Artists help Albania exorcise old dictator's home

The home of Albania's former paranoid dictator is welcoming young artists from around the world in the country's latest step to shake off its hermetic past.

"What a slap in the face to history it is to promote this freedom of creation in this former seat of power, where censorship and prohibitions were decided," said Bruno Julliard, the director of the Art Explora Foundation.

It helped transform the home of former communist leader Enver Hoxha in Tirana - a "ghost villa" heavy with the secrets of the country's dark past - into a new, chic residency.

With the first arrivals having settled in last month, the villa with its original furniture and Socialist Realist art will host 22 artists from around 15 different countries this year.

Among them Genny Petrotta, a young researcher and video artist from Italy, said that it was already inspiring her.

"Every day when I wake up, I write down my dreams because here I have absurd dreams," she said, adding that the house reminded her of "Macbeth" and "Hamlet", Shakespeare's chilling dissections of power and vengeance.

"In a way, (my dreams) act like a dramatic emotional theatre and affect my writing. It's important to be here because it adds something unexpected to my work," she added.

The residence - formerly known as "Villa 31" - was where the Hoxha family lived for decades until the fall of the hardline communist regime in 1991, six years after the dictator's death. It sits in what was once one of the most secretive and tightly-guarded areas in the capital, watched over day and night by Hoxha's secret police.

From there, he oversaw a vast security apparatus that outlawed religion and most forms of commerce. It also cracked down on personal expression - which included the imprisonment of artists - even as he binged on outlawed works of literature in his home.

Today, bars and cafes dominate the area.

The villa is the latest in a series of structures in Tirana to have undergone dramatic makeovers in recent years.

A pyramid in downtown Tirana once dedicated to Hoxha is now set to be a hub for the country's burgeoning tech sector.

Prime Minister Edi Rama - an artist himself - insisted on the symbolic value of the villa's transformation. "This space will be used to create everything that Enver Hoxha despised," he said at the opening ceremony. It is "enough to make him turn in his grave from shame", he said.

"This is what this ghost villa will be today: a house of modernist degeneration," he added - a swipe at the language used by the dictatorship to discredit artists.

Stanislava Pinchuk - a Ukrainian multi-disciplinary artist living in Sarajevo - is among the first group of creatives to take up a residency.

Known for her drawings, installations, and sculptures, she said she wanted to study how space retains memory and bears witness to political events and abuse of human rights.

"This house is incredibly heavy - everything here breathes pain and tension," she said.

In Hoxha's private library alongside tomes on politics and revolution, Pinchuk found books on sex and the devil, works that would have landed ordinary Albanians in jail.

"What strikes me about the villa is that it's immaculately well-preserved" but also so redolent of the suffering the regime caused that "you sense being here you are in this very strong kind of belly button of pain and tension."

Artists have also been able to get a very concrete sense of Hoxha's paranoid worldview.

Hidden behind a private cinema, the basement doors of the villa open into a sprawling network of tunnels and bomb shelters, spanning several kilometres, abandoned and closed for years.

For Gerta Xhaferaj - an Albanian architect and visual artist based in Switzerland - the tunnels present a potential space for creative expression.

"What are they hiding? Not only literally but also symbolically, what do they represent?" said Xhaferaj. "I want to uncover this underground world and turn that mystery into art."  |  AFP