“Out our home” tel quel: An opinion on the Albanian Pavillion in the Venice Biennale 2021

Abstract

In this year’s Venice Biennale, the Albanian pavilion named “In our home” proposed a notion of neighbourliness that presumably existed “less than 20 years ago,” yet one that has now disappeared as a result of “diving deep in the waters of globalization” and moving “toward an isolated indiference and uncertainty.”1 By ‘peeking sneakily’ at such reality through clips of “In our home” (“Në shtëpinë tonë”) – a rather consummated cinematographic totem of our communist quotidian anthropology, the pavilion invites us “to cross [the walls of our globalist apartment] and rediscover the gift of this bond2 .” Such crossing is ‘scripted’ through a pinwheel axonometric composition, in which four neighboring apartments “share a “[‘secret’] space that can only come to life if the neighbors are willing to make the discovery.”3 Some inconsistencies notwithstanding, like the association of a communist era flm with the wrong periodization of “20 years ago” (which should be like more than 30 years…), or the fact that the number of the ‘neighboring apartments’ in the brief is miscounted as three (when it should be four as an immanent result of the very pinwheel composition of the square), the pavilion explicitly proposes a return and recovery of a ‘lost’ time and its related ‘neighborliness’.