Anri Sala

b. 1974, Albania

The camera moves through the street by night, and partly by day, along the houses whose façades have been partly coloured red, blue, yellow, green, etc. In the foreground are torn-up streets and garbage. You can hear a conversation between the artist and the mayor of the city – a politician with cultural and educational concerns.

The story is this: after the political change, the apartments had been enlarged individually by the inhabitants since the situation was so anarchic that there were no laws that could have forbidden it. Walls had been torn down and balconies enlarged, so that every family could get as much space as possible. The façades looked awful – deformed, grey and damaged. The situation corresponded to the mentality of the people. Nobody was interested in how their house looked from the outside. More important was how they looked inside. There was no sense of community. The mayor photographed the façades and decided on a colour concept for certain parts. Most of the inhabitants did not like the idea, but agreed to let the intervention continue. For the first time, a sense of community was noticeable, and over time, people committed more and more to the idea, and started to communicate with each other and with the mayor.

What is interesting here is not so much the aesthetic aspect of the intervention – the renovation of the façades and the improvement of the street scene – but rather the social experiment. The most fascinating thing is the fact that such a minimal effort made possible a big change in self-perception and, more importantly, in their perception of community

(Text: imagine limerick catalogue, 2004)