In an era marked by the crisis of grand narratives and the progressive disintegration of political certainties inherited from the twentieth century, artistic practice that engages with the historical and geopolitical dimension takes on epistemological significance. It is no longer about representing events or commemorating them, but rather performing a complex work of semantic reactivation upon them, designed to bring forth from the folds of the past the unresolved tensions that continue to structure the present. The exhibition Pushing the limits, currently on view in Bologna at Galleria de’ Foscherari, positions itself precisely in this interstitial territory, where art becomes an instrument of counter-memory and a critical device capable of challenging the official narratives of power. The DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art, an independent platform founded in Bologna in 2003 and now based in Tirana, has configured itself for over twenty years as a privileged observatory on Albanian historical-political dynamics and on power relations with Western powers, particularly the United States, Italy and the European Union. This name, which recalls that of the clandestine anti-fascist youth organization known as Debatik, formed during World War II in Tirana, immediately evokes a genealogy of trans-generational and trans-political opposition and disobedience. The artistic praxis of DebatikCenter, rooted in a precise political matrix, feeds on strategies of cultural activism and forms of symbolic resistance that translate into visual language the contradictions of a country suspended between totalitarian legacy, incomplete democratic transition and new forms of economic colonialism.
AA.VV., “Pushing the limits”, exhibition conceived by Armando Lulaj and curated by Fabiola Naldi, ph. Francesco Ribuffo, installation view at Galleria de’ Foscherari, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
The exhibition path opens with an emblematic gesture of consensual occupation: outside the exhibition space, on the wall facing the street, we find the marble plaque of the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art (Milestone, 2003-2025, by Underground Movement), while the gallery’s historic sign is replaced on the entrance door glass with the name “debatikcenter” (Replacement, 2025, by La Société Spectrale). This double intervention does not represent a simple branding operation, but sanctions a symbolic appropriation that, through the works of Pleurad Xhafa, Armando Lulaj and the collective authors Underground Movement, La Société Spectrale, Manifesto Collective, transforms the gallery into a temporarily autonomous territory where history, memory and political critique enter into productive short-circuit. At the threshold, the sound installation Radio Desertion by Manifesto Collective (2025) broadcasts the voices of international thinkers, philosophers and activists invited to reflect on the concept of desertion as a strategy of opposition to established systems of power and knowledge. The sixteen vocal contributions, destined to grow over time, create a polyphonic texture that anticipates the semantic complexity of the works exhibited inside. The choice of desertion as an interpretative category refers to a long tradition of critical thought ranging from Foucauldian analyses of power to Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections, up to more recent theorizations of refusal as a form of political resistance. In this context, to desert means to withdraw from imposed logics, to refuse one’s role within control devices, to open spaces of autonomy external to institutions.
Pleurad Xhafa, “Reassemble”, 2017. Video installation. MAS-38 submachine gun magazine, cal. 7.65×20 mm Longue, steel, 18.4×3.3×1.7cm. Video, color, sound, 7’16’’. Courtesy of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art and Galleria de’ Foscherari
In the gallery window, Untitled (melon field) (2025) by Underground Movement, an installation composed of a chrome-plated iron prison cell door and two reinforced concrete melons, stages an ironic poetics of appropriation and political resemantization based on a chain of linguistic short-circuits and semantic slippages. The reference to the photograph of Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holding two fruits alluding to her surname suggests a conceptual bridge between the “melon field” and the prison camp of Gjadër, in Albania, where Italy has built a detention center for migrants. The heavy, almost tomb-like materiality of the reinforced concrete melons contrasts with the rustic lightness evoked by the fruit, while the prison door introduces into the visual field the dimension of confinement and control over bodies. The work functions as a distorting mirror that reflects back to the Italian observer their own position within contemporary neocolonial dynamics, forcing them to confront the materialization of European migration policies on Albanian territory. The video Reassemble (2017) by Pleurad Xhafa introduces the theme of performative reactivation of historical objects charged with symbolic value, a practice common to all members of the group. The footage documents the National History Museum of Tirana, custodian of a peculiar relic: the automatic pistol that ended Mussolini’s life, donated by Walter Audisio to socialist Albania in 1957 precisely because Italy refused to display it. The footage proceeds with contemplative rhythm, alternating exterior shots of the museum, with the flow of passersby, and details of the interiors immersed in an almost sacred silence. The sequence culminates in the artist’s opening of the display case and the insertion of the weapon’s missing loader, preserved separately in the same museum. The symbolic charge of this gesture is disruptive: reassembling the weapon means making it functional again as an object capable of acting in history. Completing the installation, in dialogue with the video, we find on display a faithful copy of the original magazine, of the same model and year.
