MANIFESTO Hijacking starts from the premise that the state machinery in Albania has captured the artistic means of representation, turning contemporary art into a mechanism for systematically providing cultural capital and overall legitimacy to a corrupt financial and political elite. This oligarchic elite obscures itself behind bureaucracy at the same time that it abuses the private data of its citizens. The oligarchy goes to work crushing lives, crushing buildings, crushing futures and pasts, so that it can create a new society in its image, a new relational form. What image? The image of administration. What relations? The relations of capital. What form? The form of exploitation.

The only possibility in the face of this actual broken narrative is to construct new narratives, to assemble new archives, to piece together new histories of the present. The present is a museum that never stops growing – a museum of neoimperialism and neocolonialism, and at the same time a museum of resistance. Truths are piling up in its halls, coiling like snakes, buzzing like hornets. It is time for a new wave to come.

MANIFESTO has seen the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition: it is the spectacle that we are all now living. To dismantle this spectacle, we proclaim the need to climb inside the sweltering and fetid cockpit of its cultural apparatus, and aim it straight for the ground. We proclaim the need for HIJACKING.

Every spectator is a plotter – yes, and every spectator is a hijacker. MANIFESTO Hijacking is the name for a spontaneous sneaking into the logics and the architectures of corruption, of neocolonialism, of artwashing. Hijacking won’t wash out. This hijacking catches the oligarchy in the nets of the horizon, like fish. We are seizing the mills of its empty skulls. We’re all alike, we’re with you, and we are wearing the stains of this art, this society – but tomorrow you won’t recognize us.