THE WAY WE LIVE - Eight Voices on Architecture, Urban Life and the Changing Landscape
How do we inhabit, shape, and experience the spaces around us? This article brings together eight authors and eight diverse voices in architecture and urban photography, offering critical and contemporary perspectives on The Way We Live. Through distinct visual approaches, their work explores how we inhabit, shape, and relate to the spaces around us—from the overlooked details of everyday urban life and the legacies of post-socialist transformation to disappearing architectures, threatened landscapes, cultural heritage, environmental vulnerability, and the changing dynamics of public space. Moving between documentary observation and personal interpretation, these projects reveal the complex connections between architecture, society, memory, and identity. Together, Leonard Qylafi, Olson Lamaj, Thomas Krempke, Robert Pichler, Nick St.Oegger, Wandrille Potez, Ilir Tsouko, and Vlasov Sulaj invite us to look beyond the visible environment and consider the broader social, cultural, and political forces that shape the places we call home and the ways we live.
How do we inhabit, shape, and experience the spaces around us? This article brings together eight authors and eight diverse voices in architecture and urban photography, offering critical and contemporary perspectives on The Way We Live. Through distinct visual approaches, their work explores how we inhabit, shape, and relate to the spaces around us—from the overlooked details of everyday urban life and the legacies of post-socialist transformation to disappearing architectures, threatened landscapes, cultural heritage, environmental vulnerability, and the changing dynamics of public space. Moving between documentary observation and personal interpretation, these projects reveal the complex connections between architecture, society, memory, and identity. Together, Leonard Qylafi, Olson Lamaj, Thomas Krempke, Robert Pichler, Nick St.Oegger, Wandrille Potez, Ilir Tsouko, and Vlasov Sulaj invite us to look beyond the visible environment and consider the broader social, cultural, and political forces that shape the places we call home and the ways we live.
Leonard Qylafi - The Book of Negatives
“The Book of Negatives” of the visual artist Leonard Qylafi is a photographic series made on 35mm film, created during the artist’s walks through the city, capturing moments of everyday life, people, landscapes, gestures that might otherwise go unnoticed. Years later, while scanning the negatives, Qylafi revisits these images from a different perspective, discovering and highlighting details that once seemed insignificant. At the end of the creative process, the selected fragments appear positive, isolated, against the negative image of the film. The subject is not displaced, but simply brought into attention, by changing the relationship between centre and periphery. The Book of Negatives reminds us that even the most ordinary moments can hold something unexpected, waiting to be discovered when we take the time to look a little closer.
Olson Lamaj - Between Pattern and Shadow
Olson Lamaj is a visual artist and photographer whose practice explores the relationship between image, ideology, and collective memory, examining how political, social, and cultural systems shape identity and representation.
In his photographic series “Between Pattern and Shadow”, Lamaj focuses on the overlooked details of Tirana’s urban landscape. Plastic chairs, improvised structures, exposed cables, unfinished buildings, and nationalist symbols become traces of the social and historical forces shaping the city. Through daily observation, he builds a personal archive of Albania’s post-socialist transformation, revealing how past and present coexist in an ever-changing urban environment.
Drawing on his background in painting, Lamaj combines compositional precision with a documentary attentiveness to everyday life. His carefully constructed images transform urban elements into graphic patterns of form, shadow, and texture, while humour and irony reveal the contradictions embedded in the landscape.
Thomas Krempke - Dream
Thomas Krempke is a Swiss photographer whose work moves between urban observation and poetic interpretation. His images explore the tension between architecture as a physical reality and the way it is perceived, remembered, and reimagined through photography. With a sensitive eye for atmosphere, light, and spatial ambiguity, Krempke builds visual narratives that go beyond documentation, inviting viewers to experience the city as both a constructed and emotional landscape.
His recent project in Albania, “Ëndërr” (Dream), reflects this approach—capturing fragments of urban life, architecture, and transformation through a lens that feels both precise and elusive. Developed over five years, the project emerged from his fascination with the country’s rapid transformation, where communist legacies, informal development, and aspirations for the future coexist in a complex urban fabric. Through photographs of buildings, everyday situations, and portraits of people pursuing their dreams, Krempke looks beyond documentary representation to explore how we perceive and experience the places we inhabit. The title reflects both the Albanian dream of finding fortune and happiness at home or abroad and the Central European search for an undiscovered destination. Ëndërr is an ongoing reflection on individual aspirations, urban transformation, and the shifting boundaries between the real and the imagined.
