The project CookBook: How to Digest Secrets, focuses on food during the communist period in Albania, particularly on the scarcity of food and its social distribution. Centered largely on bread, the project uses the format of a cookbook. However, rather than strictly explaining how to prepare a dish, the recipes and cooking instructions reveal personal testimonies from Albanians about what it was truly like to eat and survive during the communist regime. Through these written forms of oral history, the project aims to preserve and bring back into public memory the painful past of a society whose experiences were often silenced, concealed, or erased by the state. The cookbook is also conceptually inspired by historical events that took place after the collapse of the communist regime in 1992. At that time, widespread discussion emerged about the destruction of a large number of secret document files belonging to the Ministry of Internal Affairs during 1990 and 1991. The aim of this operation was to eliminate evidence of crimes and abuses committed during the dictatorship. The mechanics of this operation remained largely secret. It was carried out using two specially designed industrial dough mixers commissioned by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, produced in the Ministry’s workshop in Tirana. The documents were placed in the machines in large stacks and mixed with water until they were reduced to pulp. This pulp was then loaded onto trucks and either dumped into rivers or buried underground. Following this same principle and “recipe,” each recipe included in the cookbook is accompanied by a sculptural object made from recycled paper. These sculptures metaphorically echo the historical destruction of archives while transforming erased documents into new material forms. According to archival sources, it is estimated that between 1980 and 1992 approximately 29,000 files were destroyed, representing around 75 percent of all archived documents up to that time.

If you or your family have a story about bread during the communist period that you would like to share and have recorded as part of this project, please feel free to contact me at: kemil-97@live.at

Vila31 x Art Explora, Tirana (ALB) 2026

Documentation Giulia Dajci