Bunkers on a beach in Albania. Wikimedia. Elian Stefa, Gyler Mydyti - Concrete Mushrooms Project. CC.
Francesc Badia: During your five years as Spanish ambassador to Albania you were able to get to know in some depth a society emerging from a singularly traumatic totalitarian experience and trying to embrace democracy. This must have been a unique experience for you, which has resulted in two books so far, the Poetical Guide to Albania and now Bunkers. Is the latter a reflection on totalitarianism?
Manuel Montobbio: Bunkers is a book about power. About how total power is built and what are its limits. Power is not only the capacity of physical action, of collective action by individuals in a given society, but also the ability to determine how these individuals see the world. How artists create, how literature is written. That is, not just the action on the physical world in which political life unfolds, but also the action on the collective imaginary and the mental universe. Not only this, but also on the projection of other sources of power which leads, for example, to constitutionally decreeing the nonexistence of God: Albania has been the only constitutionally atheist state in history.