Robert Pichler - Kiosks
“Kiosks” is the latest project by Austrian photographer and anthropologist Robert Pichler, presented in the photobook “Kiosks: Temporary Architecture and Living Social Environments on the Albanian Coast”.
Emerging in the early 1990s, as Albania opened its economy to the free market, kiosks responded to an urgent need for commercial spaces. Over the following two decades, they became emblems of individual initiative and a vital source of livelihood for thousands of Albanian families in the wake of the mass closure of state-owned enterprises. Today, these ephemeral structures are gradually disappearing, displaced by the relentless concrete development of the coastline and the expansion of mass tourism. Through this photographic series, Pichler seeks to preserve their image at a moment of disappearance, documenting not only a vernacular building typology but also a defining chapter in Albania’s post-socialist transition.
The photographs constitute a tribute to the kiosk as an expression of informality and impermanence. Produced between 2010 and 2022, the series presents these improvised structures through rigorously composed, minimalist frontal views. The formal precision of the images stands in striking contrast to the provisional nature of their subjects, bringing their modest architectural forms, materials and individual character into focus. Pichler interweaves these architectural portraits with portraits and stories of the people who inhabit Albania’s coastal landscape, creating a nuanced account of everyday life and the social realities of transition. At once a record of what is vanishing and a reflection on what is taking its place, Kiosks traces a shifting coastal landscape in which the fragile, improvised structures of an earlier era give way to the increasingly dominant presence of concrete.
Nick St.Oegger - The Lament of the Mountains
Nick St.Oegger is an american documentary photographer whose work explores the relationship between people and places. He has been working in the Western Balkans since 2013, developing an extensive body of work addressing a sensitive issue: the construction of hydropower projects on the rivers of the region known as the “Blue Heart of Europe,” and their impact on its rich biodiversity and the unique cultures of local communities. In “Kuçedra”, St.Oegger explores the Vjosa, one of Europe’s last wild rivers, and the proposed hydropower projects along its course that threaten to alter its flow, damage its exceptional biodiversity, and displace thousands of people through the creation of reservoirs. A vital habitat for numerous endangered plant and animal species, many of which have disappeared from other European rivers, the Vjosa also holds cultural and economic significance for the rural communities along its banks, which once played an important role in Albania’s agricultural industry. Through landscapes, portraits, and interior details, he documents the river’s environment in its natural state as it faces the threat of irreversible transformation.
In “The Lament of the Mountains”, St.Oegger turns his attention to the malësorët of Kelmendi, a pastoral shepherd culture and one of the last of its kind in Europe, whose livelihood is threatened by a dozen dams planned along alpine rivers. As the government receives subsidies and loans from Western banks to address the energy crisis through the construction of small-scale hydropower plants, public consultation on the potential consequences for biodiversity and the traditional lifestyle of highland shepherds remains absent. While Italy, Austria, and Greece have secured UNESCO recognition and protection for pastoral shepherding practices, no equivalent status exists in Albania, making the survival of this cultural tradition even more precarious.
Wandrille Potez - Eagles and Angels
For photographer and researcher Wandrille Potez, Albania’s Drino Valley is a place where history, faith, and nature coexist in a fragile balance. Since 2017, and through repeated journeys from 2022 onward, he has explored its remote post-Byzantine churches and monasteries, documenting abandoned frescoes, weathered stone walls, and traces of devotion that have endured centuries of political change, neglect, and environmental exposure. Combining photography, art history, and documentary research, Potez approaches these sites as living testimonies to cultural heritage, sustained by the quiet rituals and care of local communities. His work reveals not only their architectural and artistic significance, but also their vulnerability and the intimate relationship between sacred spaces, landscape, and everyday life.
