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legacy

experimental film / 4K-Video, 20.30min
2021

Monumental architecture or monuments symbolically represent the ruling system and its power. Each new political epoch decides on the value and preservation of the former symbols of power. All over the world, the overthrow of old systems of power has often been coined with the destruction of their symbols of power.
Under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, about 200,000 bunkers were built in the Socialist Republic of Albania between 1972 and 1984, to defend the country in the event of an invasion by foreign troops. Fear was Hoxha‘s most powerful ally in his propaganda. Every Albanian, a large part of the population were reservists, was assigned a bunker. To this day, thousands of bunkers shape the landscape of Albania, waiting for the imaginary enemy to come. They lie fallow as romantic ruins, are used as chicken coops or as hotel bars for dark tourism. Nature does not succeed in capturing these spaceship-like objects like other ruins. The mass of concrete and steel makes them immovable - they are indestructible monuments, even if a new political era wanted them to disappear.
"Legacy" puts these military remains on a par with statues of former rulers and archaeological excavations of antiquity. Neither nature nor time makes any difference between the relics of past times. Only man judges their respective value for the coming era and determines what is worth preserving in order to draw his own self-image.

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