Monumentality, Counter-monumentality, and Political Authority in Post-socialist Albania

Abstract

This article examines the role that monumentality—and efforts to critique it—have played in shaping the experience of public space in post-socialist Albania. It considers artistic and architectural strategies often labeled ‘counter-monumental’ because they were first developed as a way to challenge authoritarian and nationalist monumental structures from the past, and it argues that in Albania these counter-monumental strategies have become wedded to centralized state power. In the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, projects that aim to undo traditional monumentality can effectively obfuscate political agendas. In Albania, where Edi Rama—the current Prime Minister—is also a practicing artist, the discourses of contemporary art have served to increase the centralization of political authority, and the work of architecture and design firms such as the Brussels-based group 51N4E have reinforced the symbolic power of the state at the same time that they claim to open public spaces up for citizen participation.

“Living Statues” and Nonuments as “Performative Monument Events” in Post-Socialist South-Eastern Europe

“…Furthermore, since the 1980s, the memorials for the commemoration of the Holocaust in Germany, called counter-monuments by James Young, have used “participatory strategies to make visible aspects of history that have been repressed from collective memory” and have invited visitors to take an active subject position in relation to these memorials, as artists “wanted to trigger processes of confrontation with this particular past and raise self-critical awareness” (Popescu and Schult 2020, 137). The strategies used by counter-monuments aim to invert the signs associated with traditional monuments; their goal is to substitute “invisibility for visibility, ephemerality for permanence, and horizontality for verticality” (Isto 2020, 2).…”

“…At the same time, cultural memory studies (Etkind 2010; Erll and Nunning 2008; Jelin 2001; Bull and Hansen 2020) and the examination of the role of art in transitional processes (Garnsey 2016; Barat 2014; Simic 2015) have not dedicated a lot of attention to the case of monuments (Buckley-Zistel and Schäfer 2014; Drinot 2009; Hite 2007; Milton 2011), and scarcely so in Eastern Europe (Light and Young 2011; Light and Young 2015). Counter-monuments practices have been analyzed especially in what relates to the memory of the Nazi regime (Young 1992) but could be applied to other post-socialist contexts (Isto 2020). Moreover, comparative, transnational regional analyses (De Cesari and Rigney 2014; Preda 2020) are limited.…”