How a haunted dictator’s house became Albania’s unlikeliest art residency

Usually, when I tell people I’m going on a work trip to a European city, I brace for a tornado of tips for obscure bookshops, restaurants, curiosities, and art exhibitions I must visit or might as well perish. What I fail to effectively communicate is that I’m going on a press trip, which is essentially a school trip for adults who, for a few days of their lives, get to hand over their independence and be told where to be, who to speak to, what to eat and see – and to not, under any circumstances, go wandering unsupervised. When I said I was going to Tirana, and not Milan or Venice like the rest of the creative world in April, I received no such recs. Instead, I was met with one of two responses: North Africa, right? Or, Oh cool, I’m thinking of visiting Albania now it’s a bit less sketchy.

Google ‘Albania travel’ and you’ll find a series of relatively new articles hailing the country as European tourism’s next golden child – “the new Croatia!”, “the Maldives of Europe” – as though this prime slice of Balkan real estate bordering Greece and just over the Adriatic Sea from Italy is so uncharted that it needs the name of another country to define it. Granted, this is certainly a PR improvement on Albania’s 20th-century appellation: “the North Korea of Europe”.

There are many reasons for Albania’s late blooming in cultural tourism. The country had every opportunity to collapse under aggravated political regimes of all flavours – communist, fascist – you name it, Albania has been minced by it. Under the cult of fear orchestrated by Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha from 1944-1985 (followed by his protégé Ramiz Alia), it became a hermitdom from which the country only emerged in 1992. Even for the younger generations, this is a recent memory. And as one half of Europe toasts the 80th Anniversary of VE Day, it’s worth remembering that while some were liberated, others were plunged into decades of stifling oppression – the remnants of which still move through the guts of society. But Albania always got back up, dusted itself off and asked “What’s next?” Right now, it’s art, culture, and hopefully, the EU.

I’d been invited to Albania by Art Explora, a French non-profit defined as a “public interest organisation that inspires new encounters between arts and audiences.” I met the entourage from France at Mother Teresa Airport and we headed for Tirana, passing a bronze statue of the country’s matriarch welcoming us to her city in flux. Like all cities in the grips of rapid transformation, Tirana is going up. Glitzy chunks of steel and glass starchitecture dwarf the hotchpotch relics of Albania’s club sandwich history: communist modernism with sprinklings of Ottoman, all set against Jurassic Park-scale Skanderbeg mountains. As we edged towards the city centre, I was prepared for a grey communist hellscape, but there were colours everywhere – apartment blocks painted with bright geometric murals, an entire housing block that looks like a Damien Hirst spot painting. Someone told me that all this was masterminded by Edi Rama in 2000 – then the city’s mayor – who launched a campaign to revive Tirana from the dismal throes of political oppression through the power of primary colours. It worked. In 2013, Rama was elected Prime Minister. This week, his Socialist party won a landslide victory in the general election, marking the beginning of his fourth consecutive term. Not bad for a man who finds time to moonlight as a respected painter and sits on the roster of Marian Goodman gallery.

You’ve probably heard of Dua Lipa, and possibly a gentleman by the name of Noizy who is apparently a noted rapper. If you’re into visual art, you might have come across work by Anri Sala and Sislej Xhafa, but Albania is not exactly a magnet for international arts – yet. So why am I here? Because a powerful symbol of the country’s transformation is about to take place, with art as its catalyst.

During his totalitarian reign, Hoxha censored religion and artistic expression and restricted travel. He ordered frequent executions and sentences in forced labour camps for those who opposed the regime. He spied on everyone and got everyone to spy on each other. The mass surveillance under the Sigurimi (secret police), was, for many, a very real version of hell, and Vila 31 was its engine room.

Vila 31, Hoxha’s former private residence, is located in Tirana’s Blloku neighbourhood, which, at the time, was accessible only to high-ranking party members. Essentially, it was a gated community for Hoxha bootlickers. If they didn’t lick the boots clean enough, they were booted out – and probably worse. Vila 31 was built between 1972 and 1973. While Hoxha publicly condemned arts and culture and cut his country off from the rest of the world, he kindly allowed some exceptions for himself; he brought in Italian construction workers to fulfil his modernist dreams: sexy marble floors polished to a liquid finish, premium furnishings by Western designers, statement sculptural fireplaces and interior fittings, even an indoor pool and home cinema. After his death in 1985, his family remained in the house until the fall of communism. Between then and now, the building has been preserved in a time warp; cleaned and maintained but otherwise entirely inaccessible.

