Italian Magazine: The Story of Eddie Rama

Albania's former mayor of Tirana, today Prime Minister Edi Rama, debuted as creative by requalified and coloring his city's suburbs. The author of the Albanian national pavilion in Venice Bienenalen in 2017, returns to Italy with a retrospect selection displayed in the interior of the Castelabat castle, in Salerno province, cured by Vittorio Sgarbi, who is left stunned by this artistic style and here shows Rama character

By Vitorio Sgarby

The first external data of Edi Rama's biography is objective and remarkable, like a dictionary's voice: Edwin Christaq Rama is an Albanian politician, currently Albania's prime minister, in the post since 15 September 2013. Unsurpassed! But it's as true as being a politician, if not true, the fact that he's an artist and that feature makes him unique and politically different. Looks like a “manifest”.

Do politicians absorb artist or artist invade politician? In the perception hierarchy, the political function is so high, so primary that it dominates every other aspect. The prime minister is the one who runs the country and is a doctor, a lawyer, a professor or anything else comes in second. Being a politician is more important than any other existence.

But when this essence is art, the game becomes difficult and the contrast is less inexorable. Being a politician is an abstract, an expression of opinion, of a vision. Being a doctor is practical. But being an artist brings a deep nature that does not retreat before the politician's. Thus, the topic of Edi Rama's existence and the co-existence of politician and artist, as has happened in the rare cases of public function and cultural and intellectual engagement: I think of Louis Einaud, about Benedito Crocen, for Andre Malraux, for Sedar Senghor, for Vacla Havel or Mario Vargas Llosa, all artists and politicians at the same time.

Edi Rama has fulfilled a political revolution through beauty. It has shown that this is possible, if not so, of course. It's the artist who won and led the politician. It is he who does, with a persistent conviction, my idea of a government led by beauty. It's his artist's incompatibility to compromise.

Eddie Rama's story is known. After serving for two years as culture minister, from 1998 to 2000, it became mayor of Tirana. He had to restore the shape and face of a city that had lost them in the years of animal construction chaos. Edi Rama understands he must act with his artist instinct. “I looked at all the molecular, individual energy that turned the city. I felt as if I were watching with thousands of hands moving through each building walls, building new money, soletes and new creatures as a pleasure... I was wondering how to intervene, how to direct this amount of force, making available very limited resources”

The answer, really unexpected on the part of a mayor, is that of painting the facades of houses, palaces, giving breath to the residential blocks. The colors, at first he chose them, the mayor-artist: he needed to hide his research, additions, new buildings and distinguish one palace from another. Bright, turned colors, strong combinations that interrupt the intact gray of socialism and that frustrate many of his colleagues in politics, banal representatives of the European Union, but many of the citizens as well.

Something is clear, if Edi Rama remains an artist, if it constitutes his anomalies, it is not because for a politician-artist it is easy to paint his city. On the contrary. What happens in his professional, creative world and always very attentive to sfumatures is rather a unique poetic performance, far from the logic of political discours, but in the meantime close to contemporary artistic practices. One way of thinking, in which the sense is snatched and diverted, to catch the very core of the problem by surprise. And in Tirana it was not (only) the problem of revitalizing a grim urban scheme.

Stefano Boer writes: “urban reanimation achieved in a few weeks a phenomenal result. On the streets, discussions resumed, all together, on the color to be used. Thus, the Calledoscopic wave invented by the mayor expanded, including new buildings and, above all, new protagonists, selected between national and international artists. In a few months, the color project dissolved the surrender of citizens in terms of collective spaces; it overturned the face of apathy produced by five decades of the communist regime, during which the scope of what was public corresponded to the power of few persons, censorship and violence. Tirana's colors were not only decalcoman, as the process of transferring colors on glass or porcellan is known in art, but a true social communication code”.

So it is the artist who dominated the politician, who inspired this second. Better yet? The artist who became a politician. It would not have been possible to turn into a politician a physicist, a mathematician or an entrepreneur. The artist, before the politician, is the one who wants to create a new world; and that's exactly what Edi Rama did. He did not give up art when he gained power. Instinctively, he continues to design during government meetings, totally involuntarily, as he talks with the ministers about ways to solve political or technical problems. Eddie painted. For one thing, quick, almost automatic pictures that during the meeting session receive increasingly refined, well - defined treatment. In government offices, the walls are painted with endless colors, which form a unique offset balance. Also painted are the <x0-materials of the office”, the agenda sheets, white sheets...

On this aspect, Edi Rama was invited to the Venice Bienalen in 2017 by Christiane Macel, who writes: “Edi Rama, who from artist to prime politician, is currently Albania's prime minister and his activity is conducted today at leisure intervals, but in those dedicated to work, carrying out sketches during the holding of meetings, pouring his art on office table, all these details confirming happy surrender to art”

This unprecedented experience resembles everywhere as it moves behind it into the government palace, where all the walls can find signs of his aesthetic meditation. Color like denial of gray surfaces

After the Venetian experience Rama has returned to Italy, at the Alferano Prize and offers, in the transforming spaces of Castelabat Castle, the same interlocked, colorful lines we have found in his offices in Tirana. Take with him his world, his creative fantasy, his artistic life. And his proud character, his noble soul