Albanian Trilogy: A Series of Devious Stratagems

Combining evocation and documentation, the project concentrates on a historic-political phase that was extremely important for the building of an identity that was not just Albanian but international. On display are three videos and archival materials, as well as an enormous whale’s skeleton, which is both protagonist and silent witness—an incarnation of the giant-Leviathan, the Hobbesian principle of sovereignty.

For Armando Lulaj (b. 1980, Tirana) Albanian Trilogy represents the conclusion of many years of research into the period of the Cold War in Albania and, in particular, on the relative themes of collective memory and historic experience, brought together in a film trilogy in which three mythical fetishes symbolize sea, air and land.

The first work in this series is It Wears as It Grows (2011), the second piece of the trilogy is the well-known project NEVER (2012), while the third video, Recapitulation (2015) was created specifically for the 2015 Venice Biennale. Lulaj’s work plays, above all, on the lapses in history: as the curator, Marco Scotini, states: “it reveals a friable terrain where one expects to find potent and unmovable representations.”

In Albanian Trilogy, Lulaj’s artistic research into the specters of socialism and Scotini’s curatorial research on the politics of memory arrive at an important common result.

The publication, in the form of a historical atlas, published by Sternberg Press and designed by Dallas (dallasdallas.xyz), is seen as an extension of the exhibition and includes contributions by Boris Groys, Hou Hanru, Armando Lulaj, Elidor Mëhilli, Edi Muka and Jonida Gashi, edited by Marco Scotini.

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