Ahead with the Past

Albania’s Journey of Transition and the Photographs of Jutta Benzenberg

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Jutta Benzenberg photographed this extraordinary unfinished vessel in its Roskovec shipyard in June 2010. It is planned to have many cabins in the shape of cafés and restaurants, billiard halls and slot-machine casinos, and it will welcome not government delegations and presidents with their pretty aides at their elbows, but representatives of the working and non-working people of the entire country. There will be no need for hundreds and thousands of people to drag it across the mountains, as the poor Peruvians of long ago dragged their ship under the orders of the mad rubber-baron Fitzcarraldo in Werner Herzog’s film. No. Powered by 550 years of resentment stored in Albanian hearts since the wars of Skenderbeg, when we were brutally snatched from Europe, it will proceed under its own steam, making up for lost time, and when the peoples and states of united Europe see this Albanian concrete ship, this industrial dream of the 1960s which has become a reality in the 21st century, they will welcome it with respect.

An old lady smiles at the photographer with this ship in the background. It is hers: her son is turning into reality an idea that has been so many centuries in gestation and now finds expression in this country in so many ways. The projected journey is sometimes a hesitant one, and we are unsure of the itinerary and means of travel. For instance, in the town of Kavaja, about thirty kilometres to the north, the chimney of the old nail and screw factory has been turned into a minaret, with a balcony and the muezzin’s loudspeaker facing east.

I would not count Jutta among the Albanian photographers who have decorated the national shop window, or the foreigners who have taken a whiff of the country and gone away. She ranks with the Marubis, the great photographers of Shkodra. Today we consider the Marubis as Albanians, but at one time they arrived in the city of Shkodra from Venice. Jutta too fell in love with Albania when she arrived here from Munich, and set herself, like Pjetër, Kel, and Gegë Marubi, to discover a world and its people.

Ardian Klosi