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It Wears as it Grows is a story about paranoia, dictatorship and nowadays corruption. All begins on 25th May 1959, at the height of the Cold War, when Nikita Khrushchev visited Albania. Soviet plans to arm Enver Hoxha`s state with submarines and warships, positioning long and medium-range missiles along the Albanian coast, were devised to counter the U.S. missile bases installed in Italy in order to control the Mediterranean. A large number of young Albanian sailors took part in military training under the Soviet army. In 1963, after the break in relations with the USSR, the Albanian navy, in paranoiac fear of enemy attacks, sighted an object that repeatedly appeared and vanished in the sea off the coast at Patok. Believing it to be a submarine, they fired. The object was in fact a Cachalot (Physeter catodon L), the Mediterranean sperm whale. After being recovered, its remains were displayed in the Museum of Natural History in Tirana, where it can still be found. After all, in 2011 the object reappears in the streets of Tirana and like a ghost it wonders around the city, then to be enclosed inside the "Piramida", Hoxha?s mausoleum in Tirana, that was built in 1987. This pyramid-shaped structure was designed by the daughter and son-in-law of the late Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha to glorify his figure and create an eternal monument like the pyramids of the Egyptian pharaohs. The museum was closed with the ending of communist regime in 1992. Among other activities during the 1999 Kosovo War, the mausoleum was used as a base by NATO and a number of international humanitarian organisations. Gradually stripped of its marble cladding and now abandoned, the 17,000 square metre complex will be destroyed so that the new Albanian parliament can be built on the site.

Born in 1980 in Tirana, Albania. He lives and works in Tirana. ?Writer of plays, texts on risk territory and film author, producer of conflict images, Armando Lulaj is a lucid and disrespectful analyst of the dispositive and mechanisms of power hidden backstage of the international claimed forms. He has no desire to rivendicate the context of local belonging; rather, he is orientated toward accentuating the border between economical power, fictional democracy and social disparity in a global context?. In 2003 he founded the Debatikcenter of Contemporary Art. Debatikcenter is a debate centre who wants to analyze the recent changes in contemporary society. Recently, Debatikcenter has become more of a centre for film production run by Armando and his sister Anola Lulaj. Armando Lulaj has participated in exhibitions such as: The Prague Biennial (2003, 2007), Tirana Biennial (2005), the Albanian Pavilion in the 52 Venice Biennial (2007), the 4th Gothenburg Biennale (2007), the 8th Baltic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland (2009), the 6th Berlin Biennial (2010). Among other residency programs we can mention IASPIS (2010). (Marco Scotini)