Opening speech by Prime Minister Edi Rama at photo exhibition at the Centre for Openness and Dialogue (COD), the art gallery on the first floor of the government building in Tirana, featuring 44 rare photos showing the most significant moments in Aleksander Moisiu’s life:
Most honourable Mr. President and dear Alfred Moisiu!
Honourable friends, benevolent guests and committed contributors to the Aleksander Moisiu Foundation!
I am most pleased to have been given the opportunity to attend an exhibition, a long-awaited event, celebrating an icon of the Albanian culture thanks to your invitation, an invitation extended to everyone through a cycle of 44 rare photographs of Aleksander Moisiu gone on public show for the first time!
In its modesty, this is a beautiful event showcasing an artistic and life story. I am not an expert on the life, work and figure of Alexander Moisiu, but, like many others, I am just a witness to the icon, the image, and his portrait, and, as luck would have it, Aleksander Moisiu is the first actor I happened to know and see. I haven’t seen him alive, but in a clay sculpture when my father endeavoured to materialize his portrait. I was too young back then but I was deeply impressed with the actor’s look that was practically my everlasting template within which I was trying to put others later, including living actors, always referring to Aleksander Moisiu’s crest, his eyelids and portrait to make then the classification of adaptability, living portraits with this icon actor.
He is a colourful character despite all the blackness and whiteness of the pictures and the movies preserved on celluloid or the glass frames of that time: from the velvety emerald to the gold colour of taffeta and embroideries and the goldish grey hair and the costumes he wore on in so many roles that are the jewel in the crown of any actors’ acting career, which gave him once nuances, the textiles, aromas of a world emerging exhausted by the conformism of Victorian styles, and it was exactly the time when he leaped closed eyes and hands tied in the agony of the Vienna secession, or Cubism, in a word, between the past and modernism.
In 1914, the gunboat of the world war was putting a bloody end to the so-called “the Belle Époque” and in this era of ordeals and hardships, which were heroic ordeals too in the world of art, featuring a sublime trio, Stravinsky in music, Diaghilev in ballet and Aleksander Moisu in theatre.
Although we have known and seen him from the viewpoint that Albanians are used to see another Albanian who has gained fame in Europe, try for a moment and imagine who his spectators were!
Stefan Zweig, Max Reinhardt, Charlie Chaplin, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Luigi Pirandello.
Imagine what a luxurious figure of the scene this man was as he gathered around all these phenomenal figures of art and then remained behind every show in all the traces that Mr Logreci has carefully collected and thanks, as I understand, to the passion of a tireless friend of Aleksander Moisiu.
He was an Albanian and I believe he has felt it stronger and better than anyone else when because of being very renowned, an attempt was made to wipe him out on the pretext of his family name, which turned him into the homonym of the great Hebrew prophet, Moses, and this is proved by a certificate, almost stirring I would say, that the head of Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania at that time, Monsignor Visarion Xhuvani sent to the Nazi authorities to save Aleksander Moisiu from persecution and possible extermination. The text read:
“The records collected by the Orthodox community in Kavaja, Durres Metropolis, certify that the late Konstandin Moisiu and his son Moisi Moisiu, father of Aleksander Moisiu, a playwright and actor in Austria, are born in Kavaja and have been baptized by the late priest Ignati at the St. Paraskevi’s Orthodox Church in that city and they are Albanians by blood and descent.
According to the aforementioned documents, it is confirmed that the son of the late Moisi, Aleksander Moisiu, is a Christian and also of Albanian blood and descent. This act replaces the act of baptism and can be used whenever it is needed.
The head of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church,
Archbishop pf whole Albania,
Signed, Visarion.”
And this is an evidence strongly resonating in the aspect of confirming the radiant and dazzling figure of Aleksander Moisiu, and in what President Moisiu repeatedly underlined, his being an undisputed Albanian.
Aleksander Moisiu’s legacy is a legacy resonating in every feature of his character showed in his picture images that being a decent and proud citizen of the world, it is always necessary to turn to your roots and origin, to Albania in this case, and not to turn back on your homeland.
To conclude, it is so to say a kind of breaking the enchanting charm of the rule in the role of Mephistopheles, which it is said that Aleksander Moisiu excelled in playing him in 1909 and thanks to which, just like Faustus, he found out the love of a woman whom the devil proclaimed as the sole reality.
I apologize to the German-speaking guests here, since I am not a such but I think it is pronounced: “ich bin der geist der stets verneint”, or “I am the spirit of perpetual negation.”
Thank you very much and I would like to express my respect and esteem for a great friend like President Alfred Moisiu and for everyone here celebrating a moment about which the foundation has done significant efforts that I hope wont’ be the last but the first step towards building the Aleksander Moisiu museum in a near future.
Thank you!
