I think because of the kind of politics of the Soviet Union, now in the rhetoric of Putin and the, you know, Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s this kind of ideology which refuses to die, this totalitarianism that refuses to die. […] I guess I was kind of very interested in the potential of the residency to be a place of transition, of questioning and not giving answers, but actually being there not because we have answers, but because we have questions. […] And these kind of, yeah, zombie communist, early proto-capitalist cowboy years, this was a kind of a really interesting time to grow up […] like how impossible these acts of forgetting are, you know? How like, truly impossible, you know. […] So what I’m optimistic about are young people. I think, I really feel so much more, I don’t know, attuned to, and kind of more, I don’t know, sympathetic with young people, and what they’re thinking about, and how they’re making work. […] I think the kids are all right. I think they’re going to do some great stuff.
In collaboration with Art Explora, OHI documented and disseminated the artistic practices, research trajectories, and reflections of artists participating in the Vila 31 Residency Program in Tirana, housed in the former home of dictator Enver Hoxha. Functioning as both an archival and dialogical platform, these in-depth interviews explore how the political, historical, and geographic context of Tirana, and the symbolic weight of Vila 31 itself, shape and transform artistic research and creative processes. Bringing together artistic experimentation and the public reappropriation of a historically charged site, the project offers a unique perspective on the intersections of memory, history, and contemporary artistic practice.
This research has been designed and directed by Diona Budima, with Ana Morina as camera and editor.
Stanislava Pinchuk
Samir Laghouati Rashwan
One night I start to shoot in the house at 2:00 a.m. […] and I started to be, like, afraid to think about ghosts and everything. So I think at that moment I was asking myself like, ‘Yeah, you’re afraid, but maybe they’re afraid about you too.’ […] I’m the narrator of the video but I’m also, during the video, trying to be a ghost. And I share with people, like, a lot of questions, like if everyone is afraid about ghosts, if ghosts are afraid about us, if they can fall in love. […] I was thinking, like, maybe the ghost can be, like, the universal stranger. And so I took this way to maybe talk about, like, stereotype, about, like, minorities […] I think we have stereotypes on ghosts, and with the ghosts and the diaspora, and minorities, I tried to do a link between the both.
Adriana Ramić
Like you will be wrapped up in these everyday sort of moments like, ‘Oh I have to do the dishes. I have to do the laundry,’ and then you remember where you are doing them, in this, like, horrifying house. It’s very surreal. […] I was seeing Ursa, the cat, always walking around, and I film animals as part of my work, so I thought let’s start filming Ursa and see what happens. […] Every day or every other day she will bring some sort of animal like a lizard into the house and torment it, and play with it, and then leave it frozen in one of the ground floor rooms or something. […] There is also something very uncanny about the fact that they’re, of course, this is what cats do wherever they are. They bring in smaller prey and torment them. But for that to happen here is also very uncanny, very strange. […] Maybe I experienced the paranormal through Ursa. There was a time at 3:00 a.m. I came home and she was on that grand staircase. And she had her ears completely back, and she was very afraid, and she was tiptoeing around, looking for something but nothing could be seen.
Nita Deda
The program of the residency, of Art Explora in this villa, it’s an open call that is inviting artists to apply with an idea of a research or a project that they would like to develop. And from this call, there was a jury of six members that is selecting up to 30 artists a year. These artists apply from more than a 100 countries from the world. So from all over the world. And the sessions are divided into three sessions a year. These artists, they live in the, they live in the house. There’s a studio, they have a studio space, and they have a working and living space here. They have a grant to develop a new work. And they also have a lot of help from the team, us here, to link them to the local context and to also link them to the scene here and to help them develop the research that they want to do […] For the Albanian artists that are part of the residency, this, it’s more of an emotional journey, I would say. This is what I’ve seen. [Diona Budima:] A lot of them told us that they were having very vivid dreams when they came here. [Nita Deda:] Yes, yes. And there was one idea. I don’t know if that’s going to happen, but we had one artist that had a very good idea of putting a box and of people writing their dreams, of what they’re dreaming here, and maybe after ten years, to have an archive of what people are dreaming here. And maybe after ten years to open up. I think it was Stanislava Pinchuk that had this idea of– then after ten years to open up this, and to maybe, like, do something to this archive of dreams here. But yeah, I mean, for example, Stanislava also connected to her own upbringing. It’s not that, you know, that this is a trigger of also like other similar realities, you know, of growing up in the Soviet Union, for example.
