When we were conceiving Moving Billboard II we were likewise thinking about different strategies of exhibition-making, and specifically ways to unmake them, starting from the re-conception of the vernissage itself. This was a necessity for us as a response to the existence of a single exhibition scheme developed over the years in this very politicized and highly controlled artistic situation. We see it as a form of liberation from this, but also from the other known strategies and in use for staging exhibitions. It’s very strange because in Albania even the form of the funeral procession has changed, but the exhibition model still remains the same. It is profoundly worrying that there are very few exhibition spaces  in Albania, and those few that exist are forced to capitulate with the artistic policies provided by the central government, the Ministry of Culture, or the Municipality. Obviously, as a result, what they manage to achieve is often very lazy and absolutely not very courageous programming, because it is not in tune with the situation that surrounds us. It still follows models consolidated in the 2000s. As foundations and art centers – but not private galleries supported by the market – they understood that the copy-paste operational strategy was the safest one in these situations. My criticism is aimed at their directors, or rather at the directors of their artistic programming, who continue to atrophy the art situation and stimulate a crowd of trained spectators who are always the same – positioned horizontally, never vertically – who do not seek any density of context. These spectators desire a kind of lazy tourism from the art world, which is provided to them. 

RI: When you speak about art spaces capitulating to the current artistic and political system in Albania, I assume you are referring to the way that the whole discourse of contemporary art has been instrumentalized in large part because of the fact that Albania’s Prime Minister, Edi Rama, is an artist. Since Rama first came to prominence as major of Tirana–and achieved notoriety in the artworld through curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist for his project painting the buildings of Tirana, the connection between art (and the whole cultural industry) and political power in Albania has become increasingly linked in a circle of corruption. And this tight connection is constantly further legitimized by the global neoliberal artworld, a world that invites Rama to speak at Creative Time, to show his drawings at the Venice Biennial, to show at Marian Goodman, which serves in turn to artwash the abuses of power carried out in Albania. In the face of this, some art spaces simply choose the path of least resistance. You have tried to do something else. 

AL: Since its beginnings in 2003, the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art (DCCA) has been looking for something different, a different kind of melting point. Being positioned outside the above-mentioned context, we used a different strategy. Instead of the gallery, we used the street as the most important space to produce art, but also as the most interesting space to meet a different type of spectator. Today we live in another context, one in which the role of the acute contemporary researcher (an inexistent figure in the 2000s), has become extremely important, putting into question accepted models of exhibition making, the art critic themself, the artist, the politician, the contemporary art historian, and the figure of the curator themself (all uncontested figures in the 2000s). The project was not looking for this type of lazy viewer; rather, it was looking for a new one–one produced in that particular one-hour time frame. We could also say that this contact with such a new viewer was a violent encounter, made up of unwanted pieces of recent history, or moments not present in official history, let’s say. From all this, we realized that the street remains the most interesting space to act because the work of art is encountered by chance. For me this is the most powerful aspect of Moving Billboard II.

RI: Manifesto DESERTION is the second time La Société Spectrale has organized the Moving Billboard project. The first time, in 2018, you selected all 24 images to appear on the billboards, correct? This time, instead, you asked 12 living artists to select one work of their own, and one work by an artist now deceased, to appear on the billboards. The new iteration, then, is at least partially about the formation of historical consciousness in the present. The 24 billboards represent a kind of new history in the making – a new set of references, and a new set of juxtapositions. But La Société Spectrale – as the “agitators” of the project – selected the sites where the billboards were installed, the places where these fragments of art history intersect with the specific histories of Albania, the place. How does Moving Billboard relate to a global art history? And how does the placement of these images intervene in local art histories of Tirana, of Albania?

