The Monument as Ruin: Natality, Spectrality, and the History of the Image in the Tirana Independence Monument

This article examines the Tirana Independence Monument, first inaugurated in November of 2012 on the hundredth anniversary of Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire. The monument, designed by Visar Obrija and Kai Roman Kiklas, swiftly fell into disrepair until it was recently renovated in November of 2015. The article analyzes the monument’s function in terms of its doubled existence as a sign of perpetual natality (the possibility of the rebirth of national consciousness) and as a ruin with a spectral pseudo-presence (as an object that continually reminds us of the disjunctures that divorce the present from its historicity). It considers the way the monument’s inauguration relates to the politics of monumentality in contemporary Albania, and argues that the monument’s gradual ruination between 2012 and 2015 can be read as a particular manifestation of the history of the image in late capitalist society

"In It We Should See Our Own Revolution Moving Froward, Rising Up": Socialist Realism, National Subjecthood, and the Chronotope of Albanian History in the Vlora Independence Monument

November 28, 1972 saw the inauguration of one of communist Albania's largest and most significant works of public sculpture, the seventeen-meter tall bronze Vlora Independence Monument. The work, created by Kristaq Rama, Shaban Hadëri, and Muntas Dhrami, represented an unparalleled attempt to visualize both the geographical and historical unity of the Albanian people, assisting in the cohesion of a modern national identity created and reinforced by the communist government. This paper argues that the Independence Monument, as an exemplar of Albanian communist art, represented not the propagandistic revision of national history--as is often claimed of socialist realism--but rather the establishment of a spatial and temporal ground from which its viewers could come to understand themselves as possessing a shared national heritage and participating in the common construction of a uniquely Albanian socialism

The Monument as Ruin: Natality, Spectrality, and the History of the Image in the Tirana Independence Monument

This article examines the Tirana Independence Monument, first inaugurated in November of 2012 on the hundredth anniversary of Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire. The monument, designed by Visar Obrija and Kai Roman Kiklas, swiftly fell into disrepair until it was recently renovated in November of 2015. The article analyzes the monument’s function in terms of its doubled existence as a sign of perpetual natality (the possibility of the rebirth of national consciousness) and as a ruin with a spectral pseudo-presence (as an object that continually reminds us of the disjunctures that divorce the present from its historicity). It considers the way the monument’s inauguration relates to the politics of monumentality in contemporary Albania, and argues that the monument’s gradual ruination between 2012 and 2015 can be read as a particular manifestation of the history of the image in late capitalist society.Keywords: spectrality, natality, monumentality, Albania, Tirana, independence, national identity, grid, public sculptur

Dans la vallée des tombes temporelles : monumentalité, temporalité et histoire dans la science-fiction

Modern and contemporary artists working in relation to monumentality have sometimes positioned their works in relation to sf, and at other times works of monumental sculpture have been labeled as science-fictional by audiences to whom these monumental forms appear alien or displaced in time. While art history has sometimes examined the influence of sf ideas on modern and contemporary artists, a more sustained consideration of the relationship between monumentality and sf is lacking. One necessary step in advancing this understanding is a consideration of how monuments themselves have been represented in sf literature. This article examines the representations and roles of monuments in a number of sf works, including H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936), Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths (2001), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984). The ways in which monuments appear in these and other sf texts foreground a set of questions about the perception of inevitability, the shape of time, and the mutability of history. These works explore how the relationship between past and future can be reconfigured through encounters with monumental forms that create new bridges and chronologies across cosmic and historical scales of time.Les artistes modernes et contemporains qui travaillent sur la monumentalité ont parfois situé leurs œuvres dans la science-fiction. Parfois encore, des sculptures monumentales ont été étiquetées comme science-fictionnelles par le public qui voyait ces formes monumentales comme le résultat d’un passage extraterrestre ou d’un déplacement temporel. Alors que l’histoire de l’art s’est parfois intéressée à l’influence des idées science-fictionnelles sur les artistes modernes et contemporains, il n’y a toujours pas d’étude plus approfondie de la relation entre la monumentalité et la science-fiction. Considérer la manière dont les monuments eux-mêmes ont été représentés dans la littérature de science-fiction est une étape nécessaire pour mieux comprendre cette relation. Cet article étudie les représentations et les fonctions des monuments dans un certain nombre d’œuvres de science-fiction, dont La Machine à explorer le temps d’H. G Wells (1895), Les Montagnes hallucinées de H.P Lovecraft (1936), Les Chronolithes de Robert Charles Wilson (2001) et Les Menhirs de glace de Kim Stanley Robinson (1984). La manière dont les monuments apparaissent dans ces textes de science-fiction, et dans d’autres, pose un ensemble de questions sur la perception de l’inévitabilité, la forme du temps et la mutabilité de l’histoire. Ces œuvres explorent la manière dont la relation entre le passé et le futur peut être reconfigurée par le biais de découvertes de formes monumentales, qui jettent de nouveaux ponts et créent de nouvelles chronologies entre des échelles temporelles cosmiques et historiques

