Seven Albanian Photographers, a residency

«We are what you were
We will become what you are»...
Spartan anthem

Should we ever feel nostalgia or regret our origins? Should we continuously retrace our steps? Why do we keep asking ourselves these questions of belonging? To know who we really are? No! Just to be able to move forward and forget about it.

Seven Albanian photographers, invited by the Art House and the Marubi Museum, meet in the city of Shkodra, former capital of Albania, to invoke simple and profound images that inspire them. Immigration, this exile that dare not speak its name, is their lot. What keeps them so attached, we do not know it yet: the spirit of the place, love for their native country, the clear conscience of a national rebirth...Their writings diverge and they will converge at some point, in yet undefined forms.

For the moment, they do not know whether to separate from or reappropriate their motivations.
Taking a look back, they sometimes reconnect to the elderly still living in the country or even go further, to the ancestors and founding fathers. They do not analyze the landscape, they contemplate it. So close and yet so far, they do not know what to suppress or preserve. In a few trips made in a short time, they have sensed that the return to their country is accompanied by a dense fog, but it is never too late for this to happen.

They apprehend at some point something strange and irreducible whose intensity - from the landscape to the inhabitants - might refuse them. In the views of Rome, Milan, Florence, Berlin or Leipzig, in the depths of such things so briefly seen, there lie some objects whose meaning is lost: sketched figures, desolate landscapes, visions and stigmata corrupted by the absurdity of a recent story. They certainly aspire to configure a wider horizon. In their eyes, the old world, Albania, becomes something new. However, in front of their lens, this world makes a stand and would disappear if they were not trying to distinguish some "true" forms. In the relationship to this land and its inhabitants, confrontation is the only way to go. Their frames enclose visions that would expand. For a moment, we can’t breathe! While the reason suffers to make transparent what they face, they believe in a photography announcing new tomorrows, a voluntary act of conscience reawakening some buried images.

The desire for clarity illuminates some works that fight against the shadows. Having a camera within reach, we must accept the incomprehensible, we must bear the unbearable. What these photographers do not understand is the fruit of their own darkness. Instinctive and irrational poetic, their interrogation, sometimes naive, accepts and refuses nostalgia. Time merges with contradictions and hesitations. If photography cannot change our existence, it is for sure the promise of a whole new consciousness. While it fails to provide solutions, it offers lucidity and consolation to a sad man. The seven photographers have chosen to travel the Balkans in order to put the mosaic tesserae together and choose the only possible path, the one of sensations and subjectivity.

The meeting with their homeland implies new burdens to bear. They are not able to confess this confused feeling, the indescribable things they long for, the impossible pursuit of a lost unity. For if nations are not eternal, people’s soul might be. Their works depend from the past, but it is up to them to recreate, perpetuate and transform it. And it is through a critical attitude that this past will come alive. The photographic act, between will and urgency, requires oblivion. An essential component for a happy thought is to leave everything you know behind.

Although photographers cannot predict the future, they are invested with a strange power, that of telling us stories with small elements: pieces of various images, a collection of memories, fragments from archives, various loans and shots. It is up to the Earth and its inhabitants to provide the photographers with the essential, the inspiration, the bad faith, what Ernest Renan calls “a daily referendum”.

Consciousness in motion claims action, the factory of images so strongly desired. It is no longer a matter of playing the fool’s game, which has been institutionalized by contemporary photography, a series of frozen postures and odious routine behavior. Photographing must meet a vital necessity. It is in the confrontation with History and their histories that the real works will take shape, in opposition to the general conformism and against the standardization of aesthetics. The photographs anchored in their questions and doubts are the most beautiful field of exploration ever proposed. A privileged moment, carved in the rough stone of the real, forever complex and above all, impenetrable. This quest is not futile and its nobility does not lie in the mere act but in what it requires.