Director Manfredi Lucibello's latest documentary "The Tirana Conspiracy" (Il complotto di Tirana) examines one of the most audacious and revealing hoaxes in contemporary art history. The 71-minute film, produced by Small Boss with support from Regione Emilia-Romagna, brings together renowned photographer Oliviero Toscani, artist Marco Lavagetto, and various art world insiders to revisit the scandal that rocked the inaugural Tirana Biennial 25 years ago in December 2000.

The hoax originated from a 1999 Flash Art magazine ranking of Italy's top fifty artists, where Toscani, famous for his provocative Benetton advertising campaigns, appeared second to last, just above Marco Lavagetto, who was dubbed "the poor man's Cattelan." A year later, Lavagetto orchestrated what he would later call one of contemporary art's biggest media hoaxes as his revenge.

Lavagetto impersonated Toscani through email correspondence with Flash Art editor Giancarlo Politi, who eventually invited the supposed photographer to curate a section of the first Tirana Biennial. The fake Toscani proposed four equally fictitious artists designed to push the moral and conceptual boundaries of the art world to their limits.

These fabricated artists included Dimitri Bioy, who claimed to be a pedophile; Bola Ecua, allegedly a Nigerian activist being pursued by her government; Carmelo Gavotta, described as a pornographer whose name was actually an anagram of Lavagetto's own name; and Hamid Picardo, supposedly Osama bin Laden's official photographer. These characters served as a grotesque mirror reflecting contemporary art's hunger for scandal and shock value.

The deception extended beyond the fake artists themselves. Lavagetto also offered to design the Biennial's poster free of charge, creating an image that transformed the Albanian flag into that of the Kosovo Liberation Army. This gesture proved deeply provocative given the region's ongoing post-war tensions at the time.

The elaborate ruse was finally exposed when Politi printed the official exhibition catalog and sent it to the real Toscani, who discovered that his identity had been stolen. Even after Lavagetto's confession, many people continued to believe the four fictional artists actually existed, demonstrating the hoax's lasting impact on the art community.

The real Toscani filed a complaint for identity theft, and Italian police eventually traced the fraudulent emails back to Lavagetto's computer. The subsequent trial resulted in Lavagetto's acquittal on criminal charges but a civil conviction requiring him to pay 30,000 euros in damages – the same amount Toscani had already received from Flash Art magazine.

Lucibello notes that the verdict symbolically divided guilt between those who created the deception and those who fell for it. Through interviews, archival materials, and reenactments, "The Tirana Conspiracy" reconstructs how this elaborate hoax not only humiliated key figures but also exposed the art system's fragile foundations, including its market-driven narratives, dependence on reputation, and tendency to sanctify controversy as artistic depth.

The director frames the operation as "a mirror for an industry that had plunged the knife into its own weak points." However, Lucibello observes that 25 years later, little appears to have changed in the art world. He concludes that "The Tirana Conspiracy had the merit of exposing the sickness of the system but the shortcoming of failing to cure it."

Lucibello uses this story not only to examine the nature of art but also to question his own filmmaking medium. Citing the Treccani definition of documentary as "a film based on an ontological relationship with reality," the director wonders what happens when reality itself is fabricated. "My camera will be at the service of reality," he states. "But what if there is no reality? I will have no choice but to represent it for what it is: a lie."

The film becomes a meta-documentary – a work about deception that questions the truthfulness of its own form. Lucibello transforms the hoax into an ethical question for both artists and viewers, asking: "What if the greatest artwork is the lie we choose to believe?" The documentary serves as both a historical examination and a contemporary warning about the art world's continued vulnerability to manipulation and its appetite for controversy over substance.