Potez’s commitment to preserving this overlooked heritage has extended beyond photography. At his initiative, the monasteries of the Drino Valley were included in the World Monuments Fund’s Watch List 2025, bringing international attention to their conservation. Following exhibitions in Albania and France, including a presentation at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris in 2025, his research deepened during his 2024–2025 residency at Vila 31 – Art Explora in Tirana. There, he developed the narrative structure of “Eagles and Angels”, a forthcoming publication bringing together photographs, historical research, and texts. Through this ongoing project, Potez invites us to encounter a little-known landscape where centuries of history, enduring faith, and the forces of nature converge.
Ilir Tsouko - Beyond Destruction
Ilir Tsouko is an Albanian-born visual storyteller, documentary photographer, and filmmaker whose work explores themes of identity creation, migration, political and climate change. The project “Beyond Destruction” is developed in the areas of Greece that in 2023 experienced a series of devastating natural disasters. Wildfires and floods took numerous lives, destroyed homes and transformed entire landscapes, leaving communities grappling with grief, loss and uncertainty. Months later, the photographer Ilir Tsouko and writer Anja Troelenberg travelled to the affected areas, seeking to understand what remains after the media spotlight fades. They encountered a profound paradox: even in the darkest moments, catastrophe can reveal the brightest aspects of human nature. Disasters do more than destroy; they expose the realities of our society, showing how we fracture or unite when confronted with the unimaginable. Beyond Destruction explores survival, the power of community and the resilience of the human spirit.
The project follows a new chapter in Albania, shifting its focus to the period before disaster strikes and to the often-unseen work that becomes vital in times of crisis. It follows firefighters, civil protection teams and others working on the front lines of preparedness, anticipating risks and preparing for what may lie ahead.
Vlasov Sulaj - The City as a Place of Dissent
Vlasov Sulaj is an Albanian visual artist and photojournalist whose experimental approach blends documentary and abstract photography in the search for a distinct visual language, earning international recognition through exhibitions and awards.
Student-led protests of October 2026 in Tirana transformed public spaces into sites of assembly, political dissent and demands for accountability. Gathering around the Ministry of Education, the Prime Minister’s Office, Skanderbeg Square and the main boulevard, demonstrators reshaped familiar urban settings into places of collective expression and confrontation. Government facades, institutional entrances and police barriers framed these encounters, revealing the tension between the architecture of power and the ways citizens inhabit and reclaim public space. Through images of marches, national flags, police barriers and solitary figures facing institutional facades, Sulaj explores the changing relationship between people and their urban surroundings, reflecting on visibility, participation and the right to make demands in the heart of the city.
On the Artistic Practice of Olson Lamaj
Olson Lamaj is a visual artist and photographer based in Tirana, Albania. He studied Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and completed a Master's degree in Artistic Photography at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. His artistic practice explores the relationship between image, ideology, and collective memory, focusing on how political, social, and cultural systems construct identities and modes of representation…
Olson Lamaj
The City as Ideology, the Object as Symptom
© Olson Lamaj, Autoportrait from the series Between Pattern and Shadow
Olson Lamaj is a visual artist and photographer based in Tirana, Albania. He studied Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and completed a Master's degree in Artistic Photography at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. His artistic practice explores the relationship between image, ideology, and collective memory, focusing on how political, social, and cultural systems construct identities and modes of representation. Photography is the primary medium of his work, which he combines with research, artists' publications, and installation to create narratives that move between documentation and interpretation. In his work, photography functions not merely as a record of reality but as an artistic language capable of producing poetic, ironic, and at times theatrical narratives about everyday urban life.
Lamaj's artistic practice develops alongside his commitment to shaping and promoting the contemporary art scene in Albania. From 2012 to 2017, he co-founded MIZA Gallery, an alternative art space dedicated to supporting emerging artists and fostering a critical platform for contemporary art in Tirana. He is also the founder and editor of Pararoja Publishing House, an independent publishing platform focused on artists' books and the dissemination of visual narratives through zines and limited-edition publications.
Among his best-known projects and exhibitions are Between Pattern and Shadow, Transitioning into Green, Holy Muscle, (Over)Identification, and The Cat Above and the Mouse Below. He is the recipient of the Ardhje Award and has participated in international artist residencies in New York, Vienna, and Tirana. His work has been exhibited in museums, institutions, and galleries throughout Albania and across Europe.
