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 12/16/25 Alketa Misja 12/16/25

Wandrille Potez in the Land of Eagles and Angels

There are places that seem to exist in a different rhythm of time—where the past lingers not as memory, but as a living presence. For photographer and researcher Wandrille Potez, Albania’s Drino Valley is one such place. Tucked between mountains and gorges, the valley shelters a constellation of post-Byzantine churches and monasteries, many of them little known, some almost forgotten. Wandering its paths with a camera in hand, Potez steps into spaces where history and humanity quietly converge, capturing fragments of a world as fragile as it is extraordinary.

Wandrille Potez

“EAGLES AND ANGELS”

Potez’s work unfolds as a journey into hidden territories. He approaches these sites not as a distant observer, but as a participant in their ongoing story. His lens lingers on abandoned frescoes, weathered stone walls, and subtle traces of devotion—revealing both the tenderness and resilience of structures that have endured centuries of political shifts, neglect, and environmental exposure. In Albania, these churches are more than monuments: they are living testimonies to faith, endurance, and the quiet determination of local communities who have protected them against the odds.

Photography of Wandrille Potez.. Dhuvjan, la nef de l’église Saint-Nicolas Dhuvjan, The nave of Saint Nicholas Church Dhuvjan, Kisha e Shën Kollit Dropull, Albania, August 2023 — © Wandrille Potez
***Dhuvjan, la nef de l’église Saint-Nicolas Dhuvjan, The nave of Saint Nicholas Church Dhuvjan, Kisha e Shën Kollit***
Dropull, Albania, August 2023

His encounter with Albania’s post-Byzantine heritage began in 2017. From 2022 onward, repeated journeys brought him deeper into the Drino Valley, where monasteries lie scattered across forests, ravines, and mountain slopes. Often absent from maps and difficult to access, these sites reveal themselves only after hours—or days—of walking. Over several years, Potez returned to the valley again, documenting its churches with the eye of an art historian, the curiosity of a journalist, and the patience of a photographer.

He studies their architecture and deciphers layers of Byzantine, Ottoman, and Latin influence, while also observing the quiet life that continues around them. Frescoes dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries narrate a spiritual life that resisted erasure. Local inhabitants sustain small rituals of remembrance: an oil lamp glowing softly, a dish of sweets left for travelers, water poured into sacred basins. Here, devotion and daily life merge seamlessly with nature—bats resting in shadowed vaults, snakes warming themselves on cracked stones, scorpions retreating beneath roof tiles.

The church of Saint Nicholas offers a telling example. Its frescoes, pale from centuries of exposure, have been covered after the roof was repaired, yet the scars of time remain visible, bearing witness to both vulnerability and care. Other sites, such as the Ravena Catholicon or the monastery of the Prophet Elijah, illustrate the deep entanglement of history, landscape, and community. Ruined conventual buildings open onto sweeping views of Mount Çajupi, while nearby residents continue to safeguard what they can. Even in isolation, life persists: animals inhabit the sacred spaces, and the distant melody of herds echoes through the valleys.

Photography of Wandrille Potez. — © Wandrille Potez
***Mingul, les ruines du monastère de la Transfiguration Mingul, The ruins of the Monastery of the Transfiguration***
***Mingul, Kisha e Manastirit të Shpërfytyrimit***
Lunxhëri Albania, August 2024

Potez’s practice sits at the intersection of photography, art history, and journalism, extending a long tradition of French travelers and photographers who, in the 19th century, documented the landscapes and monuments of the Ottoman Balkans and the Middle East. Like those early observers, he combines meticulous attention to detail with a deep curiosity for the stories embedded in buildings and landscapes. Yet his work is firmly anchored in the present, attentive to the fragility of sites threatened by disappearance. (1)

This commitment has already had tangible impact. At Potez’s initiative, the monasteries of the Drino Valley were included in the World Monuments Fund’s Watch List 2025—a crucial step toward mobilizing international attention and funding for their preservation.

The photographs produced through these journeys have been presented in several contexts. In 2024, Potez held his first exhibition dedicated to Albania, drawing from his Hors Sentier immersions. His work has also appeared in editorial and exhibition projects in France, in the nave of the Collège des Bernardins in Paris in September 2025, where the Drino Valley churches were introduced to a wider audience within a broader reflection on endangered European heritage.

Photography of Wandrille Potez. Saraqinisht, l’ermitage de Spilea Saraqinisht, The cave hermitage of Spilea Saraqinisht, Shpella e Manastirit i Spilesë Lunxheri Albania, August 2023 — © Wandrille Potez
***Saraqinisht, l’ermitage de Spilea Saraqinisht, The cave hermitage of Spilea Saraqinisht, Shpella e Manastirit i Spilesë***
Lunxheri Albania, August 2023

Between 2024 and 2025, the project entered a new phase through Potez’s residency at Vila 31 – Art Explora in Tirana. This residency allowed him to deepen his research while anchoring it more firmly in its local context. At Vila 31, the ex-house of the dictator who 60 years before banned the religion in Albania, Potez refined the project’s narrative structure, weaving together images, texts, and historical research. A publication untitled “Eagles and Angels” is currently in preparation, conceived as a book that brings photography and narrative into close dialogue.

In the Drino Valley, history, devotion, and nature exist in a delicate balance. Wandrille Potez’s work invites us to witness this convergence—and to recognize its vulnerability. In this land of eagles and angels, the monasteries stand as quiet witnesses to resilience, faith, and the enduring power of attentive looking.

© Atdhe Mulla, Exhibition “Eagles and Angels” at Villa 31 during Wandrille Potez residency at Art Explora, Tirana, November 2025 — © Atdhe Mulla, ***Exhibition “Eagles and Angels” at Villa 31 during Wandrille Potez residency at Art Explora,*** Tirana, Albania November 2025‍ ‍

All photos courtesy of Wandrille Potez

(1) BIO: Wandrille Potez was born in Poissy, France in 1996. After completing a khâgne at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, his research – divided between the École Pratique des Hautes Études and Paris Diderot University – took him to Germany, where he became interested in the presence of the Orient in early 18th-century Saxon décor. With a master's degree in comparative history and civilisations, Wandrille Potez then worked as a researcher at the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles, before the Centre des Monuments Nationaux entrusted him with a curatorial assignment, in partnership with the Museum of Decorative Arts in Dresden. Between 2019 and 2023, while writing regularly for The Art Newspaper, Wandrille Potez made numerous trips to the Balkans, choosing photography as a means of defending the rare and fragile heritage he discovered there, on foot or by bicycle. At his suggestion, the churches in the Drino Valley were added to the World Monuments Fund's 2025 Watch List.