This is a program installed in the former vila of Albanian Communist ditactor Enver Hoxha during the 3 month artist residency in Art Explora * Vila 31, Tirana, Albania
The artist found a hand-drawn map titled Map of the Distribution of Agricultural Crops in Albania and decided to investigate more about this map and figure out who made it and why. She went to Prof. Edvin Zhllima from Agricultural University of Tirana. During their conversation, she learned that this is likely a map of 26 districts made by a 12th-grade high school student during the communist regime, as part of a school assignment, possibly for a geolography class. It is missing the numbers and only includes pie charts. The use of lines suggests that the student was copying a map from the Statistical Yearbook of Agriculture between the 1960s and 1980s. This student was probably in their final year of high school, according to Prof. Edvin Zhllima, because that was when teachers started allowing students to write in inconsistent letters, due to the heavy school workload.
Using the data of the map as a guide, the artist invites participate collectively distributes the crops in the central installation, arranged in the shape of Albanian territory. The audience is invited to imagine a future in which a possible field of sunflowers sterms. In doing so, they collectively carry forward the meaning of an assignment that may have started by a 12th-grade student.
In the same room, the 36 Albanian alphabet is placed on the wall, with 36 objects corresponding to each letter. The audience is invited to exchange an object according to the dialect of Albanian they speak, whether Tosk or Gheg. This action intervenes in the tradition of linguistic standardization established by the 1972 Orthography Congress.
The 2.5 min short film shown on the television placed inside the dictator’s elevator is reconfigured from propaganda footage produced during Albania’s communist regime. It follows a group of scientists who have leased a lemon orchard to conduct a series of secret experiments.
The 20 min short film projected in the artist’s studio is a film where the protagonist wakes up in Tirana in 1973 and faces a series of survival dilemmas and decisions. The film reconfigures archival propaganda footage from Albania’s communist regime alongside sequences from Mao’s China. The pictorial information is reiterated as a dilation of time, where an object such as a bottle of Maotai liquor becomes a thread connecting different times and spaces. With each return, the footage takes on a new function, at times presented as it is, at other times redirecting attention to a detail that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Outside this room, a Tirana's local merchant is invited to sell fruits and vegetables. What they offer, oranges, lemons, and other produce, whose meaning is defined by the surrounding installations. Visitors are encouraged to purchase according to their needs or their wish to take home a piece of art.
One orange tree is planted in the garden, and the other one is placed in the swimming pool, which turns it into a social space.
At night it turns into a DJ set-up.
Photo: Atdhe Mulla & Blerta Kambo & Wandrille Potez