Artwork in Albania: The process of transformation from propaganda tool before the 90s to JT tool after the 90s Pablo de Greiff highlights that memorials are attempts to provide benefits directly to the victims of certain types of crimes’ and can be understood as ‘acts or objects, as things done or given.14 The main contribution of building memorials mainly in public spaces is that by transmitting memories to the new generation, survivors seek to keep memories of the past alive.15 But not only memorial not only transmit the past, they also ever since the rise to prominence of “countermonument” (Gegen Denkmal) theory and practice in response to TJ issues pertinent to the Holocaust, artistic interventions in monumental art and memorial art projects have regularly (and, one may add, intentionally) sparked controversy.16 Those controversies may result in public debate, which will be focused later on, in the material. 1.3. Memory as art The concept memory as art according to Stephen Esquith is defined as the “re-enactment” of memory in search for collective understanding and recognition.17 Memory as art has the potential to bring to attestation important issues from human rights violation to the political and existential analyses. Another argument is that memory as art can function as a spark or as sustenance; either way, action preserved in art naturally begets more action in response.18 The testimonies conveyed through art have the ability to capture attention becoming an attractive form of storytelling. 1.4. Artworks encouraging debates in public sphere Another form in which artworks can affect the process of transitional justice is fostering public debates on sensitive issues. This is supported by both Weaver and Colleran, saying: Art can play a role in transitional justice processes aimed at confronting the culture of silence, denial or rationalization.19 Similar precedents where artwork can provoke public debate, as intended by the photographic exhibitions of Ron Haviv, whose ‘Blood and Honey’ exhibition explores the wars that took place in ex-Yugoslavia.20 According to Sanja Bahun, while all the arts contribute to transitional justice discourse, there is also a culture-specific preference, in each transitional site, for an art form best suited to convey complex socio-political messages.21 Meanwhile, L. McLeod et al. points out that Art has an important role to play in these debates in providing a space for reflection about the practice of transitional justice via exposing the temporal complexity of transitional justice. Specifically, we suggest that art stimulates exploration of alternatives.22 14. Pablo de Greiff, Justice and Reparations’ in The Handbook on Reparations (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 453. 15. Lia Kent, Local Memory Practices in East Timor: Disrupting Transitional Justice Narratives, The International Journal of Transitional Justice no.5, (2011), 444. 16. Claudio Corradetti, Nir Eisikovits, Theorizing Transitional Justice (Ashgate Publishing, Surrey, England, 2015), 161. 17. Esquith Stephen, Complicity in Mass Violence, Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly 34, no. 4. (2004), 28. 18. Anson Ching, Transitional justice and transformative possibilities in memory as art, ((Vancouver, Canada, University of British Columbia 2018), 38. 19. James Weaver and Jeanne Colleran, Whose Memory? Whose Justice? Personal and Political trauma in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden’ Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts Vol. 16, No. 1 (2011), 32; Rosemarie Buikema‘Performing Dialogical Truth and Transitional Justice: The Role of Art in the Becoming Post-Apartheid of South Africa’ Memory Studies Vol. 5, No. 3 (2012): 283. 20. Ron Haviv, Blood and Hone, can be viewed at http://photoarts.com/haviv/bloodandhoney/ (20 August 2019). 21. Sanja Bahun, Transitional Justice and the Arts: Reflections on the Field, Published in Theorizing Transitional Justice, eds. Nir Eisikovits, Claudio Corradetti, Jack Volpe Rotondi (Ashgate, Routledge, 2014), 158. 22. Laura McLeod with Jovana Dimitrijevic and Biliana Rakocevic Artistic Activism, Public Debate and Temporal Complexities: Fighting for Transitional Justice in Serbia, In: Olivera Simic and Peter Rush, editor(s). The Art of Transitional Justice, (New York: Springer, 2014), 40. 149