read MoreIn October 2015, Endri Fuga, former co-founder of Mjaft and Propaganda Boss at the Office of Prime Minister Edi Rama announced the launch of a new governmental website, transparenca.al. According to Fuga, this “transparency website,” paid with taxpayers’ money, has as its sole purpose to deny “the slander of the opposition” and “the lies of certain media outlets.”
Read MoreSkënderbeg Square has once again become a giant building site in order to be transformed into a nationalist underground parking lot.
Read MoreEdi Rama, Blue Lunetta, public intervention, Mantua, Italy (2016). by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Albania and Mantua, the latter a provincial city in northern Italy, the former a country still somehow pretending to be EU-worthy. No one would ever think that these two geographical entities would have any meaningful relation with each other. Yet…
Read MoreThe remainders of a socialist realist bas-relief on a heap of former Qemal Stafa Stadium debris. Photo from Edi Rama’s Facebook. by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei For the last two months, I have been woken every day by workmen below my apartment building, viciously attempting to renovate the kindergarten and elementary school behind it,…
Read MoreIn the wake of the Brexit it is perhaps time to look at what Tory leadership contender and Brutus impersonator Michael Gove termed “The Albanian Option.”
Read MoreAfter experiencing last year, as a project assistant for Armando Lulaj’s “Albanian Trilogy”, the reactionary forces of the Ministry of Culture and the exploitative environment of the Venice Biennale, including one of the most scandalously incompetent curators that I ever met.
Read MoreKristi Pinderi (Pro LGBT), then opposition leader now PM Edi Rama, and Xheni Karaj (Aleanca LGBT) in better times (2013) by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Another year, another International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), another article that takes stock of the progress regarding LGBT rights in Albania. Spoiler alert: It ain’t pretty. When last year I…
Read MoreDuring his election campaign in 2015, pathological lier – excuse me, “socialist” crown prince and Mayor of Tirana – Erion Veliaj promised that he would put an end to the “betonization” of Tirana
Read MoreOn January 12, 2016, late at night, I was called on my Albanian telephone by an unknown Italian number. It turned out to be Lorenza Baroncelli, Consultant for Urban and Cultural Strategies to Prime Minister Edi Rama and project manager at the Serpentine Gallery of Hans Ulrich Obrist, another art-milieu endorser of a regime that is slowly suffocating in its own self-importance.
Read MoreMonfort’s project of the “new fiction state” of Balkanland reminded me of the Scientology initiative to found a state in the Balkans under the name of Bulgravia in the 1990s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Read MoreI have always been interested in what other foreigners write, imagine, or fantasize about Albania, to offset my own ramblings.
Read MoreOnce upon a time a young man ventured to hold an exhibition in a museum. He offered the museum a curator, well-known artists, and a bag of foreign money.
Read MoreSometimes one can feel disgust, revolt, despair. To be confronted with a situation that seems by any standard beyond reason, beyond purpose, where one looks into the toothless, rotting mouth of a political and economical system.
Read MoreThe militarization of the Albania territory that this bunker appears to imply is, at same time, a rather ominous reflection of the growing militarization of the entire EU in response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind with the most recent fad in international politics, has been profiling itself as a country of multicultural and multireligious tolerance.
Read MoreA bit over a year ago, while documenting the partisan monuments from the Albanian communist period, I got a phone call from the Ministry of Culture: whether I can send them a list of the twenty most important monuments to restore.
Read MoreEdi Rama must be a frustrated man. Frustrated by the provincial tastelessness of the director he chose for the National Gallery of Arts. Frustrated by the utter lack of vision of his Minister of Culture.
Read MoreDuring the last few weeks, the overall silence, or, at most, one-sided coverage of the Albanian media vis-à-vis the national economic situation in relation to Greece’s was contrasted by an echo chamber of “regular” EU media chastising Greece’s “bad behavior” and empty calls to “get your act together.”
Read More