Armando Lulaj, “Breaking Stones”, 2017. Video, color, sound, 10′. Courtesy of the artist and DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art and Galleria de’ Foscherari. Copyright: Armando Lulaj. Photo by: Armando Lulaj
Breaking Stones (2017) instead shows Armando Lulaj engaged in walking the streets of Tirana lifting and repeatedly hurling a large stone to the ground until it completely crumbles. The dreamlike and dark dimension of the nocturnal sequence, the obsessive character of the gesture’s repetition and the progressive fragmentation of the rocky matter seem to translate into physical action the necessity of dismantling the hard and apparently immutable structures of power. The work takes inspiration from a dedication by Pasolini to Maria Callas, in which the poet describes the soprano as «a precious stone that is violently shattered into a thousand splinters in order to be reconstructed of a more durable material than that of life, the material of poetry». In this context, the stone’s fragmentation becomes a metaphor for a constructive violence that aims to recompose the fragments of history according to new constellations of meaning. The choice to set the action in the streets of the Albanian capital gives the gesture a precise territorial significance, as if the artist were literally deconstructing the city’s historical and ideological stratification.
AA.VV., “Pushing the limits”, exhibition conceived by Armando Lulaj and curated by Fabiola Naldi, ph. Francesco Ribuffo, installation view at Galleria de’ Foscherari, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
The appropriation and resemantization of historical objects returns as an outcome of assemblage practices in the installation Untitled (amerika) (2025) by La Société Spectrale. When the seat of the American diplomatic representation in Tirana, closed at the end of World War II, reopened after the fall of the communist regime in 1990-1991, the furnishings that had remained in storage at the Italian embassy were auctioned off and were purchased in bulk by the collective. The table on display is therefore the one used by the American ambassador before the war, a silent witness to a historical season that precedes the long interruption of diplomatic relations between the two countries during Enver Hoxha’s isolationist regime. On the table’s surface we find scattered objects arranged like forensic evidence, elements of a material archive of geopolitical relations. A sequence of jacks refers to a previous installation by the group in which the entire embassy appeared lifted by these mechanical devices. A clay head semi-crumbled by time, created during a journey from Bologna to Tirana, traces the features of American economist Milton Friedman, principal exponent of the Chicago school and theorist of neoliberalism, whose influence has shaped global economic policies in recent decades. The fragility of the clay sculpture and its progressive disintegration contrast with the ideological hardness of Friedmanian thought, suggesting the temporal erosion even of apparently most solid theories. The Lady Vanishes, an old postcard showing Arthur Mole’s Human Statue of Liberty, formed by 18,000 American soldiers arranged to form the iconic monument, introduces a reflection on the manipulation of the masses and the construction of propaganda images. In the exhibition handout, the collective announces that in 2029 they will recreate the work using an equal number of war refugees, probably Palestinians, reversing the original celebratory meaning into a denunciation of the consequences of American imperialist policies. The sketch for an anti-monument, a statuette of a horse with legs in the air with boots on either side with toes pointed toward the animal’s haunches, supported by a man, subverts the traditional iconography of the equestrian monument. The work recalls the American military tradition of parading a riderless horse with boots turned backward at the president’s death. The arrangement of objects in space creates significant sight lines: positioning oneself at the head of the table and looking between the horse’s legs, the viewer sees framed on the opposite wall of the gallery the loader of the automatic machine gun that killed Mussolini, in a perspective of symbolic connection between different moments and geographies of the history of power in relation to Albania.
