Hans Ulrich Obrist talks to Edi Rama and Anri Sala
Painted apartment building from the Tirana color facade project, 2001–11, Tirana, Albania, 2007. Photo: David Dufresne/Flickr.
OBRIST: We first collaborated after you became mayor of Tirana, in 2000, and you started your painting project in the city—that’s how we met, discussing this at “Utopia Station” at the Venice Biennale in 2003. I’ve always wanted to ask you: How did your epiphany about painting and color happen?
RAMA: When I took office, there were very high expectations. Tirana was stagnant. And political campaigns in Albania were likewise completely frozen in time: people sitting in auditoriums just as they had under the Communist regime, a table on the stage, no real images, thoughts, or communication. So I brought the campaign to the streets. There was also always an authentic aesthetic dimension, thanks to my background and to the collaboration with Anri.
OBRIST: Did Anri make the first campaign video clips?
RAMA: Yes. It was the precursor of what would become the urban painting project: We took an old picture of the center of Tirana. We put the photograph in water, then dripped colored paint into the water, and filmed the whole thing.
OBRIST: It was a teaser.
RAMA: Because it was just this sequence, no message.
ANRI SALA: It emerged like a colorful virus on TV.
RAMA: People would see this black-and-white picture at the center, and then red, yellow, blue, or green suffusing the picture, and that’s it. Just a few seconds. It was before the actual campaign started in earnest. So it was announcing something—
SALA: But you didn’t know what.
RAMA: Once I was mayor, we actually started to paint buildings. We simply painted bright, colorful facades on rows of grim socialist block housing—and it was transformative. The colors bound together all the volumes that had been wantonly added to the original surface, piecemeal, by residents who needed to expand their living space but who were not concerned with the forms produced by such alterations and the consequent disfiguring of facades. I thought it would be a cheap, effective way to change people’s perception of the country and their common space. It worked. And the project generated the first good international press about Albania after the regime change.
OBRIST: It triggered an avalanche of things.
RAMA: After the initial color project, after the first Tirana Biennale, in 2001, after acclaimed artists came (thanks to you and Anri inviting them to participate in the facade project in 2003), everyone seemed to want to do something connected with the colored facades. I am very, very upset that this project stopped because of lack of funding.