About the Series Between Pattern and Shadow
Between Pattern and Shadow is a photographic series born out of the everyday observation of the city of Tirana. It can be understood as a visual study of the aesthetics of Albania's post-socialist transition—not through major historical events, but through the urban landscape, ordinary objects, and the traces that architecture and everyday life have left upon the city.
In Lamaj's photographs, the city is not presented as a monumental landscape but as an organism composed of fragments. His attention is drawn to the elements that usually remain outside our field of vision: a plastic chair abandoned on the sidewalk, an improvised window, a crooked fence, a discarded tire, a dead bird lying on the asphalt, or the dense web of electrical cables stretching across building façades. These are not merely ordinary objects; they function as symptoms of a society in transformation. Rather than photographing tourist landmarks or the representative urban spaces of the city centre, Lamaj turns his gaze toward its margins. This approach aligns his practice with a kind of archaeology of the present, where the most commonplace objects become material evidence of the ideologies that continue to shape everyday life.
The Albania that emerged from the post-socialist transition did not produce a coherent Western modernity, but rather an urban landscape composed of historical layers, informal construction, architectural improvisation, and the remnants of a brutalist legacy. It is precisely this contradictory terrain that constitutes the material of Lamaj's photographs. Within this urban chaos, he seeks to uncover an everyday aesthetic, suggesting that chance, improvisation, and imperfection can themselves generate a visual language with a distinct identity.
In this sense, the city is not portrayed through heroic landscapes or romantic notions of national identity, but through fragments of contemporary Albanian reality. Post-socialist capitalism intertwines with nationalist symbolism: eagles, stars, and patriotic iconography coexist alongside unfinished roads, exposed concrete, and informal construction, producing a landscape in which the contradictions of transition become unmistakably visible.
His compositions are calm, frontal, and carefully controlled. This distance is not intended to suggest neutrality; rather, it establishes a particular mode of reading. Objects are photographed as though they were archaeological artefacts—material witnesses to a historical period that continues to generate new forms of urban life. Lamaj is particularly interested in the ways urban elements produce accidental visual rhythms: electrical cables trace abstract compositions, shadows interrupt façades, while plastic, metal, and concrete establish unexpected formal relationships.
Photography here operates not simply as a means of recording reality, but as an analytical tool through which the urban landscape can be read as a cultural and ideological structure.
The title itself, Between Pattern and Shadow, encapsulates this relationship. "Pattern" refers not only to the graphic arrangements that emerge across the photographic surface, but also to the invisible political, economic, and cultural structures that organise urban life. "Shadow," by contrast, represents everything that escapes planning: improvisation, chance, memory, and those spaces where systems lose control.
Between Pattern and Shadow is ultimately more than a photographic series about Tirana. It is a reflection on how photography can read the city as a cultural text, where every object, every surface, and every trace contains invisible histories. Lamaj does not photograph the city simply to show what Tirana looks like; he photographs it to understand how history, politics, and ideology continue to manifest themselves upon its surface. In this sense, the urban landscape is not merely the backdrop to social life, but the material form through which history continues to be written.
Interview with Olson Lamaj
Alketa Misja for Tatì Space: Hello Mr. Lamaj! Thank you very much for accepting the invitation to be interviewed by Tatì Space and sharing your thoughts about your work with our readers.
In your series Between Pattern and Shadow, you repeatedly return to the everyday fragments of the city. What draws you to these urban details, and how do you understand the relationship between Albania's post-socialist transition and the aesthetic produced by the city?
Olson Lamaj: For years, I have made it a habit that whenever I leave home, I take my camera with me—even when I'm not sure I'll use it. This constant routine, combined with an attentiveness to the materiality of the city, has gradually allowed me to build a personal archive of the urban landscape in its everyday condition.
What has always interested me is not the city as a finished image, nor architecture as an isolated object, but the way the city is produced through small interventions, improvisations, and everyday gestures. Within these fragments I have found an unexpected aesthetic, where the old and the new are not in clear opposition but coexist in an irregular and often contradictory way.
In this sense, transition is not merely a historical backdrop but an ongoing condition of the city itself, continuously generating new visual forms—often unexpected, yet deeply revealing of the way we experience the spaces we inhabit.