This opulent gloom tomb is now open to the public for the first time. Devised by The Art Explora Foundation in partnership with the Albanian Government and the EU’s Creative Europe initiative, the programme invited ten international artists to decommission Vila 31 as a temple of pain and repression, and reimagine it as a stage for art, ideas and free, critical thought.

Over canapes, I learnt that not everyone was thrilled about the house being turned into an art space, but that on the whole, it was more desirable than the alleged alternative plan of a luxury hotel. I also got talking to French artist Marianne Marić, one of the first residents. I ask how it’s going. She told me good and bad. I see the PR twitching. She goes on to explain that the place is haunted by ghosts. She and her fellow artists have experienced empty rooms being locked from the inside, stuff flying off shelves, noises in the night. This is later corroborated by another source.

Marianne’s project, a blend of photography and performance, confronts the building head on. In her images, women pose in provocative choreography with the building’s interiors – the images pulsate with a liberation that subverts everything the dictatorship stood for: freedom of the body, mind and spirit. I’m certain Vila 31 has never seen anything like it. And with any luck, Hoxha would be fervently turning in his grave.

In another wing of the house, I find Ukrainian Stanislava Pinchuk’s Vampire. The basis of her research was the freaky collection of hypnosis, vampire and conspiracy books discovered in Hoxha’s private library and the parallels between these theories and his extreme, monstrous dictatorship. There was also a sickle in her bed, which was a haunting touch.

Tunisian artist Zeineb Henchiri took terror and isolation as her subjects in Mommy! There is a Monster in the House. Through film and site-specific installation, she tells the story of a child hiding from a monster in a cupboard for 40 years. Albanian artist Arnilda Kyçyku took her home city as muse and I’m stunned by the quantity of work she has produced in three months; layered oil paintings capturing domestic life in Tirana – the push and pull between heritage and intense modernisation as the city grapples with its changing identity.

Downstairs, a joint show by Lume Blloshmi and Kostandin Poga features photographs, paintings and a selection of publications by former political prisoners. Poga’s stark photographs of the remnants of prisons taken in 1992 at the fall of the regime; Blloshmi’s frantic, sinister paintings embody the trauma of watching family members die under the regime. There are stories of poets, intellectuals and artists brutalised simply for making work, which authorities deemed propaganda. I’m winded by it all, stunned by the honesty, inspired by the courage to face the agony of all this place represents. Work like this hits hard in the context of Albania’s history  – just 30 years ago, artistic freedom was as good as banned.

It’s interview time and I’m ushered into an office that looks fresh out of a midcentury Architectural Digest shoot, if it weren’t for the sinister communist undertones. This was my chance to speak to Frédéric Jousset, philanthropist, entrepreneur and founder of Art Explora – the man who made all this happen. Frédéric made his fortune through technology and services platform Webhelp.com Inc. in 1999, which he sold in 2023 with a valuation of $4.8 billion. Since then, he’s dedicated his time to improving access to the arts via his foundation, which collaborates with local art associations and institutions globally to attract new audiences, particularly those least likely or able to visit art spaces. Basically, Art Explora appears to be the arch nemesis of art-world elitism.

Art Explora already runs residency programmes in France and Denmark. So why Albania? “Serendipity,” says Frédéric, who met Edi Rama through a friend. He told the Prime Minister about his plans to expand the residency; Rama told him about his goals to reform Albania’s somewhat shady rep. “[Rama] said, ‘Well, I’d like to open Albania. I’d like to get rid of the preconceived ideas around mafia and prostitution, and I’m knocking at the door of Europe’. [We thought] it would be a great symbol for this villa, which is part of Albanian heritage, to become an open, international artist residency. The past was a burden, but you don’t want to live in a memorial of a harsh dictatorship.” The programme will host up to 30 artists a year at Vila 31 for three-month sessions with open studio days for the public. When they opened applications for the first session, they received 1000 submissions from 109 countries. “It’s about finding the right balance between the creation and the exhibition. You don’t want to turn this into a zoo where people see artists like animals,” Frédéric explains.

As dusk settled, curious visitors flooded through the gates of Vila 31 and local brass band Fanfara Tirana got the crowd moving. I wondered if this place had ever seen joy like this before.

