In Albania the communist past is largely ignored. But it still exists in people’s memories and minds, through fears and injustices gone unpunished. This past is only omitted, removed from the daylight, the light of consciousness. Sometimes though, it comes back at night, to haunt its survivors.
The sites I photographed reflect this half-forgotten past. They mostly tower from the city skylines or are so hulking to transform entire territories. These sites are ignored, not demolished but neither used for other purposes.
Could they instead be used for a new, positive meaning in today’s Albania? And by doing so, would the country be able to finally come to terms with its recent but neglected past?
]]>It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, there were high expectations to find a job and make a fortune in the capital of a state that was reborn from the rubble of the totalitarian regime. For many there were no other alterative.
Meanwhile Albania has become a country of rapid growth and strong disegualities where the majority of citizens are struggling or, as in the case of Institut, is socially excluded.
In Institut, what was supposed to be a temporary arrangement has become a permanent situation, which twenty years on continues keeping that precarious feeling of every beginning.
Currently about 600 families live in Institut (approximately 3500 people). Each family lives in a tiny, squalid room, with no running water and a gas stove for cooking. In the absence of a proper sewage system, a toilet is shared among several families and external abusive cables provide a few hours a day of electricity. The few who are able to work do odd jobs, while most of children are illiterate. Everything seems temporary as there is not proper future, only smell of burned garbage and social tension, alcohol and depression are permanent. Violence and intolerance in children’s games, promiscuity and degradation in adults’ behaviors, everywhere there are clear signs of domestic violence and psychological exhaustion.
What has started as temporary has become a lifetime. There is no way out.
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“It would have been fair to leave this world together, but if not, I am happy she was the first to go as I would have never wanted her to go through this pain”, he told me.
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