Exhibition

What creates a person’s portrait? The features by which they are identified. But are they not similar? Are features not as identifying as they are similar, so similar as to confuse you? Thus, we look for particularities in each portrait, a sign, a feature different from the others. And then we learn the names and use them. But are names not also similar or sometimes the same? What distinguishes one person from another? It is the story of life that begins with birth and continues with childhood, youth and aging, but are these not also the same phases of growth for each person?

Then what is the answer? The substance that fills life makes one person distinguishable from another, different stories that are created. When many of them resemble and merge in time and places, causes and consequences, they turn into histories of generations. There you begin to look for the details that characterize these stories not so much to discern differences as to build the oppressive structure of the dictatorship. A mark of violence on the forehead, senses and limbs damaged, minds that try to remember precisely every detail, souls that wait to be asked for forgiveness, lives that deserve remembrance and gratitude for resistance and exhausting survival, the desire to make known to the whole world the totalitarianism they suffered in spirit and body, testimonies of the truth that were held hostage with a heavy propagandistic and persecuting lid, the weight of which is felt even today. It is a long narrative in 44 portraits from 44 testimonies that former political prisoners in the Spaç prison-camp and their relatives have given to AIDSSH. A long ordeal of recordings in Tirana and other cities, where they live after regaining freedom with the arrival of democracy. These are portraits of courage and resistance that must be known, that must be learned as a mission so that the past is not forgotten. This is the purpose of the archive of testimonies and this is the message that the photographer Dorian Zanaliu conveys through 44 portraits made after long hours of testimonies. 

A portrait is a relationship or a dialogue between the artist and the subject, it is a way to narrate in the name of the future through physical and spiritual features. A portrait like these is also an artistic form to express the strong messages of the subject and the artist and to stimulate thoughts about human rights and freedom.

Written by: Rovena Rrozhani