La Société Spectrale, “Beheaded Boy (a Palestinian)”, 2020. Wooden sculpture. 43 x 12 x 10 cm. Courtesy of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art and Galleria de’ Foscherari. Copyright: La Société Spectrale. Photo by: La Société Spectrale
In Untitled (on the rise facing the Wailing Wall) (2024) La Société Spectrale presents an American colonial-style cabinet with six mirrors, also from the American Embassy in Tirana, disassembled and mounted on the wall with the front of each door facing the wall. The reference is to the 1968 Venice Biennale, when several works were turned around by artists to denounce the use of culture as an instrument of bourgeois power. Similarly, the installation, transforming furnishings once symbols of diplomatic prestige into relics of a questioned cultural hegemony, materializes the idea of dismantling and institutional critique. Beheaded Boy (a palestinian probably) (2020) instead takes up a stage object from the National Theatre of Albania recovered from the Sharra landfill in Tirana after the controversial demolition by the Albanian government in 2020. The theater, built between 1938 and 1939, represented an uncomfortable memory of the Italian fascist occupation, but also a living place of cultural production and an essential public space for the city. The mutilated wooden body of a cherub without head and arms takes on a new tragically current meaning: isolated at the center of a wall, this wooden fragment triggers an immediate association with the Gaza genocide and the bodies of Palestinian children victims of war violence, triggering a historical vertigo in which different geographies and temporalities of oppression collapse into a single tragedy.
AA.VV., “Pushing the limits”, exhibition conceived by Armando Lulaj and curated by Fabiola Naldi, ph. Francesco Ribuffo, installation view at Galleria de’ Foscherari, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
In Ménage à trois (which color is your flag?) (2021-25) Armando Lulaj synthesizes the geopolitical relations at the center of DebatikCenter’s research: three flags rolled around the pole (European Union, United States and Italy) appear aligned vertically and at the foot of each we find three condom packets. The juxtaposition materializes the separation between the three political entities, while the unrecognizability of the unfurled flags underscores the interchangeability of roles and the substantial equivalence of the power logics that animate them. The Newspaper (2024) by Manifesto Collective is a participatory sculpture that materializes the collective’s editorial practice: it is a column of newspapers available for sale at the price of a daily paper, destined to lower with the intervention of interested visitors. The publication contains historical texts drawn from the activities of the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art, here reactivated by the new proposal for fruition. The path ideally concludes with Vertical Elevation Plan (2025) by Pleurad Xhafa, a utopian project for the lifting of the migrant center built by Italy in Albania. It is not a dismantling, but a vertical lifting, as if the detention structure should become aerial, suspended. This gesture synthesizes a recurring strategy throughout the exhibition: the spatial subversion of levels, putting at the bottom what is at the top and vice versa. The embassy has been raised on jacks, Walter Audisio’s pistol is displayed in a video projected horizontally and downwards as if to evoke a burial pit, the furniture is tipped against the walls, the anti-monumental horse is upside down. This unstable and overturned geography becomes a metaphor for a necessary reconfiguration of power relations, of a world that must be literally turned upside down in order to be rethought.
AA.VV., “Pushing the limits”, exhibition conceived by Armando Lulaj and curated by Fabiola Naldi, ph. Francesco Ribuffo, installation view at Galleria de’ Foscherari, courtesy Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna
In conclusion, Pushing the limits intelligently uses the most burning materials of Albanian history to construct a critical setting directed at both past and present. The density of historical references, the complexity of temporal stratifications, the richness of connections between different geographies of oppression create an extremely articulated semantic field, which requires the viewer’s full willingness to allow themselves to be destabilized. The art of DebatikCenter proposes itself as an instrument for unveiling contradictions, as a practice of counter-memory that removes historical objects and events from their monumental fixity to reactivate them as open and burning questions, still capable of interrogating us about our position in the contemporary world.
Info:
AA.VV., Pushing the limits
Exhibition conceived by Armando Lulaj and curated by Fabiola Naldi
17/10/2025 – 18/01/2026
Galleria de’ Foscherari
via Castiglione, 2/b – Bologna
www.defoscherari.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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