
Adrian Paci
2021Interregnum
Adrian Paci
The eyes of the world are watching after the death of a dictator. Albanian artist Adrian Paci constructed Interregnum using footage from official state and national television broadcast archives. Spanning an entire century, the film connects different Communist societies through the shared language of grief. Shifting from close-ups to wider views of the masses, the film makes us witness to a crescendo where the manipulation of these masses and the depersonalisation of individual identity become increasingly evident.
Interregnum
The Column
Adrian Paci
An Jianjun, Lu Chunyu
A block of marble quarried in China crosses the sea on a cargo ship. On this apparently destination-free journey, the block is transformed into an elegant classical column; the craftsmen are several Chinese artisans, who work decisively and masterfully, excluding any possibility of error; the marble-dust powders their faces, and whitens the ship’s bridge. The story of this event, which Paci “allowed to happen” on board a factory-ship, becomes an eloquent visual metaphor, which, through art, touches themes such as work and cultural identity and, in the economic context, social and global dynamics. This is the Albanian artist’s most involved work, as far as production’s concerned, and also his most stratified, and most loaded with symbolic references. In his video, “everything flows”, in fact, around the column as architectural element, which, taking form, represents the dialogue between East and West.
The Column