Skanderbeg Square: The Memory of 1990s Music Videos and the Paradox of Empty Seats

To stand in Skanderbeg Square, the symbolic heart of the nation, and speak before empty seats is perhaps the most accurate metaphor for our cultural condition today.

The evening of 1 November at the HBS space confronted me with precisely this contradiction.

On one side, there was Jutta Benzenberg’s lens on the “burned house” — an exhibition that had already been open for some time; I had visited it many days earlier, and attendance naturally declines with time. Yet the work touched the nerve of our trauma: loss, migration and longing.

Benzenberg’s extraordinary achievement lies in the ethics of her approach.

While many Albanians wanted to try their luck in the West, Jutta Benzenberg did the opposite. She left Germany, came to Tirana in 1991 and stayed — for the person she loved and for the country.

The photographer discovered an Albania whose motifs could stand alongside the highest standards of international documentary photography, with the focus always on human beings and their environment. In every corner of Albanian lands she found remarkable scenes, à la Ara Güler, full of nostalgia and authentic urban life.

Her exhibition manages something extremely difficult: it documents this “burned house” without aestheticizing the fire and without turning the guest of the house into a victim.

Jutta does not beautify misery; she gives dignity to the wound. She acts not only as an “artist” but also as a “journalist” in the best sense of that word.

That is why this cultural act works.

It gives us a space of remembrance without academic weight, a space in which society can reflect on what people have lived through or recognize from their own experience without feeling judged.

The public, however small it may now be, respects that space precisely because the work manages to transform pain into a meditative act.

And then, in the same space, the paradox appeared.

There was another “exhibition”, equally vital: an ambitious attempt by lecturer Çina to open a discussion about the archaeology of our collective dreams — a retrospective of the music and video clips of the 1990s.

The question arises naturally: Why does one form of memory — the memory of pain — find resonance, while another — the memory of pop culture’s traces — confront the silence of an absent audience?

Is it disinterest, or self-exclusion?

How fortunate that I happened to be there that evening.

It was dark, and only the light of a projector caught my attention. I approached, and someone told me there was a discussion taking place about music videos from the 1990s — exactly my kind of subject.

Perhaps it is not accurate to say that our society is “ashamed” to admit it danced to those songs.

Maybe the problem is deeper.

It is more empathetic, more “noble”, to concern oneself with major trauma, with the “burned house”, with existential narratives.

What requires genuine research — and what the lecture fatally lacked — is to take seriously the small social and cultural micro-cycles of society: the everyday, messy things that, in principle, made up our actual lives and shaped a generation.

Because that culture of producing music videos out of nothing, those amateur experiments, those mad initiatives by creators, were a daily mini-revolution by people trying to make miracles from nothing, driven simply by the desire to feel part of something that had been forbidden for years.

That entire narrative — the history of this cultural guerrilla effort — was completely absent.

Instead, the “expo-lecture” offered us cultural homeopathy, dispensing its medicine drop by drop.

It showed us the menu but refused to serve the meal.

On paper, that was also the promise of the event: “The next discussion explores (...); after the discussion, there will be a screening...”

But what happened?

The promise of “discussion and research” was broken.

We were promised “international influences” — precisely the one thing a laptop and phone cannot provide on their own — and received nothing.

No parallel analysis.

We were given the Albanian symptom without the foreign influence.

Which body are we talking about? Madonna’s? Grunge? Turbo-folk?

The premise was the 1990s, yet the videos continued as far as 2005.

Moreover, the whole concept repeated material from 2022 — the first lecture in “TRAGË, A CYCLE OF LECTURES ON FOLKLORE, TRADITION, THE ARTS AND CULTURAL HERITAGE”, published in Revista Albanologjike, volume 5, 2022.

That was precisely the point at which the promised “research” died.

The problem begins when artificiality severs the connection.

A laptop and a phone give you scrolling and a sheet of glass.

The lecture became exactly the same thing: mechanical clicking, time lost in long and undisciplined illustration and, at the end... no discussion.

Instead of analysis, we received categories: “body category”, “animation” and so on.

Fine. But Spotify can do that too.

Without reflection, one is neither curator nor lecturer; you are simply a playlist manager.

Somewhere between the clicks, the purpose of the lecture disappeared.

And here lies the irony: you are in Skanderbeg Square, but you are not speaking to “the Square”.

The transition and our collective memory are not subjects only for experts already familiar with these repeatedly circulated concepts.

These subjects must be returned to the wider public as tools for awareness.

Is it enough to say: “We held the event”?

This critical reflection is not about assigning blame.

Any possible post-event justification loses the thread.

A private conversation, separately with the curator — a luxury — after the room has emptied, however valuable and clarifying it may be, can never replace the public interaction that was promised.

Still less when the justification itself — perhaps, with reason, the absence of archival materials or the need to secure permission from authors — contradicts what actually happened in practice.

Literally, at the end of the day, the question is: how does the logic of an “expo-lecture” breathe if the entire evening was something a phone could have done by itself in a few taps?

In the meantime, both fronts were lost.

The specialized audience was not truly addressed, because the approach remained superficial and without reflection.

And of course the wider public was not addressed either — the public that has no time for the knots and thickets of academic jargon.

The greatest problem for culture is not simply that people do not come, especially when admission is free.

The impasse comes when culture itself becomes so dry that the four people scattered around the room do not feel it is worth lifting their eyes from their smart screens in order to follow what is happening.

We turn this way and that, and still speak of culture for everyone.

At this point I would go further and say that this failure of communication is not merely a local phenomenon.

On the contrary, it is a well-known illness of cultural institutions.

Across the world, the cultural landscape funded by so-called large institutions — donors, ministries, museums, theatres, exhibitions, festivals and even project spaces such as this one — is under constant pressure.

They receive a large share of public funding, yet their budgets are often absorbed almost entirely by the institutions themselves without reaching the public.

For decades, the political promise has been “culture for everyone”.

But reality, as shown by studies carried out by Eurostat, NESTA, SPPA, UIS and others, is quite different.

Statistics are stubborn.

Around half of Europe’s population never attends events of this kind.

The academic world — universities — as well as cultural management and audience studies, particularly in the German-speaking sphere, analyse this as a specific research problem.

So yes, this is a real, well-known and widely measured international problem.

Precisely Benzenberg’s extraordinary work, and Çina’s fundamental and absolutely necessary research, should serve as catalysts for a broader and more valuable reflection.

Perhaps the moment has arrived for all actors — artists, creators, researchers, interest groups and individual members of society — to begin a dialogue about our collective responsibility as custodians and hosts of culture itself.

I want to emphasize that this is not a call intended to provoke conflict.

On the contrary, it is a sincere invitation to synergy.

It is precisely the value of these contributions — and the difficulties encountered, as I understood them, because of the lack of properly organized material in the relevant institutions — that makes this dialogue so necessary.

It is up to us — creators, artists, organizers, curators and institutions — to find a way out of expert language and to show the wider public that this is their story too.

Otherwise, we will continue to produce very important events only for ourselves and one another.

© 2025 Eda Zari. All rights reserved by the author. Reproduction without the author’s permission is prohibited.