From Albania to the former DDR, from Bulgaria to Poland, the history of the former regimes remains imprinted. The tour of the artist Giovanni Vitali who collected those indelible memories
The Spac concentration camp, a hundred kilometers from Tirana, it was one of the darkest places in that open-air prison that was Albania. Today the rare visitor wanders disoriented among those cells full of pain and abandonment, Then, suddenly, here among all the squalor is a fresh and surprising mural: at the base is the writing Fear, fear, immediately above the double-headed eagle, sign of national identity, she is caged by the sinister thought of Enver Hoxha, the dictator of that unfortunate pararevolutionary experiment.

The tyrant's head dominates the graffiti that mixes past and present, suggestions and obsessions, the dark era of socialism and the current season full of anxieties and hopes.
The brush plays with the ghosts of the post-war period. Sickle, hammer and broken dreams. Giovanni Vitali, young Lombard artist, he made a very unique journey in eight stages in as many European capitals, once provinces of the Soviet empire.

No demonization and not even a shred of nostalgia, as is also fashionable today among populations that are sunk into the sharpest poverty and the most shaky insecurity. Vitali moves in space, a East, and over time, re-grabbing the edges of the Iron Curtain, but without being crushed by it.
It goes back and forth, with acrylic colors, with photos and words, in short, along many parallel paths, always watch out for surprises, because that era, at least in these latitudes, is over forever, but the ideological machine that generated those social engineering experiments is not dead.
Eight murals, so, made in the studio in Milan and then placed in as many hot spots, eight open wounds, of that universe. Eight works and one volume, Unfaithful to the line, just published by SilvanaEditoriale, full of ideas for navigating without sinking into the current of history. Vitali leaves from Albania, perhaps the most devastated land in that Eastern Europe so different until 1989. And he enters Spac's cells offering us, in that tortured setting, the ghostly face of Hoxha. It might seem like closing accounts but it isn't; in one of the accompanying texts the author reports a not at all reassuring phrase from Mother Teresa which serves as a compass for the entire work: «The worst tyrants are not Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic. The most terrible enemy of the human being is the hatred that nestles in his heart.".
No one can observe that tragedy as one observes a landscape from a balcony. And not only for the pity inspired by the endless dramas that followed one another under Tito's regimes, imam, Ceausescu and so on. No, is that the somersaults of history and of the soul can bring back what seemed buried forever. We are not safe from new failures and horrors.
Vitali's brush and camera remind us of this. And yet this unprecedented pilgrimage gives us back to us with all its dark and broken charm that now shipwrecked world. Those huge condominiums, without horizon, legacy of an empire that no longer exists. The looming statues of Lenin. The unadorned squares. The houses of the people with their grandiloquent and didactic iconography. The grandiose monuments, obsequious to a power that seemed eternal and has evaporated against all odds.
A tour that resembles a delicious unreleased black and white documentary, a trip back in the time machine. But then, to remove certainties and sow doubts, here are the contaminations between the great history and the small brush that arrived with its curiosity and sensitivity from Milan. In Bulgaria the artist takes us to the top of a mountain, at altitude 1500 meters, to make us contemplate the Buzludzha Monument, a reinforced concrete giant abandoned to its fate in 1991, ten years after its arrogant construction. It was supposed to be a conference center, in an absurd but symbolic place, because here in the 1891 Dimitar Blagoev had founded the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party, «offshoot of the subsequent Communist Party». At the entrance someone tried to hastily celebrate the funeral of that madness, writing fear-busting words with paint: «Forget your past», forget your past. As if a trauma lasting at least two generations could be erased or worse removed. Vitali comes to contemplate that shrine saturated with melancholy and finds nothing more. One hand eliminated the recommendation. And then instinctively he writes again: «Never forget your past», never forget your past. Because the Tower of Babel can always be reborn and is as old as the history of man.
So from Tirana to Sofia, da Budapest e Praga, zigzagging between hives of socialist construction and tattered memories, sometimes rotten, of that faded cosmos with all its imposing rhetoric. As gyms document, the coffees, even the inevitable bas-reliefs of Lenin that are scattered here and there in that contemporary necropolis that is Vogelsang, the model city, the Soviet outpost in what was the other Germany, the DDR.
Three interviews with Annalia Guglielmi, Toni Capuozzo and Luigi Geninazzi help the reader on his journey. And Geninazzi, long-time journalist and writer, reports the brilliant summary drawn up at the time by Lech Walesa, former leader of Solidarity, to explain the inexplicable: «I always did the same things, I fought for the union to defend the workers, but we were in 10 colleagues… then in 1980 we found ourselves in 10 millions, not in 10. It was the Wojtyla factor.".
source – http://www.ilgiornale.it/news/i-paesi-ex-comunisti-immagini-e-simboli-delleredit-passata-1645667.html?mobile_detect=false