AL: I would like to point out that the name we have chosen, La Société Spectrale, has a particular meaning, which should not be confused with Society of the Spectacle nor with Specter Society, nor with La Société Anonyme. It is the literal translation of the famous “Firma Fantazmë,” or “Ghost Companies” – companies that appeared in the early 1990s in Albania when we undertook neoliberal reforms. This name becomes even more important for us because strangely we still find ourselves there, in those years, trying not to drown in the vast sea of neoliberalism. These corporations or ghost companies were companies whose owner was a front man, or was very difficult to discover; companies that could not provide documents on where their shares were registered or who owned them, etc. These companies were local, but also foreign, and they made billions disappear in collaboration with local and foreign politicians. Nowadays we have many companies operating in the country, mostly winning government contracts, but now they are all registered to numerous offshore corporations, and both they and the  government communicate this with pride. 

By using this infamous name, we wanted to expose the dubious activities of these individuals, politicians, or the government itself–but not only that. We wanted to remind the masses, the viewers, of when it all started, to return to the 90s, and connect the role those entities played then with the role that our group has today. La Société Spectrale likes to be defined as the repentance who expose the government’s shady activities.  

Moving Billboard I took place throughout Albania in 24 hours, and given the large expanse of territory it covered it was very difficult to carry out. This time we chose a much smaller perimeter, the capital city of Tirana, for many reasons. This city is changing very fast. I often listen to tourists who visit the country telling me that Tirana is a city of art, with beautiful and innovative architecture. I am still very surprised when I see widely circulated foreign newspapers, which these tourists rely on and believe in, publishing articles so full of falsehoods. Many people, including some curators visiting the country, try to respond to this huge number of lazy tourists, to make them see that the narrative created through paid newspaper articles thought up in the halls of government are part of an aesthetic strategy somewhere between amnesia and full control. These people, curators or otherwise, who like to go in depth have a message that is more suitable for the trained spectators, to whom I was referring to before, a small audience that is prepared to look at art a certain way. It becomes extremely difficult to counter all these appearances in many foreign newspapers or local media and it becomes even more difficult when all the other narratives by various artists or authors that tell a different truth, another narrative of the country, in contrast with the official state narrative, cannot be published. And if they are published, still they can’t get to that level of attention; they don’t appear in The Guardian or The Financial Times. This is why we take to the streets to meet or provoke, to wake up this other spectator that the system does not want, showing them some real problems of the country’s future, but in a different way: making them see the terrible neoliberal reflection that is projected onto them. This future often comes from the past and happened elsewhere, or else it comes from a present that is happening parallel to us in other countries. It is important for us to highlight these reflections from the past, but also to mix them with our current issues, not by equating them, but by showing that the collapse happened some time ago. By changing time and space, we talk about this present and terrible future more than any other project carried out in the country in the last two decades. 

To further answer your question: this curatorial scheme – like every curatorial scheme–has incorporated within itself the question of control that cannot be completely eliminated, which starts from the artists’ choices and ends in the narrative it produces. From the beginning we were very interested in how to marginalize in the production of our new narratives. Obviously we couldn’t do the same as the avant-gardists with their choices produced by chance; instead, we wanted the controllable to become uncontrollable. That is, I am not very interested in the main narrative, but rather in the parallel narratives that escape the control imposed by and on us at the outset. We cannot control the uncontrollable – let’s say, the flow of people who come across these billboards that appear before them. It is also impossible for a single spectator to see all the billboards in this order, in this period of time, and in those locations. But most of the time the space was indicated by the works themselves and the idea was to create or agitate as many narratives as possible within the main one. We decided to circumvent the process and above all to eliminate the role of the curator or sometimes even that of the artist, who in this project also played the role of curator, since the images were chosen by living artists. We worked on different levels, starting from the addition of the apparitions, focusing on how all these images, combined in various ways, can become something very different. All these combinations of narratives, and different places where the billboard remained positioned for an hour, inevitably intervene in both history and memory in a continuous process, which suggests the idea of deserting HISTORY. To return to the archiving of the Manifesto DESERTION. Desertion Archive is perhaps an impossible archive because of the difficulties of unearthing that slippery uncontrolled moment in time, i.e. Desertion. On the other hand Desertion Archive is an archive composed of those moments that are built in times or spaces that are capable of activating the power to desert HISTORY itself …