07/05/2026
Meet the artist: Ermela Teli
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The director of 🎬In The Socialist Paradise ( It Never Rains) will be joining us for the screening, followed by a Q&A 🎥
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📆 16.05 · 16:40
📍 Riffraff
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🎫Link in bio for tickets and more information!
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Growing up in a time when the state controlled nearly everything, I slowly became aware that ideology wasn’t confined to monuments or slogans. It lived with us in our homes, in the way we spoke, and even in the amateur films we made of ourselves. What felt private was, in fact, shaped by a system that quietly dictated how we saw the world and ourselves.
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Since childhood, rain has held deep significance for me. My memories of growing up are filled with rainy days, and one in particular stands out the day I saw my father in prison. Rain became tied to memory, to emotion, to truth. The past always returns to me accompanied by rain. And yet, in the official imagery of the time, those rainy days were nowhere to be found. I longed to see them reflected wondering if someone else, too, had experienced reality through the same melancholic lens.
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During my research, I encountered a study by critic and art historian Gëzim Qëndro, who explored the symbolic erasure of rain in socialist realist art. That absence spoke volumes. The more I looked, the more I found that certain elements of everyday life were systematically excluded from artistic representation. Even the smallest deviation from the idealized vision of socialist realism could be deemed subversive. Many artists were imprisoned for including what should have remained ‘invisible’ shadows, doubt, ambiguity, or any emotional truth that didn’t align with the regime’s narrative.
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My goal is not to reconstruct a factual past, but to ask: What did it feel like to live under a regime where even your most intimate expressions weren’t entirely your own? And how can we reclaim those lost voices using the very tools that once silenced us?
- Ermela Teli
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