“Weak Monumentality”: Contemporary Art, Reparative Action, and Postsocialist Conditions

Après la dissolution du bloc socialiste, de nombreuses oeuvres d’art public commémoratives créées sous les régimes communistes ont été démantelées, alors que d’autres sont tombées en ruines. Souvent, les monuments produits dans l’ancienne Union soviétique sont vus comme un héritage comparable au colonialisme. En Europe du Sud-Est, la monumentalité de l’ère socialiste est souvent plus directement liée à des héritages antifascistes localisés, étant donné le grand nombre d’oeuvres commémoratives dédiées aux mouvements de résistance partisans. Cet article se penche sur les pratiques de Luiza Margan, Nada Prlja et Armando Lulaj, qui recourent à la vidéo, à la performance et à la photographie pour explorer la culture commémorative socialiste. Puisant dans de récentes discussions sur la « théorie faible », l’article développe un cadre théorique de la « monumentalité faible » pour décrire les pratiques artistiques récupératrices et restauratrices qui nouent un dialogue avec le patrimoine monumental socialiste

Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016

This dissertation focuses on monumentality and the ways it has developed in the sociopolitical conditions of late socialist and postsocialist Southeastern Europe. It examines monumental production in this region between the 1960s and 80s, and the artistic practices that constitute responses to socialist monumentality undertaken in the postsocialist period in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. It considers the relationship between ways of remembering the Second World War and the monumentalization of what is often referred to as ‘actually existing socialism.’ Additionally, it explores how legacies of socialist monumentality have affected contemporary artists working in relation to socialist heritage and to more recent traumatic experiences, such as the wars coincident with and following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Southeastern Europe’s modernity has been a particularly conflicted one, both geopolitically and culturally. Home to an overwhelming number of (frequently overlapping and amorphous) ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, the region is notable for the hybrid and disparate ways political and cultural actors—from dictators to democratically elected officials—have attempted to cultivate a collective historical consciousness. Monuments serve as particularly rich examples of the ways politicians, artists, and publics navigate collective values and contest both projected pasts and futures. The transition from late socialism to postsocialism provides diverse examples of how public monuments in countries such as Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania relate to debates on ethnicity, gender, political economy, and class-consciousness in the context of continued redefinitions of Europe’s borders and culture as a whole. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to preserve, restore, relocate, or destroy socialist-era monuments offer a rich and complicated body of evidence for the ways that histories are repurposed, especially the histories of the Partisans’ transnational antifascist struggle during the Second World War. This dissertation argues that many contemporary artists from Southeastern Europe have focused precisely on the ambiguous and conflicted meanings of socialist monuments, and have avoided treating monuments as monolithic forms associated with official ideological forces, in need of demythologization. Instead, these artists have turned to monuments in order to address the disparate histories of struggle that have given rise to Europe’s current sociopolitical situation

Dans la vallée des tombes temporelles : monumentalité, temporalité et histoire dans la science-fiction

International audienc

Sozialistische, monumentalkunst und globale bildtransfers:

Book abstract. Socialist image cultures went far beyond political iconography: beyond hammer and sickle, red banners or stylized portraits of Lenin, they could create normality and have an integrative effect, create identity, but also be subversive. Images emotionally linked the population to the system. The anthology deals with various popular media from late socialism: picture postcards, packaging, shop window decorations and other everyday forms of pictures. The articles describe areas of tension between the political program of a uniform socialist hemisphere and the visual breaks in cultural and social practice. A glossary explains key aesthetic terms