Camilla de Maffei
Grande Padre

Exhibition Details

What happens when a regime falls apart? On February 20, 1991 Enver Hoxha’s statue was torn down in Tirana, Albania. After forty-five years of censorship and widespread surveillance, Albanians will be confronted with freedom and emptiness at the same time. Past stereotypes will be eradicated from the country’s identity. A future full of contradictions will be next: migrations, consumerism, Europe.

During six years of work in the youngest country in Europe, as the MEPs in Tirana called it during the revolution, Camilla de Maffei and journalist Christian Elia met Albanians of different ages and profiles – former members of the state police and political prisoners, intellectuals, workers, young members of the new social movements. From the Capital to rural regions, they deepened into gestures, architecture, symbols and iconographies to highlight the scars of a transition.

Far from the rapidity of photojournalism and the cataloguing of historical analysis, Grande Padre (Great Father) evokes the suffocating atmosphere of an era, and the fragility of a new world. Inspired by photographs taken by the Sigurimi intelligence and videos of trials accusing citizens of treason, de Maffei’s images show the obsessive tics of surveillance and power. The texts, reporting fragments of interviews, fill in the gaps of photography, and highlight the parallels between two seemingly opposite eras: the Hoxha regime and the irruption of capitalism.