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I was able to attend a few of the German October events in Tirana, where the German Embassy sponsored a ton of cultural events. This year’s was special because of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, but I’m already looking forward to next year.

I got to see a really interesting exhibit which was a mixture of art and artifacts once the exhibit was “opened.” I arrived at Hotel Dajti earlier in the afternoon, only for the guard to tell me “it’s not open right now, come back at 4.” I came back at 4:00, and interrupted the guard as he raked the leaves in front of the building. I suspected that it wouldn’t have caused any harm for me to just go in at 2:00, but since I sometimes live in one of Kafka’s creations made real, I still had to wait two hours to gain entrance.

In my aesthetics class we talked a lot about what makes art “art” and we talked about the role of museums in the process. The exhibit I saw was in an unusual venue: a practically abandoned, communist-era hotel sitting right in the center of Tirana. Closed after the fall of the regime, Hotel Dajti now houses traveling exhibits. Seeing an exhibit from Eastern European artists composed of pieces largely railing against this ideology is such an incredible juxtaposition. In this hotel, the most important guests of the regime were hosted in a luxury not available for normal people. And now the pride of a former government sits completely abandoned as the paint continues to crack and the weeds continue their assault on what must have been a lovely garden to the rear of the building. Time will eventually catch up to all of us and all the political systems we make.

“So where does this start?” I asked the guard. I was standing between large columns on the main floor and was completely clueless how to navigate. In no specific words, the guard said there were exhibits all over the building so I started by going up to the third floor.

I can’t describe how eerie a feeling it was to walk around an abandoned hotel. The third floor talked a lot about the Berlin art scene and each room on the right hand side of the hall was home to an installation from an Eastern European artist.

We can also talk about the nature of art. It feels to me so personal and yet so public all at once. Can someone create art and keep it on a personal level, or is it like a Pandora’s box, where once you show it to someone it escapes from where you wanted to keep it and becomes public? I prefer to discover art on a personal level, where I can look at it all by myself and not have to worry about what other people think about it or how they see it… of course I’m curious, but I first need to have time to digest and absorb. This would have been a great place to have such a personal experience in a public place if the guard wouldn’t have insisted on following me around. Just when I thought he would leave for good because I’d hear his boots on the stairs, some time would pass and I would hear them come back up the stairs again. The sound of it made me as crazy as the heart beat from the Tell Tale Heart. So the experience was almost as private an experience as you can get in such a large, public place.

My favorite part of the exhibit was seeing the work of Albanian artists. There were a lot of black and white photos chronicling communist times that were very interesting. Another artist had taken the communist writers of former leader Enver Hoxha and inserted Western candy wrappers in between the pages to create quite a statement. What would have happened had authorities seen this? Would the people who wrote those books ever have dreamed of a day when those kinds of Western goods, something so trifle as candy, were available in Albania? Did the artist, as a child, delight in collecting these little, foreign souvenirs?

Another great part of the exhibit was something I had read about before and forgotten until I saw it years later, here, on the other side of the world. After Germany’s reunification, West Germany gave East Germans 100DM of welcoming money. A few years ago a woman went around asking East Germans what they bought with this money and ended up getting thousands of items, some of which were on display. People bought stereos, records, blue jeans, wool sweaters and power tools. The best part, aside from seeing these actual items after all these years, were reading the captions. People talked about wanting to experience owning these goods that were never available to them before. Many people talked about the jeans or sweaters they bought and said they still wore them. A man said he wore a pair of blue jeans as long as he could, and when they got holes on them, he resigned himself to wearing them just around the house. They were completely destroyed. I wondered what I would have done with $50 in a consumer market many times the size I had known. I tried to imagine people getting the money, painstakingly making a decision, and then going to a store and simply buying it like it was a normal thing that had always been there to buy.

And that’s how I spent a warm, November afternoon in Tirana: in an abandoned hotel looking at post-Communist art. And yet somehow, here in Albania, it doesn’t seem the least bit odd.