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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Edi Rama is the mayor of Tirana, Albania, and it's safe to say that the Balkans have never produced a politician so beguiling. You see him everywhere: six feet six, three-day beard, baggy black pachuco pants, funky black vest, red shirt, red socks, and the kind of shapeless black frock coat that East German clergymen used to wear. You hear him everywhere: a gravelly basso exhorting the lazy, seducing the skeptics, booming his way through a hip-hop track about Tirana that half the city seems to own. He is inexhaustible. He spends his days repairing the body and soul of a shattered capital and his nights prowling its streets, seeing that the work got done, and that no one has been stealing street lights or dropping beer bottles or cigarette wrappers--that people are behaving like citizens. Rama is a Balkan original, and maybe the most original thing about him is that he isn't really a politician. He is an artist who, you might say, took Tirana for his canvas.
Rama has been in office for nearly five years (he was elected in 2000, at the age of thirty-six, and reelected three years later), and the first thing he did as mayor was to order paint. He blasted the facades of Tirana's gray Stalinist apartment blocks with color--riotous, Caribbean color--turning buildings into patchworks of blues, greens, oranges, purples, yellows, and reds, and the city itself into something close to a modern-masters sampler. (Art in America put a Tirana facade on its December cover; it looked like an abstract painting.) It was an extravagant gesture, but Rama thinks in extravagant gestures. "The city was without organs," he says, meaning that it was a dump, and that nothing in it functioned. ("Kandahar" is how he usually describes it.) "I thought, My colors will have to replace those organs. It was an intervention."
The interventions continued. Within a few years, Rama had managed to clear the choked, riverine city center of two thousand illegal kiosks and bars and cafes and shops and whorehouses and sleeping barracks and traffickers' storeroom "motels"--the detritus of a decade of post-Communist freedom frenzy on city property. He carted away a hundred and twenty-three thousand tons of concrete and ninety thousand tons of garbage. He dredged Tirana's Lana River, seeded thirty-six acres of public parks, relaid old boulevards, and planted four thousand trees. He lit the city--literally, since only seventy-eight street lights worked when he took it over. He cajoled the money for all this transformation out of the World Bank and the European Union and the United Nations Development Program and George Soros and the score of foundations and aid agencies and N.G.O.s that had set up shop in Albania in the early nineties. And he cajoled the work out of local contractors: anybody who wanted to build anything in the capital had to "contribute." People enjoy Tirana now. They stroll and shop on the shady streets of what used to be their Politburo's version of a gated neighborhood. They read the paper and drink espresso under the white umbrellas of cheerful, sprawling cafes. There is nothing remotely like Tirana in the rest of Albania. Most of its cities are still Kandahar. And its politicians, as often as not, are the clan bosses who control the contraband.
"People can say that my color is only makeup," Rama told me, as we walked through town one mild February night, stopping on an old stone Ottoman footbridge he had just restored. "But suppose all makeup disappeared. Suppose all women had no makeup, no pretty dresses, no pretty hair." It is Rama's belief that Albanians are somewhat aesthetically challenged--and his mission is to meet that challenge. "These are not Parisians," he said. "They can be calmed by beauty."
Not long ago, Edi Rama was living a happy, hardscrabble artist's life in the City of Light. He was a good painter, not a great one, and the only real difference between him and hundreds of other young painters making their vie de boheme in Paris then was that Rama was an Albanian painter--a breed not much seen in the West, or, for that matter, in most of the East, in the half century since a Communist Party Secretary named Enver Hoxha put Albania in the deep freeze of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and shut the door. Rama had come to Paris in 1995 on a two-year fellowship to the Cite Internationale des Arts, and stayed. He didn't have much, but it was pretty much all he wanted: a cheap apartment on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine; a friendly neighborhood cafe; a great-looking German girlfriend; an old laptop; and his paints. He had had some shows, his paintings were selling, and he was feasting on Western art. He had fallen in love with Picasso on a trip to the Kunsthalle Bremen ("I saw my first Picasso; I thought, I'll die") and then with Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon and Max Ernst. Now he was in love with the Louvre and its Paolo Uccellos, and was working day and night on a series of new paintings. "Edi was a free spirit," his friend and occasional Paris roommate, the Albanian video artist Anri Sala, says. "He was never interested in things, only in things that brought him closer to his vision." He certainly wasn't interested in trading Paris for Albania.
People were leaving Albania then (nearly a million, by the end of the nineties), not returning. The country was in chaos. Depending on whom you asked, it was "recovering from fifty years of Communism" or "making an irrepressible transition to democracy" or "being its Balkan self," which, for practical purposes, meant that it was held hostage to...
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