Tatì Space 11/1/26 Tatì Space 11/1/26

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.

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.

Alketa Misja 11/13/25 Alketa Misja 11/13/25

Kiosks by Robert Pichler

“Kiosks” is the latest project by Austrian photographer Robert Pichler, presented in Tirana in the form of the photo book Kiosks: Temporary Architecture and Social Living Environments on the Albanian Coast, published by Bahoe Books, Wien, in German, Albanian and English language.

KIOSKS

Temporary Architecture and Social Living Environments on the Albanian Coast

The Albanian kiosks referred to in the book are temporary, improvised structures along the Albanian coast, serving commercial and tourist purposes. As a construction typology, they first appeared in major cities in the early 1990s, coinciding with the country’s transition to a free-market economy and addressing a significant shortage of business premises. Robert Pichler (1), a historical anthropologist who has documented the Albanian transition period since the early 1990s, has observed the kiosk in its evolution, from its beginnings, development and decline. It is interesting how Pichler dedicates this book to the kiosk, precisely at the end of the “kioskization” era in Albania, when it is giving way to another phenomenon, that of concreting and mass tourism. It is precisely about the latter that the accompanying writings of other authors of an urban, ecological and tourism economics nature speak about (2). The Kiosk is the starting point, or the framework that unites these writings as well as all the author’s stories about his encounters with the inhabitants of the coast. In fact, Kiosk is a tribute to individuality, uniqueness, small family businesses, the efforts of Albanians during the transition, but also to simple aesthetics and constructions with minimal impact on nature (3).

The Kiosk was a temporary resident in the Albanian territory, with all its diversity of aesthetics and functionality. It lived for nearly 2 decades, between two different periods, that of the bunkers of the communist regime and the period of the free market economy, characterized by migration and rapid urbanization. My generation is oversaturated with the images of the kiosks, we have even stigmatized as something unaesthetic and informal, outside the rules of architecture and conventional urban planning. However, the kiosk served very well thousands of Albanian families who were left unemployed after the closure of factories and state-owned enterprises after the 1990s. The kiosk is the genesis of small business, the savior of the family economy, a symbol of the beginnings of the free market and individual initiative. The disappearance of the kiosk symbolizes the end of the transition period and the beginning of another era. Through this book, it seems as if the author wants to immortalize in photography the kiosk before it is torn down and disappeared forever. The photographic project speaks of the temporariness but also of what comes next. Although not shown in the photo, the concrete hotels and tourist resorts that have sprouted everywhere on the coast are implied (at least for us Albanians).

The photographs are a tribute to the Kiosk, as a symbol of informality and transience. In contrast, the photographs are carefully composed, with attention to geometry, which enhance aesthetic appeal and meaning. The vantage point is formal; frontal view, as a photo passport. The horizon line is straight, and divides the frame in half, half earth and half sky. The large number of kiosks photographed indicates the need to recognize and systematize them in an almost scientific manner. It reminds me of the photographs of the Düsseldorf School. The author took several years (from 2010 to 2022), many field visits and meetings with residents to photograph them. The autumn season is preferred, in the end of the tourist season, when the beach is empty, which reinforces the feeling of transience and abandonment. The colorful and minimalist photography highlights the design elements and the poor materials used. The narrative of the kiosks is intertwined with the stories of people met in the beach, about the difficulties of transition and everyday life. As an anthropologist and photographer, Robert Pichler combines photographs of the architecture of the kiosks with photographs of portraits of coastal residents, which completes the picture of the lives of ordinary people in the territory of the Albanian coast.

All photos courtesy of Robert Pichler

(1) Robert Pichler is a historical anthropologist and photographer, who mainly deals with migration and transnationalism, family and kinship, nation building processes, also using the medium of photography. His work lies between anthropological/social research and documentary/artistic photography. He has documented the transitional period of the early 1990s, when Albanian society was moving from the isolation of the communist regime to openness. Robert Pichler is member of Balkan Research Unit of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and serves as Chair of the International Association for Southeast European Anthropology (InASEA)

(2) The accompanying writings in the book are by Mamica Burda, Saimir Kristo, Daniel Göler, Dhimitër Doka, Kristi Bego.

(3) “Kioska” was conceived as an exhibition and publication project. A selection of the photographs was nominated for the Photo Graz Biennale in 2016 and presented there for the first time. An exhibition followed in December 2017 at the Zagreb Cultural Centre as part of the Photo Graz selection. In September 2022, “Kioska” was shown at the Off Gallery in Graz , before the traveling exhibition toured several cities in Albania (Tirana, Vlora, Durrës, Fieri, and Shkodra) until December 2023.