Edi Rama, who is a visual artist as well as Prime Minister of Albania, knows how to unite these two fundamentally different tasks creatively. Hence, producing his artistic calendar pages is just as important a part of his daily life as his political documents. In struggling to deal with his immense workload and with the pressing responsibilities of building a new society in his native country Albania, art helps him to communicate.
He records his daily thoughts and ideas on thousands of calendar pages in colourful abstraction, creating intimate moments. He describes the process as an eruption of profoundly interior forces, which he is able to liberate in his art. Together these daily drawings constitute a visual diary of his personal and political life translated into abstract forms and dynamic lines and entirely free of representational topical content.
Edi Rama’s state office is also his studio. His illustrated leaves of his memo can be seen as resistance to and liberation from the rigid and standardized structures of his daily official agenda. The drawings seem to expand beyond the boundaries of the standard size sheets with their functional linear framework like flowers that break through concrete. Rama’s forms disrupt the constrained space of the DIN A4 norm and capture a time beyond such formal organization – in these forms an imaginative visual present, past and future emerges. In this way Rama integrates art and politics and connects imagination and administration in a manner that unites flowery organic forms with sober, political duties. In our solo exhibition ‘Les fleurs du calendrier – calendar flowers’ we are showing a selection of these unusual drawings from Edi Rama’s time as a mayor of Tirana.