The House of Leaves is not a botanical garden as I presumed when I glanced at the day’s itinerary, but a museum of surveillance which opened in 2017 in the former Sigurimi headquarters. The tour was in French, but I gathered a piecemeal understanding of daily life under Albania’s communist regime. Letters were intercepted, phones were tapped, houses were riddled with microphones. There were bugs everywhere, in handbags, shoe heels, lamps, ornaments. People were imprisoned and executed without trial for spying and going against the regime. Everyday citizens were recruited to be government informants – your friend, neighbour, postie or hairdresser – nothing you said was safe. It all felt rather meta, and actually a bit Meta.

En route to the next stop, we passed a series of military bunkers and I’m told there are 750,000 of them across Albania. We arrived at the Pyramid of Tirana, built as a mausoleum for Hoxha with a giant statue of him in the atrium. There is no trace of that now. The building has been repurposed as a hub for developing coding skills through a mix of art and tech innovation. Like many relics of Tirana’s history, including Vila 31, this building could have been bulldozed and erased from memory. Instead, it was simply repurposed from a memorial to the country’s spectral devil to something functional and forward-looking. I liked Albania for that; it’s not sentimental.

A 45 minute journey from Tirana to the Port of Durrës took two hours. There have been no trains in Tirana since 2013, despite frequent government promises, including a Tirana-Durrës line that has been ‘nearing completion’ for some time. Albanian urban traffic is no joke. Even if you do take public transport, that public transport will be in the same jam like everyone else. But this hasn’t deterred visitors. Since 2021, tourism has been Albania’s largest economy.

After lunch, which involved swordfish and an enlightening conversation with Jemima Montagu, director of Art Explora UK, we were bundled back onto the bus and whisked down to the Art Explora Festival in a cordoned off area of the working port. It was all free to enter, and there was even a complimentary shuttle bus to bring visitors to and from Durrës’ centre. There were lively bars, pavilions, tents and stages, but the heart of it all was the Art Explorer, the largest catamaran in the world (I have been told this multiple times, so I presume it’s an important detail), which has bespoke sails commissioned by French artist Laure Prouvost. I suddenly get a rush of déjà vu, which turns out to be real: I have seen this boat before when it was docked in Venice for the 2024 Biennale opening week! At the time, I had lots of questions. Finally, some resolution.

The PM arrived with his entourage, gliding through a huddle of paps. He had the energy of a rap star, decked in white trainers and a knee-length Adidas puffer. I pictured Keir Starmer in the same garb and squirmed.

It was time to board the boat and I was given little shoe booties, presumably to protect my beaten-up trainers from the abrasive decks. On the boat, the initial Succession vibe made way for a more pensive mood with a sonic artwork centring on the “sounds of the Med”, snippets of audio recorded at each of the boat’s stops so far, which have included Tangier and Rabat. Excitingly, I later learnt that the catamaran will dock the in the UK in summer 2026. Downstairs, we entered a room filled with AR headsets for an interactive cultural experience. On the screen I was asked to select an ancient Mediterranean city. I chose Alexandria. Now I love history education as much as the next gal, but I did wonder when the bass of high-concept art was going to drop. It never did.

Back on land, another immersive experience awaited. Created in collaboration with the Louvre, the wall-to-wall screens charted the role of women in Mediterranean civilisation, from ancient Mesopotamia to the fall of Rome. It was interesting, and the deck chairs were comfy, but my art itch needed a scratch, badly.

In a pavilion fashioned from shipping containers was an exhibition called ‘Under the azure’. As a person burdened with abnormally high levels of cynicism, I usually work with the formula of art + ‘accessible’ = crap. This was not; there were no hyper commercialised auction faves here – no Kusama dots or Koons balloons. Instead, it was a mix of 20 international artists of different generations who each drew ideas from the Mediterranean, among them Etel Adnan, Khalil Joreige, Simone Fattal, Marguerite Humeau, Marisa Merz, Joan Miró, Anri Sala and Dominique White. I was introduced to new artists, I saw things I’d never seen before. As we prepared to leave, the port came to life with music by Turkish Electro-traditional group Liman. My itch was scratched.

On the bus back, another gridlocked journey allowed for a closer observation of everyday Albania; its shops, cafe culture, communities and architecture. I hoped, even after its inevitable touristification, the country keeps its quirks and bears its scars and heritage proudly, not as markers of pain, but survival.

As I boarded the plane home, a friend sent me a link to a new BBC investigation into how the Albanian mafia is running one of Europe’s most prolific cocaine trafficking networks from South America. I didn’t read it.