les presses du réel

Albanian TrilogyA Series of Devious Stratagems

Armando Lulaj - Albanian Trilogy
This catalogue-reader accompanies Armando Lulaj's project for the Albanian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. A time capsule of the country's past, presenting strange memorabilia and trophies that tread the line between fact and fiction.
Armando Lulaj's exhibition combines evocation and documentation, and concentrates on a historic-political phase that was extremely important for building an identity that was not just Albanian but also 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. Parallel to the exhibition, this collection of essays, film stills, and original and archival photographs ruminates on communism's mechanisms of power and socializing myths through the lens of Albania's geopolitical situation. The publication in turn offers another process of mythologizing.
Curator Marco Scotini's essay overviews Lulaj's political task and his use of unusual emblematic forms to represent one of the most internationally isolated political states of former Eastern Europe. Historian Elidor Mëhilli's text offers a history of the Communist Party of Albania, acknowledging that the mechanism of propaganda worked best when it did not entirely erase the record, but selectively altered it. Boris Groys further enriches the discussion by expanding the relationship of the Albanian Trilogy to the local situation of Albania to view the communist project as a model for society very much cultivated in relation to the outside world, the “West,” as another mythology. A conversation between Hou Hanru and Armando Lulaj, along with Edi Muki's reading of the trilogy, focuses on the methods of historical reconstruction as cross-disciplinary and located between the role of the artist and the social archaeologist. A film analysis by Jonida Gashi examines the three works through Lulaj's focus on the unseen figure as way of critiquing the production of the social body—the extras in cinema being analogous to the people in history.
Published on the occasion of the artist's exhibition, Albanian Pavilion at the 56th International Exhibition of visual arts – La Biennale di Venezia, from May 9th to November 22nd, 2015.
Armando Lulaj (born 1980 in Albania, lives and works in Tirana) is an artist, playwright, and filmmaker.
Edited by Marco Scotini.
Texts by Jonida Gashi, Boris Groys, Elidor Mëhilli, Edi Muka, Marco Scotini; interview with Hou Hanru and Armando Lulaj.

Graphic design: Dallas.
 
published in 2015
English edition
14,5 x 21 cm (hardcover)
308 pages (150 b/w and 101 color ill.)
 
24.00
 
ISBN : 978-3-95679-146-8
EAN : 9783956791468
 
in stock
Albanian Trilogy Albanian Trilogy Albanian Trilogy Albanian Trilogy


 top of page