Institut is a neighborhood situated only 5 km from Tirana’s city center, the emerging cool capital of a country in economic growth and inspiring to join the EU. It is made of eight buildings constructed in the 60’s during the communist regime in order to accommodate students of the Faculty of Agriculture. Since the 90’s, after the regime fell apart, due to a strong internal migration and the housing crisis, those same buildings were occupied by hundred of people coming from rural and extremely poor areas in the north of the country.

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.