Changing the picture

“This place was a ghost in the middle of the city,” says Nita Deda as she opens the metal gate of Vila 31. There are workers milling in the garden, putting finishing touches on the newly renovated space. A caravan belonging to one of the artists in residence is parked off to one side. “The atmosphere has shifted since the artists arrived; it’s like the air is lighter,” adds Deda, who heads up the property’s cultural programme. Once the home of dictator Enver Hoxha, who governed Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, the house has been newly converted into an artists’ residence in partnership with French art foundation Art Explora. In January, seven artists arrived, who will each stay for a three-month spell. “This is one of the first artists’ residence in Tirana and really the first project of its kind in the Balkans,” says Vila 31’s head of development, Bisej Kapo. “We’re putting Albania on the international scene and creating a new and exciting artistic network.”

Vila 31’s marble-floored hallways exude decadence, the walls painted in soft pastel hues. But the weight of history here is heavy. A Stalinist dictator, Hoxha’s legacy is defined by his paranoia and the violent state-of-siege isolation that he forced the country into. While in power, Hoxha banned religion, restricted travel and outlawed private property. Political assassinations and labour camp sentences were common. Forty years since his death, families continue to look for their loved ones among mass and unmarked graves. “It’s still so difficult to talk about. It’s hard to find the right words,” says Kapo.

The residence is in Tirana’s Blloku neighbourhood. As Hoxha ascended to power, he moved to the area, which was then known as New Tirana. By the end of the 1940s, the neighbourhood was made accessible only to high-ranking party members and was guarded by armed security, earning the name Blloku i udhëheqësve (the leaders’ block). Publicly, its inhabitants strove to convey the image of a tight-knit community of elites. In reality, double-crossing reigned and houses and plots of land regularly changed hands as different party members fell out of favour.

So it was with Vila 31, built between 1972 and 1973. Hoxha brought in architects, engineers and technicians charged with getting the house, dubbed “Object X”, in a state fit to satisfy his exuberant and distinctly modernist taste. Supplies were covertly imported from Europe and Italian technicians were brought in to install fixtures unseen elsewhere in Albania. The result was a 2,500 sq m residence – complete with pool and home cinema – that mixed local and Western architecture. “The villa’s completion in 1973 coincided with a dark period in Albania’s cultural history,” says historian Elidor Mëhilli. “Hoxha launched a vicious attack on what he deemed liberalism in the arts and culture. As his designers sourced furnishings from Western catalogues and installed amenities at the pinnacle of luxury, he publicly condemned Western influence in music, art and architecture.”

Vila 31 was inhabited by Hoxha, his wife, sister and the families of his grown children. They stayed after Hoxha’s death in 1985, only leaving the house at the fall of Albania’s communist regime in 1991. Since then, Vila 31 has been mostly off-limits, its windows obscured by dark curtains. The house became a monument to a painful period of history – a place that passers-by would avoid looking at. “This is a space that, until now, has meant censorship, darkness and the lack of freedom,” says Deda.

Blloku has kept its name but the district is now a vibrant part of the city’s culture and nightlife. Around Vila 31, restaurants, bars and hotels are thriving. The whole city is in construction mode with cranes punctuating the skyline against the backdrop of the snowy Skanderbeg mountains. The authorities in Albania – as in many post-communist states – have been faced with the question of what to do with the period’s architectural heritage. In 2023 the Pyramid of Tirana, once a museum dedicated to Hoxha, reopened as a Youth IT centre.

The idea for the Vila 31 artist residency was born in 2021 when Art Explora founder, Frédéric Jousset, met with Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama. “They realised that they shared common values, in particular in regard to the importance of art as a bridge between people,” says Art Explora artistic director Blanche de Lestrange. Though based in Paris, the foundation is turned towards Europe at large. They brought in Lucie Niney and Thibault Macra, founders of nem Architects, for the renovation. The Paris-based studio restores heritage buildings and has completed significant cultural projects in France, including the Pinault Collection’s artists’ residence. “This building required extra humility on our part, not just in regard to the complex history but also our position as foreigners coming in to work on it,” says Niney.

Though Vila 31 had been abandoned for decades, the architects were surprised to find a well-preserved time capsule of the 1970s inside, complete with wood-panelled walls and sculptural fireplaces. Once the utilities were updated, the floorplan was rearranged to accommodate the artists and the residence’s administrative team. “One of the changes we made was to turn Hoxha’s private bedroom, office and bathroom into the common dining and office areas for the residents. We felt that it was a way to avoid creating nostalgia and truly subvert them by turning them into places of community, joy and creativity,” says Niney. The original wall colours were kept, when possible, as well as the vast array of kitschy colourful tiles. The furniture found on site, including floral-wallpapered sound-proof doors and retro television sets, was restored.

Every resident of Vila 31 is given a private apartment, comprising a bedroom, bathroom and a living and work area. The first to arrive from the inaugural cohort was the Ukrainian artist Stanislava Pinchuk. It was an experience she will remember forever. “I couldn’t sleep, so I just walked around the rooms and corridors in the dark, completely alone in this eerie house,” she says.

Born in Kharkiv but now based in Sarajevo, Pinchuk’s work, which includes sculpture, video documentary and photography, focuses on the legacy of oppression. “Coming here was a way to find a missing puzzle piece for myself, especially now when, as a Ukrainian, there is so much reckoning with history and its effect on our present.” Here, Pinchuk has had to weigh the cruelty of Hoxha’s regime against the family life that coexisted within these walls. “I found Disney stickers on the tiles in the bathroom, which belonged to one of Hoxha’s grandchildren; it’s truly Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil,” she says, referring to the German philosopher’s famous phrase about the ordinariness of the people who committed the atrocities of the Holocaust. While here, Pinchuk will be examining the figure of the monster and one of her sources is Hoxha’s library, including books on French existentialism, science fiction and the supernatural. “I want to look through his banned books and the worldly pleasures that he allowed himself while punishing Albanians,” she says.

Fellow resident Gerta Xhaferaj’s project is also intimately related to the house. “During my studies as an architect, I always heard about the tunnels built during the dictatorship which connect this villa with other spaces in the city,” she says. “I’m going to work with the architects to check their status and hopefully create temporary installations inside them.” Born and raised in Tirana, Xhaferaj hopes that the renovation of Vila 31 will be cathartic. “My goal is to convince my friends to come here and see the changes for themselves,” she says.

When monocle visits the house in January, it feels eerily empty, with rows of bare shelves. As the programme evolves, the hope is that artists will fill Vila 31 with colour and objects that they’ve made during their stay. In April the first open studio will take place. “I would love to see this house explode with people and with ideas,” says Kapo. The ghosts of Vila 31 won’t be exorcised completely but its new residents will add more layers to the history of the building, painting a new – brighter – vision for the future of Albania. — L
artexplora.org