Tatì Space: Cables, plastic, fences, concrete, stray animals, and temporary structures frequently appear in your photographs as central elements of the image. Rather than remaining incidental details of the urban landscape, they can be read as signs of a broader social and ideological reality. What do these ordinary objects represent for you, and why do you think they are important to understanding post-socialist Albania?
Olson Lamaj: These urban objects are, in a way, the raw material from which I construct my photographs. Cables, concrete, plastic, fences, and temporary structures are not simply accidental features of the city; I see them as traces of the way it has been built and continues to transform. They constitute a kind of visual matter through which one can read not only the city's physical form, but also its social and historical condition.
At the same time, stray animals—birds and dogs in particular—play a very important role in my work. For me, they are equal inhabitants of the city, inseparable from its existence. I often feel a sense of empathy towards them, as though, in a quiet way, I recognize something of myself in their presence—in the way they move, adapt, and negotiate the urban environment.
There is something profoundly genuine in this coexistence between nature and the city, even when it unfolds under difficult conditions. In a way, these figures embody a quiet resilience and an ability to find their place within urban chaos. That sensitivity, that direct relationship with them, often becomes part of the way I observe and photograph the city.
Tatì Space: Your compositions are often frontal, calm, and marked by a noticeable emotional distance. At the same time, many of your photographs create graphic rhythms and abstract relationships between form, shadow, and texture. To what extent do you see photography as a document of social reality, and to what extent as a formal or abstract visual structure?
Olson Lamaj: I believe this way of photographing is directly connected to my artistic education. Having studied painting and coming from a visual arts background has led me to think constantly in terms of composition. There is a natural need for me to organize the elements within the frame with precision, often pursuing a certain kind of compositional "perfection."
When I stand before a subject, I frequently change my point of view until every element within the frame functions as part of a single visual structure. It is a highly intuitive process, yet at the same time a very controlled one—a kind of dialogue between myself and the subject.
In this sense, photography, for me, comes close to constructing a painting. Urban elements such as cables, wires, or architectural structures often appear to me as brushstrokes within an informal painting, where the city itself becomes an open canvas.
Tatì Space: Patriotic symbols, advertisements, kitsch objects, and traces of urban decay often coexist in your work, creating a subtle sense of humour and absurdity. These images can be read as reflections on the ways consumerism and national identity have become intertwined in post-socialist Albania. Do you see post-socialist consumerism as a new form of visual ideology, and what role does irony play in the construction of your images?
Olson Lamaj: Political and social concerns are not simply thematic layers in my work; they are structural conditions that shape it. In the Albanian context, where politics does not function merely as a background but as a regime of everyday life, urban space itself becomes a field in which ideologies are constantly materialized through objects, remnants, and built forms.
My practice seeks to read the city as an open archive of transition, where past and present are not separated in a linear way but coexist as overlapping layers. The post-socialist landscape does not produce a new homogeneous order, but rather an economy of fragments: abandoned structures, unfinished infrastructure, and signs of late capitalism that continuously intervene upon one another. Within this entanglement, the ordinary object is never neutral; it functions as a symptom of a historical and ideological system in constant transformation.
In this sense, what is often perceived as urban chaos is not the absence of order, but a new form of visual rationality, where ideology is no longer articulated through official statements but through the materiality of everyday life. Humour and irony, in this context, do not serve as aesthetic relief but as mechanisms of critical distance, making the internal contradictions of this visual regime visible.
Tatì Space: Your practice seems less interested in constructing linear narratives than in examining how power, memory, and culture become materialized within urban space and everyday objects. Do you see photography as a tool capable of revealing the invisible social, political, and cultural structures of a society?
Olson Lamaj: Yes, fundamentally that is precisely what my photography attempts to do: to read and make visible the structures that usually remain invisible in everyday life. I am not interested in photography as a straightforward record of reality, but as a means of analyzing it.
Within urban space, power, memory, and culture rarely appear in explicit or narrative forms. Instead, they materialize through dispersed, often modest manifestations: objects, architectural interventions, the organization of space, and the ways in which that space is occupied and used. Photography allows me to read these layers as a kind of open text.
In this sense, the image is not simply a representation of reality, but a mode of thinking—an instrument through which reality can be understood by reading its visual traces.
Tatì Space: Thank you, Olson, for sharing your thoughts and reflections with us. We wish you every success with your future artistic projects