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. Read More
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Last 31 July the Court of Auditors would have delivered it to the current mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, an ordinance inviting the entity to “adopt suitable measures within sixty days to remove the irregularities and restore budget balance”.