In the Albanian Trilogy (2011-2015) Armando Lulaj (re)produces the informal archives based on his own memories and oral histories around the Albanian historical narrative. Seemingly marginal stories, taken up by Armando Lulaj coming from the 1950s and 1960s, create a matrix of quotations and juxtapositions of socialism’s obsessive struggle against the ‘Other’. The level of abstraction and the uncanny universalism of these quotations hover on the edge of an anecdote and political narrative, giving these artworks a notion of timelessness. The abandoned facts, omitted by the global historical narrative, reappear in Armando Lulaj’s works, presented in the context of performative monumentality, at the intersection between past and present.

An intriguing series of historical artifacts begins with the film IT WEARS AS IT GROWS (2011), which refers to the story of the excavation of a skeleton that allegedly resembles an enemy submarine spy apparatus. On May 25, 1959, at the peak of the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev visited Albania to discuss the Soviet Union's plans to arm Enver Hoxha’s state with submarines and warships and to deploy long- and medium-range missiles along the Albanian coast to counter the U.S. missile bases installed in Italy to control the Mediterranean. In 1963, after the break in relations with theUSSR, the Albanian Navy, in paranoid fear of enemy attacks, sighted an object that kept appearing and disappearing on the surface of the sea off the coast of Patok. Believing it to be a submarine, they fired at it. The object turned out to be a Cachalot (Physeter macrocephalus), the Mediterranean sperm whale. After being recovered, the remains of the whale were displayed in theMuseum of Natural History in Tirana.

The film of Armando Lulaj NEVER (2012) unarchives the history of the erection of a monumental inscription bearing the first name of a dictator: ‘ENVER’. In 1968, during the Cultural and Ideological Revolution, when relations between China and Albania were at their peak, the AlbanianWorkers’ Party made a grandiose commitment to the greatness of the figure of its despot, Enver Hoxha. Hundreds of young people were forced to join theAlbanian People’s Army for this project, which covered an area of 36,000 square meters with massive, white-painted stones spelling out the dictator’s first name on the steep side of Mount Shpirag overlooking the ancient 2,500-year-old city of Berat. In 1993, after the fall of communism, the Democratic Party came to power. On the orders of the party, the army attempted to destroy the letters on the side of the mountain using napalm and heavy military equipment. The fire caused by the explosions failed to destroy the letters, while two soldiers were burned alive. After this defeat, time passed and what remained of the inscription was covered by bushes and weeds.

The third work of the exhibition, RECAPITULATION (2015), introduces viewers to the documented incident of the accidental landing of an American aircraft after allegedly violating Albanian airspace and being suspected of espionage. On December 23, 1957, at 11:10 a.m., a U.S. Lockheed T-33Shooting Star aircraft piloted by Major Howard J. Curran took off from Chateauroux, France, bound for Naples, Italy. Over Turin, the aircraft’s radio failed, and after encountering bad weather with high winds, the plane veered off its flight path and inadvertently entered the sovereign airspace of thePeople’s Republic of Albania. At 13:28, the intruder was intercepted by theAlbanian Air Force Command, which immediately ordered two MiG-15 fighters to take off and identify it. At 15:50, the fighters reported that they had spotted the intruder in the area of Rinas Airport, flying at 500-650 km/h at an altitude of 150-200 m. Immediate countermeasures were taken. The plane was forced to land, and the airport was sealed off to prevent it from taking off again.

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Born in Tirana, Albania, Armando Lulaj (1980) is a writer of plays, texts on risk territory, film author, and producer of conflict images. He has no desire to subject to the context of local belonging– rather, he is orientated toward accentuating the border between economic power, fictional democracy and social disparity in a global context. In 2003 he funded the ‘DebatikCenter’ of Contemporary Art. In its current incarnation ‘DebatikCenter’ is a gathering of filmmakers, academics, activists, architects, artists, imaginary and real collectives, critics, curators, journalists, translators, etc., which seek to shed light on the ways in which our contemporary society works but also offer the necessary tools to imagine alternative futures and strategies of resistance to the status quo.