Memory of the air

The Marubi Museum documents a century of Albanian history and society through a central nucleus of almost 500.000 negatives and including the work of 13 photographers, mostly from Shkodra and takes its name by Pietro Marubbi, an Italian citizen who moved to Albania for political reasons and that established in Shkodra the first photographic studio of the Country. The Marubi Phototeque was continuously active from 1865, the year of its foundation, until the mid-1900s. Thanks to the fact that it fortuitously escaped destruction during the regime of Enver Hoxha and to the meticulousness with which Marubi recorded the names of his customers, the Albanian community could, in recent years, find photographic traces of their ancestors and discover aspects otherwise lost of its private and collective lives.
Intrigued by this resource, Rizzi and Laita (whose work in recent years became increasingly concerned about the topic of the archive, especially photography related) carried out an extensive research on the territory starting from the area of Shkodra and Tirana and introduced themselves into people’s houses with the aim of finding pictures taken by Pietro Marubbi or his successors and, in some cases, by other photographers whose legacy has merged into the archive.
Starting by those photographs, Rizzi and Laita recorded a series of stories from the inhabitants of those houses and, when possible, from the protagonists of the photos themselves. The artwork that generate from these moments of encounter took the shape of a sound installation and a series of photographs of the domestic interiors in which Marubi's photographs are still preserved. The result is a scattered fresco, composed of stories and personal memories, which have their counterpoint in the Marubi Museum.

If the figure of Pietro Marubi bears witness to the century-old relations between Italy and Albania, this intensity of exchange is once again underlined with Laita and Rizzi’s project The Memory of the Air; which, moreover, was conceived during a research period spent by the two artists at the Art House of Shkodra in the summer of 2019.

By recording both the presence of the photographs in domestic spaces, therefore interpreted as living archives, and the stories related to the subjects of those photographs, the exhibition stands at the intersection between image and word, between past and present, between private and public, subjective and collective; and it highlights the omnipresent traces of history and the vital bond that the individual has with it. Where official history tends to freeze the narrative in an often reductive version, Laita and Rizzi instead bring out nuances, contradictions and unexpected, sometimes unpredictable, often unspoken aspects. All the more so in a country that has been subject, for over forty years, to a dictatorship which has led, among other things, to profound removals. The title of the project, The Memory of the Air, comes from the collection of poems Kujtesa e ajrit (1993) by Visar Zhiti, (Durrës, 1951), victim of communist persecution and witness of the recent history of Albania.