Ndërmarrja e Dekorit – Bashkia Tiranë, West entrance to the square and the 200m depth gauge, 2018

How is money better represented than as a large public toilet? 

One of the first things that Albanian families did in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the communist regime in the early 1990s was to refurbish their toilets. The stone tiles of the socialist period were substituted with cheap ceramic tiles, mostly in white or grey tones, so as to emulate the look of a decidedly more costly material, namely, marble. Illuminated by a new, cold neon light, the post-socialist toilet was also fitted with a bathtub, electric shower, sitting toilet, and bidet. The new aesthetic turned out to be so popular that the rest of the home soon followed suit. More recently, this obsession with tiles has transcended the boundaries of the home altogether, spilling out into public space and onto public squares. The new Skanderbeg Square, which features stone tiles supposedly originating from all the territories populated by ‘ethnic’ Albanians, is a recent example of this. It is possible that the architects of the new square purposely set out to make a statement about the divide, or lack thereof, between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere of the town square. Perhaps this feeds into the overall effect that the design of the square is meant to convey, functioning as an image of the unification of the nation, though it remains utterly obscure what such a process might actually entail. What is certain is that the citizens of Tirana have, indeed, made the connection between the post-socialist toilet and the new ‘post-historical’ square.

Over the last couple of years, the Décor Department of the Municipality of Tirana has been busy painting over the telephone and Internet cabins scattered across the capital. This represents a continuation of the famous use of colour on the façades of the socialist buildings that made Tirana visible to the rest of the world, but with two important differences. Colour is now also being used to highlight and make visible the lower parts of the city. Additionally, famous fictional characters like the Blues Brothers, the Exorcist, Hello Kitty, and Sailor Moon have now replaced the abstract shapes and patterns that adorn the façades of Tirana’s socialist buildings. The friction between the new designs, which are bright and effervescent, and the surrounding environment, which is dull and polluted, is both calculated and superficial, but it is not inconceivable that in one or two cases it might get to the heart of the problem, so to speak. This is the case with the telephone cabin located next to the west entrance of the new Skanderbeg Square. The design shows Scrooge McDuck, the Disney character, diving into a sea of money and gold. The character is so familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1990s that the image inevitably functions as more than an invitation to enter the new square. It reveals a not-so-hidden truth but one that risks being overlooked if not forgotten, namely, the corruption scandal surrounding the construction of the new square and the participation of politics in it. Beyond the aesthetic embodiment of the unification of the nation represented by the tiles, the image of Scrooge McDuck diving into a sea of money and gold opens up the space for a deep dive into the questionable wealth of the representatives of the current, supposedly ‘socialist’, government, starting with the Prime Minister of Albania who, according to a leaked review by the OSCE in 2015, has managed to amass a fortune of approximately 200 million Euros, almost all of it safely tucked away in offshore accounts in tax havens. As such, the function of this image produced by the Municipality has the value of an investigation trail, just like the killer who always leaves traces even as he tries to hide them.